I'm looking for games that help people learn useful concepts. The games need to actually be enjoyable; an "educational" game that no one wants to play isn't actually doing much education. A few examples of the sorts of games I'm looking for:
Minecraft: Teaches the basics of logic circuits.
Understand/Eleusis: Teaches inductive reasoning.
Cookie Clicker: Teaches the power of exponential growth. (Ok, this one's a bit of a reach.)
Kerbal Space Program: Teaches orbital mechanics.
Manufactoria: Teaches concepts relating to finite-state automata and formal grammars. (This one likely isn't very fun for most people who aren't already interested in that sort of stuff, so it's not as good an example.)
I'll resolve this market to the top 5 suggested games that I haven't played before, in 30/25/20/15/10 proportions based on the importance of the topics they teach and how good I think they are at teaching them.
There's no set resolution date on this market; I'll leave it open until I've had a chance to try out all of the suggestions that look interesting.
1,000
3.00Everything in a computer can be constructed from a basic component called a NAND gate. You will be challenged through a series of puzzles, to discover the path from NAND gates to arithmetic, memory and all the way to full CPU architectures. If you complete this game, you will have a deep understanding of how assembly, CPU instruction sets and basic components are related. And you will understand how programming concepts like if statements, loops and functions actually work in assembly and hardware.
By the way my answer would definitely be https://ohmygit.org/, but I don't want to pay the 250M to submit a new answer since I doubt I'll get it back
@colorednoise It's not instructional. It gives players opportunities to creativly solve math and system engineering problems. It also exposes players to information about what materials are made of and by what processes they are gathered or made.
@HankyUSA Against your second point, Factorio does not even represent copper and iron ore as their real-life colors. You craft bullets directly from metal without any propellant or explosives. It's a deeply unrealistic game, essentially a cartoon version of science.
Like Cookie Clicker, but better and about AI.
https://www.euclidea.xyz/en/game/
This one seems to not working anymore, it was a puzzle game about geometry.
Just put it here if it starts to work again soon
@dionisos A sort of programming game where you should solve puzzles with a small set of simple instructions. Some of the puzzles are really ingenious, I liked it a lot.
Also it is open source and on Android.
SineRider: a game in which you travel through level to level by inputting the correct algebraic function for your character's path to transform and go through the required path. Adds complexity as you go with multiple/more difficult paths and there is an element of story.
In public beta and made by high schoolers so has potential to get even better as it goes! Amazing way to brush up algebra and graph transformations.
WE BECOME WHAT WE BEHOLD
a game about news cycles, vicious cycles, infinite cycles
https://ncase.itch.io/wbwwb
A five minute game revolving around one piece of practical philosophy.
@rjgumby surprised this wasn't here yet. Chess is great for planning, visualization, setting priorities, and learning to make hard choices.
@LukeHanks Simulator that teaches about disease, particularly in terms of how it spreads. The Cure is some free DLC about running a worldwide disease prevention organization. I played it with one of my kids to teach them about disease and disease prevention.
@LukeHanks Obviously educational as it exists to teach languages. I think the way it goes about it is obviously a game.
Arr you author? Hmmm...
https://lifehacker.com/11-educational-video-games-that-are-actually-fun-1849788759
@kazoo That website is clickbaity enough that I don't particularly want to read through its suggestions, but feel free to add them as answers here.