(electronic music)
- Alright, so it's no secret that I love video games,
but I admit it's not always the best use of my time
when I could be spending it by learning
to program in JavaScript or rebuild a car engine
or even speak in Portuguese,
but could video games be more than
just a fun waste of time?
I mean, why do we play games in the first place?
Well there are a lot of theories,
but one popular thought is that
it allows us to learn new skills
in a low-stakes environment, and it's not just us.
Kittens will pounce on each other to learn hunting skills.
Puppies will wrestle with each other
to learn fighting and self-defense.
So could a video game actually teach us
skills we can use in the real world?
Well, some scientific studies
suggest that yes, they can.
In 2010 a study showed that people who played
a fast-paced, first-person shooter action game
like Call of Duty II could actually
make decisions 25 percent faster
than a control group with no loss in accuracy.
And a 2013 study found that people who
played strategy games like StarCraft II
actually had better cognitive flexibility,
which is your ability to flip between
different types of mental tasks.
And think about that, those were accidental side-effects.
What if we were to build a video game
specifically to power up our brains
and learn new skills, and even educate us
on new topics like quantum physics?
Okay, so the quantum world is weird.
It doesn't make sense on a classical level,
and we might be able to learn
the principles and the abstract,
but it never really feels right.
Enter the Google Quantum A.I. Lab,
which in 2013 released qCraft.
Now that's a mod for the popular game MineCraft,
which gives the blocks in the game
special quantum properties like
super position and entanglement,
but why should we stop there?
What if we had quantum physicists team up
with game developers to create
a fast-paced action platformer
where you play as a photon racing through lenses
and half-silvered mirrors with
full quantum effects in play like super position
so you have two pathways open simultaneously
until an outside observation causes
the wave function to collapse and you're down to one?
Now this is a truly unique way that video games
can teach us about quantum physics.
You wouldn't just be talking about
the rules of the quantum world,
you would actually feel them at play.
It doesn't stop there.
There's no reason why video games
can't exists side-by-side with lectures
and text books in the classroom,
or maybe even replace them.
The game company Valve has an initiative
to provide copies of the game Portal Two to classrooms
so students can use it to learn things
like math and physics and critical thinking skills.
There's also very skill-specific style games out there
like CodeSpells where you play as a wizard,
and your spells are made by creating
lines of code in the Java programming language.
Now if we take that concept and go a step further,
you could level up your character
not by destroying an endless number
of trolls in a dungeon,
but by creating increasingly complex lines of code.
You're actually leveling up your brain
and learning real-world skills.
When you think about it, games are the perfect way
to learn skills in all sorts of ways.
First of all, games are self-motivating,
you can learn at your own pace,
and you can lose yourself in the learning process,
which minimizes distractions.
So why should learning and play
compete against each other when the two activities
could actually be the exact same thing?
Alright, I've got a question for all of you:
It's your job to design a video game
that's going to teach someone a new set of skills.
What sort of skills are you going to teach,
and how do you go about doing it?
I wanna hear your most creative answer
in the comments below.
If you enjoyed this video, make sure you hit like
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and also share the video with your friends,
and once you're done with all that,
it's play time, and by play time,
I mean watch these.
(electronic music)