Before I continue, let me be clear: I'm well aware of the fact that there are educational games out there, and have been for many years. By "educational games" I'm referring to games that cater to young children, which teach basic spelling, grammar, math, etc. There are also those games that target adults trying to learn typing, or those games that try to teach world politics to high school teens, etc. This is not the kind of education I'm talking about. I'm not against games whose primary purpose is to teach skills; I've made use of some of them myself. But there is a large difference in theme between creating a game specifically for the purpose of education, and trying to educate players almost without telling them that they're absorbing knowledge, which is the kind of tactic that I believe works best. It's this latter type of game that we don't get to see much of these days, and of which I'd like to speak.

Probably the best example of the type of "stealth education" game I have in mind is the Civilization series. While essentially a top-down tactical nation-building simulation, the game nevertheless folds in quite a bit of history, both civic and militaristic. I remember playing the original Civ and being impressed by the way the Phalanx unit would trounce all comers until the introduction of gunpowder. Not only would I look up the history of the Phalanx in the Civilopedia, but the way that many of the units were crosslinked with each other made it easy to entertain curiosity by following the development of a type of technology over the course of years.

It wasn't just military units that benefited, either. Accessible at all times were the histories of technology, a given culture, vehicle and building types, you name it. Not once did I ever feel that I was Learning Something, and that likely made all the difference. It's not that I was averse to learning history, but being able to actually play through some of the world's more famous battles and skirmishes made that history come alive for me.

It's a peculiarity of human nature that we can be resistant to things that we're told will be "good for" us. Suddenly, the supposed benefit takes on a sinister sheen -- if it's medicine, we're predisposed to think that it will taste bad. If it's exercise, we expect that it will be the toughest thing in the world. If it's knowledge, we're sure to find it deadly dull to process. So, just like coating a bitter pill with chocolate, we've found that the best way to offer education is to dress it up as entertainment.