Simulations and games provide a  unique learning experience and, one could argue, they are a revolutionary concept in education. Games and simulations are highly interactive and motivational, since they are engaging students to "use a model of behavior to gain a better understanding of that behavior" (http://serc.carleton.edu/sp/library/simulations/what.html) and give students the opportunity to explore and to engage in real life situations. According to  Charles F. Petranek, Susan Corey and Rebecca Black (1992), there are three levels of learning concerning games and simulations
( https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Susan_Corey/publication/43119259_Three_Levels_of_Learning_in_Si...):

Through participating, where the participant experiences different types of situations, feelings, strategies
Through debriefing, where students discuss and reflect upon these experiences, share their ideas and listen to their peers' impressions, and
Through writing, which extends "the analytical learning process by requiring each participant to organize the material" and reflect upon it on an idividual basis.

In a simulation or game the learning cycle presented in the image below can be repeated several times:

But, why teach simulations? Because, among others, they enhance and deepen the learning experience, they are model-building, actively engaging, they allow students to understand theory and "think about how and why they behaved as they did during the simulation." (http://serc.carleton.edu/sp/library/simulations/why.html) Simulations and games are excellent educational tools, and combined they can provide students with unique learning experiences.
But, how can we teach through simulations and games? Active student participation and instructor preparation are crucial; students need guidance when using games and simulations, and they need to be challenged (http://www.cited.org/index.aspx?page_id=143), facts which make the instuctor's role important in order to help students engage in the process and, afterwards, debrief on what the entire experience has offered them on a cognitive level.
Some types of game-based learning are:

Flash Cards, Game Show Competitions (for memorization-based or drill-based applications).

Role-Play, Quests (when the learning objective is to encourage imitation, reinforce continuous practice, and emphasize increasingly challenging content).

Strategy, Adventure (when the objective is to foster decision-making abilities, or sharpen choice-making and quizzing skills).

Multi-Player Gaming (for fostering collaboration and team work).

Open-Ended Simulation (exposing learners to games and simulations that are open-ended (no single wrong/right answer) for  teaching experimentation and logic)

Timed Games, Reflex Testing (to foster quick thinking and thinking “out of the box").

(https://elearningindustry.com/simulations-and-games-making-learning-fun)

Some examples of games and simulations used in classrooms are" the Taiga Park curriculum unit in Quest Atlantis, which has been used by thousands of students in elementary schools, after-school clubs, and science centers, and the simulation-based learning environments developed by Songer, Kelcey, and Gotwals (2009), which have been used by hundreds of students in the Detroit Public Schools. The developers of the River City game-based curriculum unit have investigated the process of widely implementing the unit, as well as its effectiveness for learning" (http://www.nap.edu/read/13078/chapter/5#60).
What is now posed as a challenge is how can teachers implement simulations and games in mainstream school settings taking into consideration the curriculum that needs to be taught and the limitations of time and resources. It's a great challenge for educators which needs to be addressed in order to create the ultimate learning experience. The link below can give us some ideas:
 http://education.mit.edu/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/GamesSimsSocNets_EdArcade.pdf

To sum up, I believe that as Dr William Cope mentioned in the video "Multimodal Meaning, Part 3A:What's new about Digital Technologies?" (https://d3c33hcgiwev3.cloudfront.net/aiQZr2G6EeWTXA5xtTqziw.processed/full/540p/index.mp4?Expires=14...), games and simulations could be included in learner-generated knowledge representations as part of the phenomenon called "multimodality". They could be effective and efficient tools for knowledge representation.