The Positive Effects of Video Games on Education

One of the things that's so refreshing about your perspective is that you're not a game designer. You're an educator. This gives you a kind of a "kid centric" perspective that a lot of parents are missing./nA lot of the time, the things that video games do are actually things that we would love for education to do. When education does those things, we applaud it and we're so happy about it. But when video games do those things, we say, "Oh, that's all they want to do." Not a waste of time, but psychologically, what's happening is the same. It's the same thing. So I think it's so fascinating that on the one hand, we can look at these psychological tools that are getting used in video games and think that they're being used in a negative way. But if it was happening in most other activities, like if a kid were that motivated to play the cello, we wouldn't be like, "All I want to do is play the cello for four hours a day." Right? Yeah, it sounds absurd. So that was kind of my entry point to really looking at it was to really focus on what's going on and not just attributing it to superficial things about games, but really looking at what's going on under the hood.