(the following is a synthesis of comments I made on Raph Koster's website and on one of my own, which the Slate editors suggested I post here)

I was sort of honored to have been mocked in an illustration by a renowned illustrator, and I think the criticisms in the article are mostly well-argued.

I continue to disagree with the idea that the fundamental ingredient is "fun," and there’s a whole chapter trying to defend this idea in my last book. That said, I think Raph Koster, Justin Peters, and I actually agree about the fundamentals of what would make these games good, even though it looks like we disagree.

That said, I think it’s misleading and unfair to compare my newsgames to Civilization. They’re totally different forms of the medium, and expecting all games to function in the same way seems, well, boring. Admittedly, I do have a reputation for being interested in boredom and monotony as a theme in games. Many of our games have queues, for example. But Peters complains about Food Import Folly partly because he was, perhaps, ill-tuned to the kind of gaming experience we are trying to create. To be sure, it's probably not a perfect game, but it also represents the polar opposite of Civ in terms of player experience. I tried to make an argument for this kind of expansion of the medium in a recent article on boring games, and I'd apply the same thinking to the issues Peters raises.

Newsgames are a totally different experience than big strategy games. Same with the Cold Stone game (although I thought the comments about training games were quite well placed). I'm sure there were good and bad things about Food Import Folly, and I'm always happy to read criticism about our work, good or bad. But it's unfortunate Peters chose to focus on just one of our newsgames, since I think that a lot of them are actually appealing in exactly the way he hopes they would be, and part of the project is the regularity and totality of the genre. Some are even — gasp — fun.

Finally, and maybe most interestingly, I found myself lingering on this sentence from the article:

"In taking the fun out of video games, companies like Persuasive make them less alluring to people who love games and more alluring to people who don't."

I'm pretty sure this is supposed to be a criticism, but I actually take it as a compliment. In many ways, that's part of what we have in mind to do. I'm less and less interested in satisfying the perverse demands of gamers and much more interested in talking to ordinary people through games. The idea of making games more alluring to people who don't love games is actually something of a noble goal, in my mind, especially as those who do love games become ever more narrow-minded about what a game experience needs to be. For what it's worth, those people seem to be having a somewhat different response.

I think you miss the point Ian.

These games are boring - how is that going to help anyone?

Learning needs to be fun and interesting. A dry, academic paper written on global warming doesn't nearly have the same effect as An Inconvenient Truth, for example.

And despite the fallacies and misrepresentations in that film, it achieved it's goal of getting people and politicians talking about Climate Change.

When people talk about your games, they just talk about how boring they are. Not the same thing.

I think a false dichotomy has been presented here. The author of the original piece argues tacitly that games must be fun and a game without fun is not a game. The author of the parent post argues that games can be "un-fun" and still be games. I don't think that by this rather convoluted definition of games and gaming forwards the debate of whether games are a viable platform for meaningful learning. I also think that the author of the original piece conflates educational gaming with outdated learning pedagogies (reminder: rote repetition is old hat behaviorism). We don't need to be talking about fun and un-fun. We need to be talking about engagement. We need to be talking about social negotiation. Video games would appear to be a medium that can facilitate both engagement and social negotiation. But engagement and social negotiation do not result in learning... they merely set the stage; they provide a framework for meaningful learning. And a powerful framework it is indeed. The causal reasoning skills needed to solve a problem in 3D shooters, MMORPGs, etc. are skills educators have tried and failed for years to impart to learners. One would likely be surprised at the amount of real, meaningful, useful, and transferable knowledge that one acquires while playing games. To dismiss the power of gaming in knowledge acquisition is to dismiss one of the most promising learning technologies to have emerged recently.