Michael, a commenter in response to The Chemistry of Game Design by Daniel Cook, July 21st 2007The reason a chemistry text isn’t more fun is because it doesn’t teach you skills: it teaches you concepts. Concepts are further divorced from the pragmatism of reality than the skills that are forcibly acquired in the pursuit of goals. The appropriate analogy would instead be that you learn more from an hour in a chemistry lab than you do from a game; in such a case, I think you would agree that this is questionable: both have relatively equal educational potential, given appropriate conditions.
Just like the Civilization games include encyclopedias that give you reference cards to help you play, the chemistry lab gives you a textbook to enlighten you as to the concepts which you can expand into skills.
The law of constant composition, for example, is a concept. It is not a skill. You do not DO anything with the law of composition (other than fractions, which is a skill): you merely know it. Successfully mixing a reagent, on the other hand, is a skill.
Chemistry texts are boring because you are utilizing active skills (how to read, how to memorize) in order to acquire concepts that you may feel have a low perceived value, in large part because the skills they form the foundation for also have low perceived value. Someone excited about chemistry, on the other hand, will devour the text with gusto, because the perceived value of the concepts is high, as the skills that build upon them are have high perceived value.
