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I was thinking about edutainment from when I was a kid. We had Treasure Mountain to help learn words, JumpStart for a whole bunch of interesting stuff each year, and so on. From age 5-12 it felt like there was a massive array of edutainment products, which disappeared as I hit high school. I remember trying to convince my teacher at age 9 that Escape Velocity was educational as it taught you to buy low and sell high.
So as a teenager, nothing. Makes sense - teenagers are less pliable and enjoy this stuff less and want to go off and do their own thing.
But I am genuinely surprised edutainment never really took off, or doesn't seem to have surpassed its 90s-early 00s peak. I would've assumed there was a lot of demand for this sort of product for adults, but instead we just reverted to video games sans education.
Am I wrong about this? Are there a bunch of super popular products I'm just not aware of? Or if not, why did it never take off? Entertaining yourself while learning is a big market, but maybe it's not entertaining enough so unless you're choosing it for someone else (like a child) you don't? I'm not sure, but feel free to chime in with thoughts or the like.
Edutainment games for teenagers aren't there because teenagers buy their own video games. As a child you play whatever games adults allow you to play: so if your parents (or teachers) provide you with an edutainment game, you'll play it. Once you're picking out your own games you pick what sounds fun or interesting, not what is "good for you." At that age if you want to learn something (say, playing piano or Spanish) there are a lot of computer programs that will help you learn those things, and if you want to have fun you pick out a game that looks fun.
Now there are still games that are fun and educational: I learned a lot of history from Paradox and Creative Assembly games, for instance. Factorio teaches you a lot about process engineering. The Cold War scenario from Rise of Nations helped me better understand why the Korean War ended in a truce without much land changing hands, and why the Bay of Pigs was a disaster, and why the USSR and USA kept building more and more nuclear weapons, all by putting me in a game situation where I faced the same incentives (the Korean War scenario was a slog after Chinese reinforcements show up, and when given the option to ceasefire with South Korea intact or hammer it out for the next couple hours I choose ceasefire; the Bay of Pigs scenario requires you to make a risky fast supporting attack with aircraft: if you hesitate to try to get better prepared then the rebels all die pretty quick and then you have nothing but regret; and the game incentives nuclear parity or supremacy enough that I spent a lot of resources on it). All educational, but none of those games are billed as educational. They're billed as interesting and fun, just as the educational computer programs are billed as educational. Nobody is trying to get adults to eat their peas by promising them dessert.
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There's a whole bunch of edutainment on YouTube. Cooking shows, history shows, DIY shows, general knowledge shows. I haven't seen any edutainment fiction, though.
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