Learning games ? or Learning as a game ....

Off late I have been spending some time playing with my little niece.
She is quite fond of my IPhone and likes to generally fiddle with it and explore the apps that are there on it.
I gleaned an interesting observation from her experiences with my IPhone and one which is relevant to the nature of video games. It also corroborates with the Educationist Seymour Papert's views about gaming and education.
My niece tried playing the IPhone version of the popular game Spore,published by Electronic Arts. The game-play is not something that a four year should find out of reach, since it only involves tilting the phone to make a creature floating about in water, to avoid monsters around and eat some bugs to increase one's points.
Then there was puzzle game called Iced-in which I should concede was beyond her grasp and rightly so, she also tried her hand at a roller coaster racing game by a company called Digital Chocolate.
There was a extremely popular flute application called Ocarina by Smule, the IPhone camera, the timer in the built-in clock application that she also tried.

Now to appreciate the point I am about to make, try making a mental list of her possible favorites from amongst these, which one would be the most liked by her and which one the least.

All common sense probably would say that the Spore game by EA would beat all the others all ends up and that comparing the timer application with a game from EA would be ludicrous.
Now let me list out what the actual list looked like :

1. Pass code locking feature in the Phone (oops , this is not even an app, I forgot to mention it.)
2. The built in Camera.
3. Ocarina.
4. Spore.
5. Roller coaster.
6. IPhone timer.

Pass code locking feature in the IPhone is a feature with which one can set a pass code to lock the Phone. When one activates the phone one has to slide a widget software widget across the screen for the pass code screen to appear. Then one has to enter the pass code and the phone is unlocked.
When I taught my niece how to go through with this process of unlocking the phone, she learnt it quite easily. On each successful attempt at unlocking the phone, one could see her face brighten up. After a certain number of times, she started asking me to let her do the unlocking thing again, in the middle of playing spore or something. The fact that she had memorized the pass code and learnt the process to unlock it made the simple feature into a game for her.
As compared to Spore, this held her interest to a much greater extent.
And frankly I could not understand how Spore on the IPhone could hold anyone's attention beyond 2 mins. It could not hold mine for sure. I could not manage to play the game for more than 2 mins. I did not find anything interesting in it other than the beautiful graphics.
This case shows in a rather simple way, that learning is itself an interesting and enjoyable activity far more than looking at interesting graphics or hearing interesting sounds.
And that is precisely the reason why I have a very strong vision that learning games, when they are made can capture a market that can be many many times bigger than the market for entertainment games, whether hardcore or casual.
The reason I use the phrase 'learning games, when they are made..' is because I have not come across a game which can be called educational or one that helps in learning in the real sense. And I have played the most popular so-called educational games that are on offer, and could not find any content which would enable anyone to genuinely learn anything and make them hooked on to it.
Imagine a gaming genre with which people , children and adults alike can learn things in an enjoyable way, things that are meaningful and useful to them.
That is when gaming will start making a real impact on the lives of people and not just provide them with light entertainment. Imagine the kind of demand there would be for such a genre. Maybe 10 times that of casual games ? Maybe more ?.
But it would take a lot of effort, both in terms of marketing, ideation and development to make the first such genuine learning game and that really means a publisher who has a deep pocket and conviction about a game like this.
Its wait, watch and hope until then.