Podcast 21: What are kids learning from games?

Welcome to this week's question of gamification. On this question, I get asked a lot by parents, "What are my kids learning on video games, on computer games, on mobile games?" "Should I limit their time on it," is typically the second question. "I am worried about my kids playing too much." It's a very frequently asked question by managers in many organisations with children at home. They see that their children are playing and playing a lot, and I suppose with the World Health Organisation, you're marking gaming as a disorder as well. There's a need to explain why and what the case may be with games and what it brings or doesn't bring to your children or young people that you know. The first thing I will say is as a person growing up, my parents were quite protective and we were not allowed games at all in the house. So when I was growing up, I was always borrowing somebody else's games in school in order to play. In fact, I think at one stage my dad thought that Pong was going to blow up the television. And if you don't know Pong, look it up, it's a very basic game with two balls knocked to the side of the screen and you have to sort of play table tennis on the TV screen. So my uncles had to uninstall it quite quickly after it had launched. What we did do, however, is we had a lot of board games. We had a lot of card games. We were all involved in sports. Although computer things were banned, we still got to play. Actually all of my children's parties were sets of games. Most of them I dreamt up. I was lucky to be born in June, and often then the weather in Belgium was quite nice and quite fun. We typically had really fun things in the garden, in our house. The little puddle pool was used as the hinderness that you had to overcome or the obstacle that you had to overcome rather than the hindrance, which is nice Flemish word for that ... it's an obstacle. One group of the party people had to defend the obstacle and either make you go through it, which gave you immunity, or you had to be cunning enough to distract them and run past them super fast and get to the other side. Things like Tug of War, you name it, we did it. For my confirmation, we had this massive life-sized board where you had to roll the dice and you move forward, and based on where you landed you had to go find the clue in the woods and perform whatever task was related to that clue. If the person that was minding that clue thought you had passed you, you were allowed to continue back to the board and the dice. Things you had to do in order to get over a clue were things like dress up and take a photo, solve a riddle. Sometimes you had to find things. There were always fun, cool stuff that happened. So although I never actually got to own a console of any denomination of sorts, I did love to play and my parents did definitely encourage that. Even though when I asked about a career in gaming, my dad was very adamant that there was no money in games. I guess it was a good ... I would have been seven, so a good couple of decades ago. Let's just say that. Today's kids I think have a bit more of a privilege or access ability, I think. And maybe that's also my worldview of a relatively well to do middle class background, because gaming, let's not forget, this is not cheap. So a lot of kids from the lower end of the market families may still not be able to access any game consoles or just purely because of costs. And if they do, they might have to work really hard to earn access to it. So I think if your kids are gaming, you're already in a nice place and you probably have enough money to help them do certain things. So that's one thing. But what are they learning? So think about it this way. If your children are playing as a team with other kids in their class, in their neighborhood, but even with other kids online that they have never met,