Iwament
A finished round is not a course
A 2013 review found a modest learning gain from serious games, and no reliable rise in motivation. The larger gains came when play was repeated and joined to other teaching. A round on HD Games is that loop. It is not a syllabus.
A game is often introduced as a lesson that happens to be enjoyable. The research on serious games is stricter than that pitch, and less generous.
In 2013 Pieter Wouters, Christof van Nimwegen, Herre van Oostendorp, and Erik van der Spek compared serious games with ordinary instruction across dozens of studies. Learning favoured the games, and memory of the material a little more so. The size of the advantage was modest. Motivation was not reliably higher. The comparisons looked stronger when people played more than once, when they played with others, and when some other teaching sat beside the game.
That last condition is the one this studio has to keep. HD Games publishes board, card, puzzle, and quiz games. A Quiz round, a Bingo line, a solved Puzzle, a game of Chess: each one ends, and the ending tells the player whether the attempt worked. Ending is the useful part. The round does not choose next week's topic, and it does not stand in for a teacher. The public site does not offer classrooms or tutoring, and a catalogue of finished games is not a course.
The design consequence is small. Keep the round legible. Keep it short enough to play again. Leave room for a person, a friend, or a later product to supply the explanation the round itself does not contain. If a future Iwament game is for learning, the learning intent belongs on the product page, in plain language. Until that game exists, the accurate claim is the one already on the homepage: these are games, and further educational work is a direction.
Source: Wouters, van Nimwegen, van Oostendorp, and van der Spek, "A meta-analysis of the cognitive and motivational effects of serious games," Journal of Educational Psychology, 2013.