Rude’s comment about the ineffectual nature of incidental (or undirected) learning also strikes a nerve for me. By way of example, he describes a situation where a friend of his asked what the difference between a major and a minor chord is. His friend had no formal training in music, and after some deliberation on the subject, here was his response:
Really understanding the chords technically depends on a solid knowledge and understanding of scales and intervals, which in turn depends on a solid knowledge and understanding, and a substantial level of fluency, in standard musical notation.
He basically says that any level of knowledge less than his own would make it impossible to explain what the difference is. Putting aside the fact that the he is a teacher, the statement is rather galling. Not knowing the difference myself, I asked a formally-trained friend how he would describe it. His response? “The third is a semitone different.” While that may not be a completely satisfactory explanation to Mr. Rude, there are probably people – gifted composers and the like – for whom his explanation is just as unsatisfactory.
This is not just nitpicking – developing a progressively more complex and nuanced understanding of an idea as more context around that idea is central to learning models, incidental or otherwise. This is reflected in science teaching from age 15 onwards. Every year, you are told “what we told you last year wasn’t quite true. Here’s a better way of putting it.”
Incidental learning isn’t the be-all and end-all of learning mechanisms, but it can help with the first few rungs on a ladder of learning – particularly in situations where a student / player would not normally engross himself in a subject.
Now that the overall role of incidental learning is defined, we can look at examples of what form it might take. Since edutainment doesn’t cut it, and conventional approaches to game design don’t appear to do much of it, it’ll be interesting to see what we can come up with.