I feel like a lot of people desire validation and achievement as short-term feedback. When we go through middle and high school, you can find achievement in short-term feedback on academic assignments, or in extracurricular activities where competitive matchups are rather frequent. (The American focus on short-term "A for Effort" grading is debatable, in this context.) Then you go to college or the real world, and suddenly the goalposts become much further away, all eggs in a nebulous basket: academic research that takes years to gain the next level of credentials, career progression, dating, financial stability. Learning requires you to subconsciously justify self-designed goalposts - you have to set your own goals for when you can be happy with what you've learned - and that's just as nebulous as the real world.

I think many gamers would envy, and aspire to, your ability to have confidence in self-set learning goalposts. But rather than despair at not being able to do so, if they can sit down on their couch and be spoon-fed goals, a process to get there, and Steam Trophies when they do... and they are truly legitimately happy (a local rather than global maximum, to be sure, but who ever achieves the global maximum of happiness anyways?)... who's to argue against that?

Efforts like Khan Academy and Duolingo understand this dynamic; they break things down into achievable interim goals, with flashy rewards as you progress. But it's hard for serious learning apps to reach the mental intensity and dopamine release of, say, a successful boss fight. A company that can figure that out would do a lot of good for humanity... but why wouldn't they just be a game studio instead?