Serious Games

In Chapter 9, Nielsen goes over serious games--games that serve a purpose other than just pure entertainment. He briefly goes over advertainment, which is advertising in video games, and political games, games with a political agenda. The bulk of the section discusses educational games. "The findings so far suggest that...a student has the same chance of learning a piece of material using a game than he does through another way of learning. Games cannot be said to be more effective than other teaching forms, although most studies have offered evidence of better retention over time...Even though we cannot objectively measure an increased learning outcome, students often feel they have learned more."
Educational video games are split into three categories. The first are commercial educational video games (also known as edutainment), which are games with the goal of teaching players specific skills. The second are "commercial entertainment titles used fairly haphazardly for education," where the goal isn't to to teach and the education is usually an indirect effect. The third are research-based educational video games which is edutainment originating from research.
"Even though we find different expressions of educational computer games, edutainment has come to dominate the area with a very particular approach, which we shall describe...as problematic and limiting." The games rely on extrinsic motivation rather than intrinsic, meaning players are motivated by getting points rather than the feeling of accomplishment from learning. The learning experience is usually not integrated with the experience of playing, so the player will give more attention to playing than to learning. The learning principles are based on "drill-and-practice" rather than actual understanding which encourages the player to memorize answers instead of learning the actual material. The gameplay is limited which is a problem because it will not engage older audiences who expect more than just a simple game. And finally, there is no teacher there to "steer the use of a game in the right direction, and provide an effective debriefing that can catch misperceptions and important differences in students' experiences while playing."
Research has shown that there are positive results  from educational video games, but it'll still be a while before they are used by the majority of teachers.
In the TED video, Jane McGonigal talks about the large gamer base, how much time we spend playing games, and why. Games bring out the best in us--they motivate us to work hard and to start working now. She devotes her work to creating games with the goal of utilizing this motivation and use it to solve real world problems. Her thinking is definitely right, at least for me. If life were a game and I gained experience for doing homework, I'd be so much more motivated to do it. Even though learning and getting a good GPA for getting a good job should be enough motivation, it doesn't do it for most of us. Nothing really gets us motivated like playing a game does.
Combining these, do you think that by playing edutainment games really motivates people to learn?