Can Video Games Replace Cramming?

We hear about gamification more and more. Still, most students hardly play games for academic learning. How come?

Textbooks In The Age of TikTok

Entertainment is getting more and more catchy. Every couple of years a new engaging tech pops up. Look at how social media has been developing: MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and TikTok are each more engaging than the other. They evolved from text to images and short-form videos.

We have so many ways to entertain ourselves that we read fewer books year after year. Take a look at how many books an average American has been reading yearly.

Education methods went in hand with current tech advancements. We used the same tools to both have fun and study. During the stone age, people gathered around the fire to share funny stories, or discuss mammoth hunting tactics. When printing became common, we could either read novels or study religious texts. Then we got video, and you could either watch Netflix shows or view MIT lectures online.

Today we have hyper-engaging mobile games and social media. Meanwhile, students in colleges still learn the old-school way — they read textbooks and listen to lectures.

Can studying become as engaging as playing video games? To answer this, let's take a closer look at what makes anything fun to us at all.

How Fun Works: Why Are Video Games More Addictive Than Textbooks?

Obviously, to most people, games are more fun than textbooks. But have you thought about why it is so? Let’s find out how motivation works from the standpoint of neurobiology.

Dopamine, The Motivation Molecule

Dopamine is a universal currency for motivation.All of our actions are driven by it.

You crave to reach for your phone because you’re getting a dopamine rush. Whenever you don’t feel like doing laundry, it’s because laundry doesn’t increase your dopamine very much. You need a certain amount of the molecule to pursue anything.

The same applies to books and video games. When you play a first-person shooter, it can be hard to stop, because your brain is being bombarded by dopamine. Reading a book is much slower in pace. That’s why video game addiction is more commonplace than textbook addiction.

Intermittent Reinforcement Keeps Gamblers In Casinos

We know how to control motivation and increase your dopamine levels. In fact, casinos, video games, and social media are all designed with this knowledge in mind. Meanwhile, schools are not optimized to be as addiction

Some people can entertain themselves by pressing a single button

The best way to keep you wanting something is to reward your actions every once in a while. This strategy is called intermittent reinforcement.

For example, slot machines in casinos let gamblers win about 30% of all games. This keeps people hooked, although over time, they inevitably lose money. To stay motivated, you need to win sometimes, even if you lose most of the time.

The key is to make the wins unexpected. If the player knows that they’ll win exactly every 3rd game, it’s not going to make the game very captivating.

Can We Make All Education Engaging Through Games?

Sure. Most people don’t consider video games, casinos, or social media to be good for them, even if they engage in it every day for hours. Such activities hijack our brains to keep us engaged even if we don’t want to continue doing them long-term.

But who said that productive activities couldn’t be as engaging and addictive? Imagine if we could use the casino mechanisms in a fruitful way. Being addicted to studying seems much better than to Call of Duty. For now, most learning software is definitely not addictive, though.

Here’s what it takes to make Linear Algebra as engaging as a viral TikTok:

• Hands-on experience. First-hand experiments make you way more engaged than reading. Kids who learn circuits through Minecraft will have no problem understanding 8th-grade physics.

• Challenge. The best way to engage you is to slightly challenge your brain.

• Intermittent reinforcement. Let the players win every other game. Make sure that they can’t be sure if they will win the next round.

• Short rounds. If a round takes more than a few minutes, the player can lose focus. Keep it dynamic.

• Streaks. When you’re 200 days into a streak, you don’t want to erase it. Thousands of Duolingo users learn languages daily because they don’t want to start over.

Should We Gamify All Learning?

Gamification in eLearning is not new. Schools and EdTech companies realize how much potential there is. The industry has been growing slowly but surely. It seems that students are going to play more games in a few years.

Learning games are a great tool to keep students interested. When playing, students can actively interact with the world, not just passively read about it. If the game is fun, students are much more likely to remember the information and keep wanting to continue studying.

Will Textbooks Still Be Around?

Perhaps, yes.

Remember, that dopamine is the main driver of your motivation? Well, your body can only process so much of it. If you get too excited, you’ll need more and more stimulation, but there’s a limit.

After a certain point, you can deplete your dopamine levels, and you’ll need time to restore them. That’s why overstimulation is bad for us. If we replace all learning with super fun games, it won’t be great for your attention span. As the old saying goes, everything is good in moderation. Fun included.

Learning games can spice up the studying process, but not fully replace it. It’s best to use interactive content to introduce new concepts or highlight the most important parts of a lecture.

Gamification in eLearning is not new. Schools realize how much potential there is, so they try to include e-learning content like games, 3D models, and AR into their curriculum. It seems that students are going to play more games in a few years, and good for them. Just don’t play too much.