Before Alice Taylor of Wonderland blog quit her day job to work on a startup, she worked for Britain's Channel 4 Education to create public service games with social lessons. This one above deserves a particular note: The End is a Flash game about death, belief and science.
The game about death & philosophy I commissioned from lovely Preloaded, to have a look at death and all the things around it. It's something as a society we report on a lot, and fetishise/agonise over, but we never really talk about how to handle it when it happens.
Kids (in the UK) are predominantly atheist or agnostic these days (large numbers of adults, too), and religion usually has quite a lot of ritual and support ideas around death, but the secular world, not so much. Us atheists are on our own, a bit. This game was commissioned around wanting to help out with that, a bit.
It's a platformer, and a quiz, and a 2-player card game, and a bunch of thought-provoking, open ended questions. Oh, and collectibles. Dig in.
Link | Alice's blog post about The End - via Boing Boing
An old talk that breaks down the motivations behind gaming:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KyamsZXXF2w
Thanks for the link, Joanna! That TED talk by Tom Chatfield was very interesting.