What do video games actually teach a child?
Cooperation, mastery mindset, and honest limits: what research on video games and learning actually supports, and what it still can’t say.
Your child has been at the same level for twenty minutes, muttering strategies under their breath, trying one approach, then another, then a third that finally works. Ask what they learned and they’ll shrug: nothing, it’s just a game. Researchers who actually measure this disagree, at least in part, and the details of where they agree and where they still have doubts are worth knowing before you decide what to think about the console in the living room.
Who you play with changes what you learn
One of the clearer findings comes from a 2013 study in the Journal of Educational Psychology, led by Jan Plass of New York University with colleagues from Stanford and the City University of New York. Middle-school students played a math game called FactorReactor, built around problem-solving, either alone, competing against a partner, or working with one. Students in the competitive and collaborative conditions ended up with a stronger mastery mindset, the drive to understand a problem rather than just get past it, than those who played solo. They also reported the greatest interest and enjoyment. The researchers were careful to add that the result might be specific to this particular game’s design, not a universal law of gaming.
What the evidence still can’t say
That caution matters, because the field as a whole is younger than the games it studies. The American Psychological Association’s own review of the research, published in its Monitor magazine, points to a 2012 analysis that started with 363 studies on games and learning and ended up keeping only 39 rigorous enough to draw conclusions from. Richard Mayer, a researcher quoted in that review, put it plainly: the evidence ’is not all that convincing yet that digital games are going to revolutionize education.’ Some games, in some subjects, with some age groups, show real gains. A blanket claim that games teach, full stop, goes further than the data does.
A game that sharpens one skill in one study is not proof that every game sharpens every skill.
A test that found nothing, and why that’s useful too
A 2023 study out of the University of Houston looked at 160 fifth graders from a diverse public school, most from lower-income households, comparing their gaming habits with scores on a standard cognitive ability test covering verbal, quantitative and spatial skills. Neither how long the children played, up to four and a half hours a day for the heaviest users, nor which genre they preferred, correlated with their test scores in any meaningful way. Even games marketed specifically as brain training showed no measurable edge in this age group. The one caveat the researchers flagged: heavy play did eat into homework time, which is a scheduling problem more than a cognitive one.
Persistence looks different on a screen
Watch a child fail the same boss fight a dozen times and keep coming back, and you’re watching something that would look like stubbornness anywhere else. Games are built to make failing cheap: try, lose, adjust, try again, all within seconds and without anyone grading the attempt. That structure is close to what teachers mean by a growth mindset, treating a wrong answer as data rather than a verdict. Reading a quest log, following subtitles in an unfamiliar setting, or picking through an in-game menu in a foreign language are real reading practice too, even if nobody calls it homework. None of that is a reason to hand over the console with no questions asked, but it’s also not nothing.
What this means at your kitchen table
Put the findings together and a fairly calm picture appears. A game played with someone else, sibling, friend, parent, tends to pull more effort and enjoyment out of a child than the same game played alone, and that effort is where any learning would have to come from. Some games plainly build something: patience with a puzzle, a strategy tried and rebuilt, a rule system worked out through trial and error. But none of this transfers automatically to a spelling test or a fractions worksheet just because a screen was involved, and no single title deserves credit for skills it hasn’t been shown to build. The question worth asking is not whether games are good or bad. It’s which game, played with whom, and what got pushed aside to make room for it.
Sources
- Gaming to learn (American Psychological Association, Monitor on Psychology) (apa.org)
- Educational video games can boost motivation to learn, study shows (ScienceDaily) (sciencedaily.com)
- Study finds video game playing causes no measurable harm to young children’s cognitive abilities (University of Houston) (uh.edu)