Ye Olde Blah

In an effort to raise some posts from the dead... Educational Games Topic!

Well since about 6 months after WoW came out (which I still haven't played, good on me for staying clean!) and seeing all the addiction, I thought of education in MMO's, which I'm sure a million other people have thought of too.

There's something about game mechanics involving information from the real world that just tweaks me.  Ie: imagine if the game was made in several languages, but it's still an MMO, so you could essentially not communicate with some of the other players in the game world.  Why shouldn't different parts of the game world be made in different languages (ie: a different game experience for people buying the game in a different language).  People who could learn the other language, or use tools to do so, would have more game world to understandably explore and more people to play with.
Of course the game world itself could then teach you the language and you could earn real experience from passing "levels" of other languages (from the npc "teachers" and "testers" of those communities)

The same could then be done of anything.  In order to actually get the skill in cutting gemstones, you should be able to answer questions about it to prove you can.. and the level of your skill should be equal to the difficulty of the questions.
The questions shouldn't be hard set ie for beginners gems..
What is the hardest stone? (Diamond)
Well, they might be for beginners... but questions which the computer can alter easily (so, numerical basis) so that "cheat sheets" can't be really easily made to help people conquer every aspect of the game simply by having the right website bookmarked. ie:
> The refractive index of emerald is only just above that of? (multi choice)
then the words [refractive index] [emerald] [above] and the [options] given can all be exchanged for other variables since this data can all be tabulated numerically. (of course someone could still make cheats for this but the effort of utilising a cheat program to answer this sort of question is much more than just "find".)
I guess that's the thing too, even if there were easy ways to cheat in some circumstances, you still have to look it up and choose, type, draw or say the right answer - which will put the information in your brain at least that one time, if not with repetition.

Of course, you'd still go around smacking zombies with your pipe of justice, but now you could jewel encrust it and yell at them in latin while doing so.

I think this would work for knowledge-based skills, but not for those which require physical practise. To accomplish that you'd need something like a controller, and then you're getting close to the point where "you might as well do it in real life".

Of course, you could make an item bank, where people can create in-game items by sending you self-crafted real-life items. But how would you know if someone crafted an item himself?