terjepe: I am a Norwegian middle school teacher that have been using computer games in class for the last few years.
I'm a bit confused. I was of the impression, that Norway doesn't have "middle schools"?
Do you refer to middle school as in "middle grade" AKA barneskole or as in secondary school ungdomsskole?
At any rate: The epicenter of European game studies is the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands. Prof. Markus Hendrik Overmars is a specialist in Algorithmic Geometry, author of one of the best text books on the subject and also the one who began teaching game design at European universities. He is also the one who initially created Game Maker as a tool to teach his students.
I should add that his text book basically uses games as examples to explain complex concepts and algorithms.
Last year, Prof. Overmars started a new platform called Quarterfall to assist teachers in remote schooling. (First 6 months are free.)
If there is anybody in Europe who should be open to the concept of gamification of education and ready to help you get up and running, Prof. Overmars is the one to talk to.
As far as actual mainstream games are concerned, I personally found a few to be useful for learning a second language in a limited number of circumstances, perhaps to start talking about ethics, but hardly much else, as they are typically not designed with education in mind.
Obviously there are specialized websites with a focus on educational games, like mathgames.com. However, they on the other hand frequently lack the budget to produce something that can be engaging for any more than a couple of minutes. Might be worth a try regardless, since they also have practice sheets.
A great motivational aspect, is task gamification in general, to start developing routines. Pages like habitica.com reward students for finishing a task, like doing homework, with items to equip to virtual characters. I found these approaches to gamify repetitive tasks can be helpful when the conditions are met.
Another thing that might help you convince colleagues is a closer look at psychology and problem solving. There are a number of studies that support the idea in general, arguing that in order to form neuronal connection a larger number of stimuli can be beneficial. There are also studies that found positive results when using games as a tool to teach children that are high in the autism spectrum.
However, I am unfortunately not aware of any studies that found beneficial effects of mainstream games for teenagers that might justify their general application in the classroom beyond a very limited number of scenarios. If you know of any examples, I would be eager to learn of them.
There may be some isolated examples, tough, like "Loom" that requires memorizing and repeating tunes, understanding which note is higher or lower, that could be an idea to try for lower grades. Music and Maths in general are both prime subjects for positive aspects of gamification, alongside any programming skills for obvious reasons.
"Thou" is similar to My Memory of us, which you mentioned, but it is not strictly educational beyond the puzzles as such.
"Kim", which was mentioned above, is hard to recommend. It is based on a book by a British Nobel laureate in literature, Joseph Rudyard Kipling. But, caveat emptor! The developers are neither Indian, nor have they ever seen the country or the historic places they talk about. They take the author of the book "Kim" at face value, even though that author supported British rule in India to a point where he grossly misrepresented historic events to retroactively justify British atrocities. He is one of the best sources of the period, but has to be taken with a grain (or rather a full teaspoon) of salt, which the developers absolutely failed to do.
With some work, it could however be a starting point to discuss British rule in India, the Indian uprising of 1857, the Amritsar massacre of 1919, the Bengal famine of 1943 and its parallels to the Great Irish Famine of 1876, as well as the role of both as a catalyst to hasten the end of British rule in Ireland as of 1921 as well as India in 1949.
"1979 Revolution: Black Friday" on the revolution in Iran might be an interesting title, however I lack the proper background knowledge to speak on its authenticity.
Otherwise, I would check a number of Math related titles, and there is a large number of titles that aim to teach the alphabet, as well as introducing kids to music. I found a number of those to be of use in home-schooling pre-schoolers.
In all honesty: I would be extremely curious to learn which aspects of the games you mentioned you have explored with your students and what you found to be helpful in class.
#EDIT: One last recommendation. Last year, just before release, I had a conversation with Douglas Meredith, author of the middle grade SciFi series "Generation Mars" (books). I found his titles perfectly suited for teenagers to read their first chapter books in English. The protagonists are teenagers as well, the books use simple words, short chapters, and feature beautiful illustrations. Douglas is self-publishing and an overall nice guy. If you send him a mail or contact him on Twitter, I'm pretty sure he would be open to the concept of allowing limited complimentary use of his books in your classroom, if you found them useful.
