Motivation and Games
Motivating the unmotivated and "Mandatory Fun"
One of the most difficult issues a teacher has to deal with is kids that have no motivation intrinsically, and upon which extrinsic motivation doesn't work either. It's a head-scratcher and a fight every step of the way to get this type of kid motivated. This of course isn't the vast majority of kids in the classroom, and many will have motivational preferences: subjects they're excited about and others not so much, and that's normal. The question then arises: what do you do about it without turning the material into a chocolate-covered pickle? If the point is to find a way to get some intrinsic motivation to learn, then it is something that they need to choose to do. Testing standards being what they are doesn't allow for much in the way of innovation in methods in traditional classroom settings, which is why the settings changing to the virtual space might help.
This has been studied before in a meta-analysis of the subject titled : "Considering Games as Cognitive Tools: In Search of Effective 'Edutainment'", by Jan Hogle of the University of Georgia, the results of which supported this premise. There have also been experiments conducted to test this, an example being one done by in Greece by Maria Virvou et al. of the University of Piraeus, which resulted in supportive conclusions. Hogle and Virvou emphasize though that in order for it to work, the games need to be well-designed as games just as much as an educational resource, and so far as a fledgling industry, most attempts at educational games don't sell nearly as well as commercial games geared for pure entertainment, so there's a lot of room to grow in the medium. One very important criteria to keep in-mind though is that this can't be "mandatory fun", or in other words, gamification from the top-down, there has to be consent to participate in the activity to avoid this. This is explained very well with examples from a TED talk on the subject by Gabe Zichermann, Chair of GSummit, as well as a presentation that expands on the Topic at GSummit 2014 by Ethan Mollick, the links to which will be given below, along with the Hogle and Virvou's work.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4M7Snd1T_rY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZZvRw71Slew
https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED425737