This just in: Work is boring, games are awesome

Bodily exercise, when compulsory, does no harm to the body; but knowledge which is acquired under compulsion obtains no hold on the mind.

Plato, The Republic. Book VII. 536

How, then, should we ingest knowledge and understanding?  Through games, of course!  Yes, this is yet another reason video games are nowhere near as deleterious as our parents told us they were.  And not in quite the same way that Gummy Vites are both delicious and nutritious; these games are for grown-ups.

Studies in psychology tell us that subjects show “significantly greater learning and transfer in the fantasy than in the no-fantasy conditions.”  Consider the vast and constantly multiplying amounts of information we all need to deal with in order to, well, make anything of our lives.  Then consider Ender’s Game, in which Battle School imparts intense military training into the minds of children through the medium of a single game.  Or consider Azad, a sort of cross between Risk and Settlers of Catan; this game is so complex, its winners become emperors.
It could work.  Even if two out of three of my sources are sci-fi novels, it could work.  There’s nothing like the enchantment of fantasy and the glory of conquest to motivate what might otherwise seem like hours of intellectual drudgery.

Some games – Easyway to Stop Smoking, the Wii Fit – purport to teach us control over our lives through games.  Valuable skills like willpower and hip agility, packaged brightly and swathed in friendly music, making vivid our own progress.  Easyway to Stop Smoking hasn’t been released yet, but Asians and Americans have been using the Wii Fit for months now.  Verdict: “The same effects could be achieved by doing push-ups and sit-ups for 45 minutes every day,” blogger Kevin Tambornino says.  “However, I know that I for one would never have the motivation to do that. I do have the motivation to use Wii Fit though.”  Games are more interesting than straight-up work almost every time.  This fact, I think, has yet to be fully harnessed.

Many of us have been gaming for years.  What might have we already learned?  I don’t mean the virtues of auto theft or hooker murder, but the head for strategy, or the reflexes for avoiding sudden physical threats like Frisbees to the face.  Is a gamer a better logician than a normie?  Or does he whack bricks with his head and wait for power-upping mushrooms to leap out of the debris?  (Or worse, does he expect bodies to dissolve where they fall within a matter of seconds?)  Let us hope Science can give us some answers in the near future.