stealth learning
Well designed stealth learning can avoid chocolate covered broccoli, but this may lead to players not properly associating in game learning with the real world.
Reflective Game Design-Khaled makes the argument that designers are tempted to hide the educational aspects of their games because they see communicating values as a tradeoff with entertainment, however not only does this sabotage the larger meanings of their works, these two values can be intertwined with intentional design.
I’m not actually convinced this is as large of an issue as Reflective Game Design-Khaled makes it out to be… The paper brings up an example of a spy game teaching cryptography that players don’t associate with the real world, but maybe they will? As long as the spy game accurately simulates real world cryptography enough that players can recognize the patterns, then learning is being done.
