That totally clears it all up, right?! Good. We're done here. Nothing else to see...
Oh. You say you still have questions. Well let's see if we can make this topic a little more concrete and a lot less hypothetical. The below Ted Talk from Jane McGonigal served at the gateway to my interest in games and their potential intersection with education. Here's one of my favorite quotes from the 20 minute session:
The average young person today in a country with a strong gamer culture will have spent 10,000 hours playing online games by the age of 21. Now 10,000 hours is a really interesting number for two reasons. First of all, for children in the United States 10,080 hours is the exact amount of time you will spend in school from fifth grade to high school graduation if you have perfect attendance.
So, we have an entire parallel track of education going on where young people are learning as much about what it takes to be a good gamer as they are learning about everything else in school. And some of you have probably read Malcolm Gladwell's new book "Outliers." So, you would have heard of his theory of success, the 10,000 hour theory of success. It's based on this great cognitive science research that if we can master 10,000 hours of effortful study at anything by the age of 21, we will be virtuosos at it. We will be as good at whatever we do as the greatest people in the world. And so, now what we're looking at is an entire generation of young people who are virtuoso gamers.
Please watch Jane's presentation, or, if you prefer you can read the transcript instead.