USING MECHANICS AND PROBLEMATICS TO EXPRESS CONCEPTS
The SimCity games show us something really important: through the mechanics and rules, but mostly though the challenges, the obstacles, the problematics and difficulties of the game, we understand some aspects of the society.
For example, in SimCity 4, you have conselors. Each one dedicated to his own interests (funds, pollution, education, power and water...) They are quite "peevish", they will easily complain and finally you learn that, if you want your city to work out, most of times you must just ignore them. If you listen to them and do as they say, your city may fall into bankruptcy. This teaches you an important leson: you can't please everyone, you can't make everyone happy. Leading doesn't mean making what everyone under your command says, leading means taking hard choices and deciding what battles are worth winning and which ones losing.
Also people, citzens, will complain like beasts if you take their food away. They will never comprehend any reason, they won't care if the city hasn't enough money, or if the city is losing money due to something they asked you to build, like a hospital or a school. They won't understand any reason, they'll just complain if they don't have what they want. By this, the game makes you put in the shoes of the governant and understand how difficult is to deal with masses and, since most of players (or all of them) are citzens, makes them see themselves from another angle. Makes us see that even if we have to fight for our rights, many other times we can be quite capricious and spoiled. Causing more trouble than help.
These are only a few examples. The game is full of many more interesting aspects and lesons to analyse. The point is understanding how a game like SimCity, which isn't directly narrtive, expresses such complex concepts and turns them into a game, perfectly merging them with the mechanics.
And if we sharply analyse, we see that most of times those concepts are represented and introduced in the game through problematics, difficulties, obstacles.
What this games suggests is that the best way to learn is with problems that we have to deal with. When we face difficulties, and we are forced to use imagination and creativity, also of course try and failure, we learn and our mind can get fun learning.
Until now what I'm saying can sound quite obvious and simple. Notwithstanding, what I'm trying to utter is that the real point, the key of all of this isn't using imagination or creativity, not even repetition, but facing problems. And that's a mistake that most of games make nowadays: when games try to teach you something (and I'm not talking directly about the mechanics of the game, I'm talking about something else, something additional to the game), they just give you information. They won't make you play with it, and most important, face it. They just make information show up in random and useless bombing.
Let's understand it better with examples. Nowadays, a game trying to teach you history would maybe insert interesting facts or points through the game. For example, you're moving through a city and when you pass next to a church (which exists in real life), the game gives you information about that church. Unfortunately, most of players won't pay attention to that or will easily forget it. Perhaps learning about that church is not a goal in the game, just something additional, okey. But, why putting something in the game just to be, most of time, ignored?
And now imagine that the game is actually about learning history. Then you want the player to learn something and pay attention to the information you left there for him. Even if education isn't your main goal, you dedicated resources (workers, money and time) to introduce that in your game. Instead of displaying a lot of information just to memorize, or making tests and questions, boring to answer, to make players learn just merge the information to learn with mechanics and make trouble, make it "necessary"..
For example. You're told to get to the "meeting point", where your character has an appointment with another character to continue with the story of the game. Instead of telling him where to go or marking it on the map, tell him to go to a "church" and just tell him in what area of the city it's located. Then give him information about the church, like how it looks like, and make the player look for it. By this, furthermore, you can also insert some additional information, like "the church you're looking for looks old, because in fact it was built five hundred years ago, in the year ....", or "the royal cathedral is located at the north of the city, that's because at the north is where most important people, aristocracy, used to live".
Because our brain, more even in videogames (because they are about overcoming obstacles), tends to put aside, ignore the unnecessary information and hold back only what's essencial to overcome the obstacles. That's how we work, when we face problems, our brain ignores what it considers unnecessary to surpass the obstacle. So if we want the player to learn we need to make the information to teach, essential and necessary to him. What a better way to do that than turning that information part of the solution.
A game is, essentially, a big problem. If you want the player to pay attention to something, turn it into the key to the door he's trying to open. That's how you get it.
And finally, although all of this may sound really obvious and simple, the truth is that most of games fail when trying to educate or teach something. Mostly because developers teach just like they learned back at school: "swotting", "cramming". Hours infront of a book believing that massive information bombing is the right way to learn, instead of applying that knowledge and making it useful to something.