So yes, given all the flak that games cop for rotting young brains, it’s kind of ironic that many of them are such sophisticated teachers. As Gee and others have argued, policy-makers could stand to learn a great deal from videogames, especially in regards to the structure and content of school curricula. With the resurgence of conservatism in countries like Australia and the US, the institution of public education has become increasingly focused on skill and drill study, where a student’s ability to memorise and regurgitate raw data determines their success in the classroom. But as demonstrated by videogames, and supported by numerous studies in cognitive science, people are much better at retaining and reasoning with information when it’s contextualised by practical experience.

For example, consider this variation of the famous Wason test detailed in the book Moral Minds by biologist Marc Hauser:

You have a deck of cards, which, unlike regular playing cards, have a letter on one side and a number on the other. An experimenter removes four cards and places them in front of you as follows:

The following rule, which may be true or false, applies to these cards: If there is a D on one side of the card, then there is a 3 on the other side of the card. To decide whether the rule is true or false, which card or cards do you turn over?

Now just think about that problem for a second. Okay, now how about this:

You have been hired as a bouncer in a bar and you must enforce the following rule: If a person is drinking a beer, he or she must be over twenty-one years old. The cards below represent four people at the bar. One of the cards says what the person is drinking, and the other side of the card says how old the person is. Which cards do you have to turn over to ensure that the rule has been enforced?

The correct answer for the first problem is D and 7. For the second one, it’s 20 and Beer. In terms of their logical structure, both problems are identical. But which one was easier to solve? If you’re like most people, your answer will be the second one, and the reason for that is because it emulates familiar social conventions, and so appeals to the contextual nature of cognition. The first problem, on the other hand, is harder because it consists of nothing but raw data. Devoid of any meaningful connection to lived experience, it exists in a vacuum outside the world in which our brains have evolved to function.

To steal an analogy from Gee, asking people to learn and think in abstractions of this sort is like trying to learn how to play a videogame just by reading the manual. Yes, you can understand the words and you might have a general idea of what you’re supposed to do, but unless you can marry that information to experience – either with the game itself or another game like it – then you might as well be reading the phone book for all the good it’s going to do you.

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