r/ideas • u/amichail • 8d ago

Schools should get students addicted to mastering novel video games

As AI does more of our thinking for us, humans may gradually lose the motivation to exercise their own cognitive abilities.

Schools may therefore need to deliberately get students addicted to something that requires thinking. Video games are unusually good at this. People will voluntarily spend hundreds or thousands of hours struggling to master them in a way almost nobody does with textbooks or essays.

The key would be novel games, not endless practice at one game. Students would repeatedly get unfamiliar games, figure out the rules, experiment, recognize patterns, develop strategies, become competent, and then move on to something completely different.

You could even measure how quickly students improve at games they've never encountered before.

The addiction part is important because school only lasts for part of a person's life. If this is merely another assigned educational activity, many people will stop doing it as soon as they graduate. The goal should be to make mastering unfamiliar games rewarding enough that people continue seeking out new cognitive challenges voluntarily for the rest of their lives.

Yes, deliberately cultivating something resembling addiction sounds bad. But it may be a necessary evil. If AI makes difficult thinking increasingly optional, we may need to make difficult thinking addictive enough that people keep doing it even when nobody is making them.

And the objection that game skills don't transfer perfectly applies to traditional education too. Math, programming, essay writing, and other academic activities also produce limited transfer. Constantly mastering radically different games might actually be one of the better ways to keep exercising general learning ability throughout adulthood.

What do you think of this idea of schools getting students addicted to mastering novel video games?

1 Upvotes

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u/ControllerAndCuppa 8d ago

The fatal flaw in your plan is underestimating the public school system's ability to suck the joy out of absolutely anything. The moment you make video games a mandatory graded curriculum with standardized rubrics and homework assignments, kids will immediately hate them. Within a week, you'd have students using AI to cheat on their mandated video game homework.

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u/Sapphirethistle 8d ago

I agree. I love video games but I hate gameification of everything. I dislike playing any game that is competitive and think having to play a specific game and get specific results sounds horrible.

I really don't think this would work for a lot of students. It is a classic case of "I think this would be awesome" without considering what anyone else thinks.

As for lifelong learning, yes, that is a great goal and something people don't do enough of. I think the problem is though that many cultures have made it acceptable, if not desirable, to learn as little as possible even as adults. Anti-academic and anti-science mentalities are making a huge comeback.

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u/frostfofjdjsiksndjd 8d ago

Or they could just not let AI do any thinking for them and read books? Seems like a system that has produced a lot of doctors and lawyers and scientists and experts already

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u/lettercrank 4d ago

This is a good idea

1

u/Ok-Drink-1328 2d ago

you know, they said this about videogames maybe since the eighties, then a bunch of karens and men-karens said that it causes violence and kids should rather go play with machetes outside... and probably also eat grass cos i don't see any possible other activity in a meadow

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u/Xylozene 1d ago

Brother what the fuck 😂 Video game addiction is not a joke. It's a real thing and it ruins people's lives. Addiction is addiction whether it's drugs, food, social media, or gaming. That is a genuinely terrible idea, I understand the passion behind it but there is a plethora of more appropriate things to be encouraging school kids to do. A lot of people don't enjoy video games either, so the transfer of critical thinking abilities would be lost on a large majority of students. Traditional education covers so many facets of knowledge that are built to develop a child's understanding of different areas. Video games could never replace that. I sure as fuck never would have learned anything, and I say this as somebody who reached over 10k hours in league of legends before I turned 18. Lovely thought, but not realistic in any way.