One thing that's important to AVOID is the things that come from the world being artificial and made specifically for challenges, things like there always being a way to succeed in the given task even if it seems not to, or the player always turning out to be important without a clear cause, or a multitude of other things, just look through TV tropes for more. In short, most games are stories. If you want the game to train you in thinking like reality you have to make the game more similar to reality (or make it very abstract).
So, some properties a reality like game might have:
Procedurally generated environments, with no special checks for solvability or indeed any causal arrows coming in from what the player might do in them.
The player is not placed in a special character. Either the player is the inly intelligence around, ir the player is given control of a random sample from a large population where everyone have interesting enough lives, or the player has to find and chose someone interesting from a randomly generated population. The middle solution is probably the most realistic.
Lots of things are Hard Work. No gaining advantages quickly as a side effect of accomplishing your other goals, or by killing random things. You have to earn your skills.
Brutal and unforgiving. A single mistake can make everything you have come crashing down, and there is no reloading from a saved game. Even usually harmless things can permanently cripple you and the only way to avoid this is being observant and trying to understand what makes things tick so you can be out of the blast radius when they finally tock. If there is combat it is short and even if you will can leave you mortally wounded. The game is NOT fair, and things having consequences disproportionate to the crime is the rule rather than the exception.
Lots of these sound similar to the rougelike genre I think, those also tend to require less development effort than most other games.
Hiya, while I greatly appreciate your effort to help us improve the quality of games we build... I don't want to turn any idea away just yet (no matter how terribly tropey).
We're still in the early brainstorming phase of this - and it's much better just to let the ideas pour out - regardless of how bad they are. Engaging the internal editor too early quashes that natural flow. :)
Also - the games you describe above sound really interesting... but probably too big for what we've got in mind to begin with... my little red+blue card game might be built over a ...
We need some ideas for serious games. Games that will help us be better. Games that reward us for improving ourselves (even if just by the satisfaction of seeing our scores improve). Games that will help us in our quest of Tsoyoku Naritai
We've got an upcoming hackday in London - where we'll have a (small) bunch of people able to code up any good ideas into something usable... but we need **you** to help us come up with a whole bunch of good ideas.
To start with, they should be simple ideas - not as complex as Rationalist Clue (which is an awesome idea... but we all have dayjobs too). I've got in mind something like the kinds of games you see at luminosity
The ideas should address individual biases - a way of training us to: a) recognise when we've accidentally engaged a bias b) reward us when we find a way to get the "right answer" in an unbiased manner.
We can do the programming (more help would of course be welcome), we can even come up with some ideas of our own...
but we are few, and you are many... and the more ideas we get, the better we can choose between them... so let's roll.