GDC: Can Games Make You Smarter?

Can videogames teach? If so, what can they teach, and how fast? More importantly, can we even answer the question? A panel of experts attempted to tackle these issues at the Serious Games Summit.
ImagePerhaps the questions have an obvious answer: the ability to play games does represent a type of intelligence. "We wouldn't want a President who didn't know how to play Poker," said area/code co-founder and creative director Frank Lantz.
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But at the session entitled The Paradox of Play: The Challenge of Measuring What Game Players Learn, there was little consensus and the panel contested nearly every point. Although everyone involved conceded that games do teach, USC Professor and learning expert Richard Wainess stated, "You're going to learn from anything." The question is how the pace at which these things can be taught; if games cannot teach as quickly as traditional teaching methods, why bother with the expense of them?

A further question was brought up: games may be the best possible medium at teaching processes and how to do things, but is it possible to quantify that type of teaching? Wainess said that while everything is quantifiable, to get a thorough scientific understanding of the answer to this question would take time, and that if everyone waits for that data "serious games won't get anywhere."

In the end, perhaps the question of games as teaching tools itself is moot. Lantz said that the questions asked were both "obvious and besides the point," stating that perhaps games should be treated as sublime aesthetic experiences, and that looking at them as measurable teaching tools is ridiculous. After all, he asked, "Did music make Louis Armstrong better at gardening?"

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A nice followup to the bad news thread. Must've been an interesting session. Cost is probably one of the biggest concerns of the whole "serious games" deal, but it's interesting to see what people are making.

Serious games? People shouldn't care for games being "serious", because in that case we would get a Dr. Phill plague. As long as games will be "taken with a bit of salt" (bad translation of a Dutch proverb), things like violence wouldn't be an issue.
So I think it will be better, if games stay "just games".

yep, games are just games. if you think otherwise then you got a problem and should become a politian unless you are one already. in that cse you should retire XD