Yes, my initial skim-reading thought was something something, France geography in minecraft, something something WAIT did I just read 'government program'?!
I think this is an absurdly untapped function of governments agencies regardless of country; figuring out how to make interesting things that are also useful for public education.
Being able to "trick" people into exploring game/internet media that immediately translates to the real world must be some kind of holy grail of education. I bet if we (usa for example) threw a few tens of millions at trying this kind of random crap to see what sticks, the results would be amazing even if the immediate cultural(/economic) value would be hard to calculate.
I have personally experienced this with Europa Universalis IV. A great game that allows you to learn a lot about the geography of Europe, and maybe even some of its history. Although some a-historical gameplay elements are introduced in an effort to make the game more likely to simulate certain future events (relative to the game's starting date of 1444).
One example is making Philip the Good, who was notoriously promiscuous, unable to father any children, so that the in-game Burgundian Succession Crisis will happen, which historically happened when Charles the Bold (Philip the Good's heir) died without having produced a male successor.
It is interesting how this game is still evolving, with new DLC's adding loads of historical context to regions outside of the Europe (which was the original target of the game). This historical context is a mix of events that happened in the real world, as well as stated ambitions of the different rulers. It is not uncommon for a very specific event to cause a deep-dive into wikipedia articles related to that event.
I'm surprised we aren't already tricking people into doing 'real' office administration by gameifying the role, look up this, match it with that, move it to this stack, move it to that stack, it's looks like Animal Crossing but actually you're cross referencing disparate sets of information in a real world dataset to deliver the required "manual last mile'.
I think this is an absurdly untapped function of governments agencies regardless of country; figuring out how to make interesting things that are also useful for public education. Being able to "trick" people into exploring game/internet media that immediately translates to the real world must be some kind of holy grail of education. I bet if we (usa for example) threw a few tens of millions at trying this kind of random crap to see what sticks, the results would be amazing even if the immediate cultural(/economic) value would be hard to calculate.