Sorry I'm late, I was on vacation (much needed) last week. A few comments:
[quoting Foshay, 25 Feb 97] a popular "adventure game" in which the object is to chase the main character across history, geography, etc., by "solving problems" which involve no more than recall of arbitrary verbal facts. No attempt at building a cognitive structure, by presentation, feedback, etc., and no attempt at any cognitive activity other than knowledge-level (in Bloom's taxonomy terms) recall.
Thanks for the examples. The issue is what are the pedagogical goals of the game (this also comes up in the reading issue). Someone's found that the above game doesn't lead to recall of the material. Does it lead to effective search strategies? Who knows? Who's tested? I'd think you could get either, with proper external scaffolding. Can you build it in? I think that's what Rob's indicating, and I firmly believe. Is there a market for it? How do you know? I think another form of education is required, raising the knowledge level and expectation of the consumers, through good examples (already suggested).
[quoting Foshay, 1 Mar 97.a] I would say that "hard" and "fun" are orthogonal. And most of the ID projects I've seen which result in the best outcomes tend to be in the upper right quadrant (hard+, fun+). But, to quote a friend of mine, "sometimes work is just work."
Two separate points (and arguably in contention).
One: Czikszentmihalyi argues that the proper difficulty of work is actually one component in "fun." If it's too easy, it's not fun. There's more, of course.
Two: Interestingly, a student doing her Ph.D. (also a famous trainer) has evidence that one way to get effective outcomes (now this is for people who already understand the need for the training) is to be honest about the difficulty to be faced in learning and to help the learner focus on the positive outcome.