Not many game developers have to worry about a new game being billed as “Doom with a coat hanger.” But that’s the risk Ian Bogost took when he started crafting an abortion-themed video game. By tackling one of the thorniest issues in American society, the assistant professor at Georgia Tech’s Experimental Game Lab and partner at Persuasive Games has placed himself squarely in the middle of the emerging so-called serious game industry.

Far from the hedonistic fantasy worlds of Grand Theft Auto and World of Warcraft, serious games seek to educate players rather than merely entertain them. Like all attempts to put a fun pastime into the service of lofty goals—think Schoolhouse Rock—serious video games have met with mixed results. It’s hard to imagine that Food Force, the United Nations’ video game aimed at teaching players about world hunger, is played much outside the confines of elementary school classrooms. And Mr. Bogost allows that his new game could “utterly fail.”

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Speaking at the Game Developer’s Conference in San Jose, California, in late March, Mr. Bogost said his new abortion game will use an artificial intelligence engine that his team is creating to figure out the player’s political and social ideologies, and then respond with questions and tasks that will expand the player’s viewpoint on the subject. Sound fun?

Due for release in September, there are plenty of ways the as-yet-unnamed game could fall flat, he says. It could be met with shrugs by non-gamers, or the game could fail to transcend the biases of its academic origins and lose credibility with one half of the abortion debate.

The pitfalls of marketing serious games to the general public are not invisible to Andrea Lauer, the founder of Lauer Learning. Even more than Mr. Bogost, Ms. Lauer needs to be mindful that she faces a hard sell. Her next game, FF56, seeks to teach teenagers about the Soviet-thwarted Hungarian uprising in 1956. Hurling Molotov cocktails at Russian tanks on digitized Budapest avenues promises more fun than Food Force, but it’s still not as gripping a pitch as “Doom with a coat hanger.”