[mikeash]

If you look beyond the AAA games you can find a lot of great stuff. My favorite is Kerbal Space Program. It's fun, it's educational, it has personality, the challenge scales up with player skill to an almost unlimited degree and entirety organically, you can set your own goals or have them given to you... I could go on.

What really amazes me is looking at the players and seeing a lot of people going into aerospace careers because of it. And not only that, but finding that they have a huge leg up on their classmates because they've already learned so much from the game.

The magic is still there, you just have to find it.