Basically, games where you lead the player to develop a useful mental model through the mechanics of the game, and that model is inmediately transferable into something useful. Imagine a game whose mechanics are fun (you know, what edutainment games aren't) and indirectly teach you music theory (or the fundamentals of animation, or food science or whatever) through the gameplay. After playing it you'll have absorbed the "tacit" knowledge (hard or impossible to put into words, like writing a guide to riding a bicycle).
Basically edutainment done right, but it takes a pretty skilled game designer to produce something effective. Food for thought at least.
Of this form, TTRPG are among the best. That's real life games though, and involves imagination, creativity, problem solving, and roleplaying social situaitons. I mean this from the perspectives of kids. In Kids, play is among the greatest ways of learning.
link about homeschooling and TTRPGs
Varg Vikernes made his own game, MyFarog. It's often seen as a joke game by hardcore TTRPG players, but it's a source for him to teach his children.
I think paradox games etc prove there is a huge appetite for games that would fill this niche
The issue with these, is that politics is part of an incredibly chaotic system. You can't make politics in a void, as it's policies that govern religion, education, economics, culture, justice... A good political simulation, is a good world simulation, so a complete version of this only works in a good simulation of the world. You can try to cut this down to you being a single actor in the world, but then that's a different scope, and arguably a harder scope, as the feedback mechanisms lag in politics(sometimes by decades, as found by China's 1 child policy). It's why most games that are tangential to politics, or political commentary, like Paper's Please, only cover how policies affect its subjects, not so much about creating policies.
Also exploration games: just wide open worlds that are detailed and have a nice vibe no matter where you stop. E.g. like Assassin's Creed's european cities or Genshin Impact's fantasy world but without quests or enemies or a story. I guess it's not very profitable to make a huge, detailed environment and have nothing in it except the player. Games like Minecraft gets away with this because the maps are randomly generated, and that reduces the exploration value a lot compared to what I have in mind.
I agree on exploration. King's field-like games where the exploration is more focused also works here. The only games that come to mind for this are Lunacid and Northern Journey. Maybe Long Dark too?
The Elder Scrolls have heavy asian mythologies influences (well, until skyrim, in which they went full nordic, but doesn't matter)
Are you a morrowind player? I've tried to get into Morrowind but I don't have the time to sit down and play it every day. Is there a good way of making it a game I can approach for a few hours each weekend? I find when I try to play it, I get into it, make little progress, come back to it the next weekend, confused by what I'm doing and have no idea what I should be doing. In other words, I feel it has a "knowledge burden" that I have to keep stuff in mind about it.
I use OpenMW to play currently, but I don't play much. It's a game I really want to get into. I know it's the getting into part that's hard.
I'd love to find a new RTS game (and I mean a new IP, not Age of Empires 25 or Civ LVI) that doesn't feel old or simplistic
Try Battle for middle earth. It's a starcraft/AoE adjacent game. It's also abandonware, since EA lost the LOTR license. It's about a decade and a half old mind.
* Indie action-adventure games. Personally I think it needs a variety in this genre by the indie scene but most of the games i know try to mimic zelda gameplay and even graphics like ripping off alttp and game boy entries like Oceanhorn or the myriads of walking simulators i see on itch.io . While i'm fine people who like those games, I rarely see effort and creativity on those games to stand out on their own. Examples: Sable, Creature of the well, Outer Wilds.
I'll mention Hyper Light Drifter. I played and replayed that game to death. Really good game.
1: fast-paced arena shooters, like Xonotic or Quake Live. whenever i ask a normie about shooter games, they bring up shit like valorant or overwatch but no one thinks about the classics. for some reasons i just LOVE fast paced games, idk why. i havent really found any other decent ones other than maybe Unvanquished but i genuinely think that unvanquished only counts as a fast-paced game when you join the alien team, when you join the human team you're extremely fucking slow.
These exist, but whenever they come up they die off pretty quickly. See splitgate as a recent example of a Halo-style arena shooter. The problem with these is usually this: If one opponent is 5% better than you, they will win by about 90% more than you, to the point of overkill. It's not hard to get 5% better than the general public, so as a result, it's a race to the top, and those who can't or don't want to get 5% better, than those who already are 5% better get filtered out and usually filter out of the game until you have hardcore folks left around.
The only antidote is a mixing pot of all different skill levels. And this is what happened with call of duty's multiplayer games... and most multiplayer games before ELO-based matchmaking became a thing. ELO-Based matchmaking improved this somewhat, but you need enough people with similar ELO ratings for a fair game, and when you introduce friends partying up, this is harder to match.
Mind you, although I'm naysaying here, I really wish arena shooters came back in style. I bloody loved Quake Live.
You guys know what I think is underrepresented? Sci-fi racers in the style of F-Zero and Wipeout. The only thing that meets this is BallisticNG. Nothing else has come close, or even been a return to form. In general, a lot of racing games are under-served areas. Not by quantity of games, but by quality of the racing elements, destruction, weight of the cars, physics of the cars(notice how physics are utterly broken in the vast majority of car games. Even Forza Horizon 5 can't handle cars not being magnetically connected to the floor, and any Ubisoft racer, is that "premium" Ubisoft quality). There's a lot of representation for arcade racers though, but I suspect a lot of that is down to hand-waving the car physics and damage in the name of arcade fun.