[quoting Peay, 23 Jan 97] Talk is cheap, give us an example that at least sounds like it will work.
I'll use an example I was peripherally involved in. It was a team approach, which I most heartily endorse. The pedagogical goal was to motivate computer auditing. I don't know about you, but my first reaction was less than complete enthusiasm. Yet when you ask practitioners what makes the job fun for them (there's a lesson here), they'll tell you it's like playing detective: following the trail back to find out if it's just a mistake or (more interestingly) fraud.
Of course, that's how the game was laid out. Obviously, you go for fraud. So, you are placed as a person who's got an audit job, you find an error, and you need to establish what the story is. The game starts out that you're a computer auditing new employee, you've got a bank, with people to interview (the branch manager, the teller, the VP, etc.), an office with reference works, and a built-in computer auditing tool.
And it's got a particular graphic style that's NOT postmodern, but rather almost art-deco.
This is very much tied to a real task, as was Quest. I think it's an unanswered question of whether you might get better far transfer by practicing a skill in some non-real environment. It may well depend on the skill. But say you're working on a more abstract task or general skill like math or programming. Does the situatedness have to be real, or only thematically coherent and that the theme is of interest to the learner. Say, for example, set up an environment where you're motivated to learn a language to put together control structures. Could you embed algebraic manipulation in some space task? And what would be the effectiveness? If we infer from the Gick & Holyoak analogy studies, we might believe that two different scenarios would really facilitate abstraction and transfer.
Look at Rocky's Boots and, more interestingly, Robot Odyssey. Two games that taught Boolean logic gates and control design (respectively). The latter was really a stunning accomplishment, particularly given that it was done more than ten years ago!
I hope this gives some idea of what I'm talking about.