People at Iowa State University (one is now at U of Arkansas, Little Rock) have been doing awesome things in writing-across-the-curriculum and communication-across-the-curriculum using simulations and case studies. They've been developing some interesting techno-pedagogies, including a content/course management system that allows instructors to simulate "real" work-world/professional situations. Students take up particular roles and immerse themselves in these simulation-situations, which drive their research and drive them to produce specific kinds of writing.

Check it:
http://144.167.28.49/
http://casebuilder.rhet.ualr.edu/sites.cfm

There are several interesting things about this approach, including: 1) It introduces students to the complexities of "real-world" problems that require analytical thinking and writing. 2) It avoids, or at least supplements, the standard "the teacher said so" motivation and gives students more concrete/accessible/(possibly) better reasons to care about what happens in their college writing courses.*
*A note for those of us committed to teaching civic discourse/citizenship/politics: although these discourse simulation-situations are "practical" and business-oriented, they nevertheless drop students in the middle of complex ethical issues. There's plenty of room around them to discuss competing values and "who wins."

Another interesting thing is that these are, I now realize, thanks to Clay, closely related to the video game my CWRL workgroup developed this year. There are important differences, of course. For instance, they are discipline- and/or profession-specific and rely on verisimilitude, while ours tries to appeal to a very general audience of first-year writing students by relying on fantasy and surreality.