Video games, therefore, involve individualized skill
development, which likely leads to enhanced motivation (Green and Bavelier 2008). In contrast, this high level of individualized skill development is more difficult to replicate in the average classroom where there often are more than 30 students per class, potentially contributing to the finding that many adolescents report feeling bored and unmotivated in school (Larson 2000). As we have shown, mainstream ‘‘popular’’ video games that involve problem solving are associated with increased self-reported problem solving skills, and thus educational video game developers […] should focus more on including problem solving tasks in educational games.

As someone who played a lot of games in my adolescence, I’d like to be a little nitpick-y with this quote from the article. For one thing, when the article discussed examples of strategic video games at the beginning of the article, they mentioned World of Warcraft (WoW), a game that I was fairly deeply associated with during my pre-adolescence. Though WoW wasn’t mentioned specifically as a game that the participants played,  the discussion at the beginning of the article makes it clear that it is considered a “strategic game”.  However, from my experience with that game, I can say confidently that the above quote only applies to it in very narrow and specific instances. 

First, we can discuss how WoW elicits “motivation” from its subscribers. WoW and other online games of that genre are fairly infamous for addicting players by deliberately providing them a seductive combination of variable-rate reinforcement and escapism. I think that most of the motivation for players to choose certain kinds of video games over objectively more important activities like school work (food, sleep, personal hygiene, etc.), has more to do with the intentionally addictive properties of those games, than with their “individualized skill development”. Without intentionally manipulating their students psychologically, it would be incredibly difficult for schools to compete with video games like WoW, in terms of motivating participation. So, even though playing these games seems to correlate with higher self reported problem solving skills and those skills correlate with stronger academic achievement, it might not be correct, morally, to look towards those games for methods to keep our students motivated.

Further, because the majority of the WoW’s single player content involves grinding for rewards that drop randomly, the only genuine instances of problem solving strategies occur in WoW when playing in groups, not when playing as an individual. For the majority of players, this doesn’t constitute a large portion of the gameplay, which could contradict the study’s claim of “individualized skill development”. This makes me wonder about how the study determined which games were sufficiently “strategic” enough to be included. That isn’t to say that I couldn’t imagine a former WoW player having an advantage when it comes to schooling; WoW can absolutely train players to sit in place and deal with monotony, which could help when it comes to studying or taking tests. However, I doubt that being better at sitting still can be associated with problem solving strategies learned during gameplay. For this reason, I think that the video games being used in the study could be increasing the scores of the students’ self-reported Problem Solving skills assessments in a variety of different ways. An interesting follow-up study could look into exactly what skills are being taught to players of different video games, within the article’s “strategic” genre, and how those different skills could each affect student’s academic abilities.