How many times have we - as MMO gamers - compared our virtual
playgrounds to the real world? The correlations are strikingly similar:
when we gather up gold and resources, we farm; we don't merely wait for
monsters to spawn, we camp them. The list goes on and on.



So it comes as no surprise that groups of developers are being funded
by organizations like the National Science Foundation and the United
Nations to produce games that help children learn about various real
world issues like food aid and the need for higher education.

"Many academically low-performing students do as well
as their
high-performing peers in River City," Chris Dede, a professor of
learning technologies at Harvard Graduate School of Education, writes
in Science. The key to this, he says, is the ability of students to
become immersed in a digital world where they can build confidence "by
stepping out of their real-world identity of poor performer
academically, which shifts their frame of self reference to successful
scientist in the virtual context."

• href="http://www.sciam.com/blog/60-second-science/post.cfm?id=using-virtual-worlds-and-video-game-2009-01-01"
  target="_blank">You can see the whole article at Scientific
  American.