The Future of Successful Learning is Video Games
How a Switch game instantly revolutionized sports and opened new doors
About a month ago, a new Nintendo Switch game came out and surprised the world: Ring Fit Adventure.
This game gamified working out and demonstrated that working out can be fun for anybody.
Some people love working out. I don’t. But I do like games and I own a Switch so I gave it a go and the reviews were right: this game is good.
It is simple at its core. You have to run on the spot to allow your character to move and battles against monsters are handled by doing different kinds of tasks such as squats, pulls and such. The level of difficulty can be adjusted to fit the player’s fitness.
It allows brings working out home to those who feel afraid or lack the motivation to go to the gym.
But above all, it made it fun.
Let’s face it. What is good for us usually isn’t “fun” and the only people succeeding in their field are the ones who enjoy the tasks.
Athletic people love working out, polyglots love learning languages, successful chemists love doing experiments. Artists love their craft. The list goes on.
The principle is simple enough:
If you enjoy it, you’ll keep on doing it.
When people start learning their first foreign languages, the possibilities and things to learn all seem overwhelming. We often turn to apps that barely do the work and after months of holding on, we give up because no results show and it feels like a waste of time.
On the contrary, polyglots learn to notice the small improvements and, as a result, enjoy the process.
Our society has reduced our ability to focus and doing the same thing over and over bores us to death.
Yet, proper adventure games show us progress. Getting to the next level, beating this boss may seem like nothing to the person watching but the more effort put, the more pleasant it is at the end.
Fights in Xenoblade Chronicles 2 can easily take 30 minutes but winning provides a peak of “happy hormones” that keep the player coming back.
While in “standard” RPG games, no real-life positive action comes back to the player, Ring Fit Adventure shows this could be improved to open news doors through games.
Obviously language-learning has already been gamified but the way it has been implemented still lacks the positive feedback of hormones due to an absence of real advancement in the game.
As a result, coming back to any learning game is just a matter of motivation right now. Only when language-learning games will allow for proper adventures will we be able to create a positive loop that’ll keep us coming back for more and learn even when relaxing.
When that game comes out, we’ll all be learning constantly. Can’t wait for that to happen! How about you?
