Entertainment, after all, is a powerful thing. People use entertainment products voluntarily, and are far likelier to learn from them and internalize the lessons than they are from products they are forced to use in school, or experience for a few brief moments in a museum setting. I would maintain that Zucker's Napoleon's Last Battles, for instance, allows the player to understand Waterloo better, in many ways, than any book on the subject. The map shows the terrain. All the military units of the battle are represented by pieces, whose strengths indicate something about their combat abilities.
Initial deployments show where the competing forces began the battle.
The ebb and flow of reinforcements, and the clustering of combat around terrain features, shows how and why things happened as they did in the course of the battle. And the ability of players to experiment with alternative strategies helps them understand the mentality and decisions made by the actual combatants. In principle, multimedia can do this this kind of thing far better. We need something that lets us interact with the situation and explore alternatives, that lets us 'game it out' and shows us thereby the constraints the system operates under. And we need something that gives us the emotional impact and visual understanding of film and photography.