Wheel of fortune is a fun family game, and is a good idea for a quick shareware title, now that you mention it.
I don't want to offend you about your age, Marylin, but I think you'll find most young people these days are familiar with role playing games. They have been around since the seventies, and started out as simple text games and pen and paper games like Dungeons and Dragons. Fantasy RPGs are one of the most popular genres of PC gaming. They inherently involve a lot of reading and interacting with other characters, and so were my choice for an attempt at an educational title with mainstream popularity -which is the future according to what I learnt at the Game Developers' Conference in San Francisco. If you like simple, maybe you'll like my pachinko simulation (
http://www.pahcinkoagogo.com) though it's aimed at men. Still, it certainly is simple, and your significant other might like it
! [end_shameless_plug]
Thanks Tomasz. The US military agrees with you in a big way. They are throwing hundreds of millions into video game simulations for every aspect of training and recruiting. They even design some of their hardware around Playstation controllers so it'll be easier for the kids to adjust to. I know someone at a studio in India who does the same thing, but they don't get such massive budgets. Anyway, it certainly looks like games are making headway into training and educational arenas.
Thank you both, and looking forward to more replies.
EDIT> @Admin -Thanks for making this a sticky!