Can Your Child Get Smarter From Video Games? Generalization: The Magic Sauce in Learning From Video Games
How video game play can improve real-world skills.
If you want to improve your aerobic capacity, play full-court basketball, not softball. To improve your analytical skills, learn to play chess or bridge, not Chutes and Ladders. If you really want to improve your aerobic conditioning or your analytical skills, play against people who are better than you and see if they’ll teach you a few tricks. If you want to use video games to improve your child’s problem-solving or performance at school, you’ll need to choose the right games and ensure that they are challenging enough and require planning, metacognitive, and critical thinking skills. You will also need to accept the fact that decades of psychological research connect children’s play to learning. However, to get the most out of video game play and connect the skills children use in their gameplay to real-world situations, you need to pay attention to the process of generalization (Singer et al., 2010).
Games That Generalize Skills to the Real World
Not all video games are created equally. Some games clearly challenge cognitive capacities, such as thinking ahead and adapting. For example, Animal Crossing: New Horizons requires spatial reasoning and planning, and Stardew Valley involves resource management and long-term planning. Research has demonstrated that action-based games, such as Starcraft, can improve the speed at which players process visual information, and these improvements have been shown to transfer to other tasks (Lewandowska et al., 2022). Other games, like Candy Crush, require only that you pay attention—sometimes—and appear likely to have no or limited cognitive benefits for game-based learning.
While there is compelling evidence that video games can enhance specific cognitive skills, often the improvements are modest. Just because video game play can improve a cognitive skill that could be applied in the real world doesn’t mean that video games are a preferred method for learning. In part, this is due to the difficulty in generalization. In this context, generalization is the ability to transfer a skill learned in one context (like a video game) to a different context (like real life or schoolwork). It’s often hard to generalize or transfer a skill learned in the classroom to real-world activities, even when a teacher actively instructs how to do this. With video games, there is often no explicit instruction or metacognitive training that makes it clear how game-based skills can translate to real-world skills. This is a key challenge in effective game-based learning.
Game-based learning might generalize to the real world, but it often doesn’t do so perfectly. You might become a whiz at using your planning skills in a game like Civilization. However, improving your planning skills and building empires in the newest version of Civilization VII doesn’t mean you will flawlessly display planning skills when organizing your child’s birthday party or creating a perfect menu for your next dinner party. Just like the near-perfect swing you practice at your golf lessons doesn’t ensure great shots at every hole on the golf course, or being a good cook does not guarantee perfection with a new recipe, generalization of skills is an uneven and sometimes frustrating process. It might be even more challenging for a child who may not actively think about the connection between their video game play and real-world skills. This is why incorporating metacognition into game-based learning is so important.
Far and Near Transfer in Video Games and Generalization
To further explain this, we can look at the near and far transfer concepts. Near transfer refers to the transfer of skills between very similar contexts (Lieberman et al., 2014). For example, if you get better at driving a car, learning to drive a truck is usually routine. Far transfer refers to the transfer of skills between very different contexts. For example, learning to drive a car will only modestly help in piloting a plane. In video games, planning skills (e.g., setting short-term goals of completing a quest and long-term goals of beating the game) may not immediately connect to doing one’s homework on a nightly basis and achieving a grade of A. As a result, far transfer is more challenging because the contexts are less similar. Connecting the skills used in one context to a seemingly unrelated context requires more conscious effort and thoughtful metacognition, essential for effective generalization in game-based learning.
However, with attention and technique, we can increase the odds of successfully generalizing a skill from one activity to another that requires similar skills. At its core, generalization of skills requires practice, attention to the skills being used, metacognitive strategies that help recognize the application of these skills, and instruction, questioning, and awareness of mistakes. So, if you’d like to improve your chances of generalizing that perfect golf swing to your next competition with friends or your child’s chances of generalizing game-based learning to the real world, you can follow several tried-and-true approaches (Raviv et al., 2022).
Generalization Strategies to Make Game-Based Learning Into Real-World Skills
- Select appropriate video games: Find the best video games to practice the identified skills. If your child is disorganized, look for games such as RPGs (role-playing games) that require sequencing or accumulating items or coins to purchase supplies. This is a great start to encouraging generalization.
- Diversify how you practice: Practice the skills you want to improve in various ways. If you want to improve your iron game in golf, you’ll need to vary your distance, whether you are hitting from the fairway, the rough, or a sand trap, and learn to hit with loft to go over obstacles. In video games, practicing the same skill with a variety of games improves the chance that a player will be able to apply it to new situations they encounter in their daily activities, enhancing generalization.
- Embrace challenges: Generalization requires you to learn from your mistakes, so your child should play increasingly challenging video games where they will initially fail. Just like you might choose to alter the time you cook your new recipe, players use metacognitive skills to reassess their strategies and, therefore, learn new skills in gameplay.
- Ask for help: Be willing to ask for help. If you can get your child to recognize their need to improve a specific skill, they may be more willing to look for ways to practice and master the skill in their gameplay and ask for your help in applying it outside of the game, which fosters generalization.
- Use multiple modalities for practice: Generalization works best when practice occurs across settings and with various tools. Video gameplay is only one tool, albeit a fun and engaging approach, to mastering thinking and academic skills. Encourage strategies such as observation, modeling, shadowing, rehearsal, visualizing, and self-instruction. Then, they should be sure to try out their newly acquired skills in the real world.
Originally published on Psychology Today
