Maximizing the potential of digital games for understanding skill acquisition

Abstract

Gamers invest many hours exploring digital environments in which simple rules can generate a complex space of action, response and interaction with other players. As well as being an industry with greater revenue than the global music and film industries combined, gaming is also a domain of profound skill development. Players' digital traces create an opportunity to understand the development of expertise from novice to professional-levels of skill, across the entire history of their practice, exploring how individual differences, practice style and other factors interact to enhance or impede skill acquisition. We review existing research into skill development using data from digital games and show how game data has been used to confirm, challenge and extend existing claims about the psychology of expertise. We show that game data allows novel analyses and offer recommendations for the future of research into learning using games. We argue that existing work, while exciting, has yet to take advantage of the potential of game data for understanding skill acquisition, and that to fully do so will require computational accounts of complete game performance, at the level of the individual, tied to a cognitive theory of skill and backed by experimental rather than observational studies.

Long-term Motor Learning in the Wild with High Volume Video Game Data

“…The future of studying motor learning through video games is promising (Anguera et al, 2013;Chen et al, 2018;Stafford & Dewar, 2014;Stafford & Vaci, 2021;. Gaming provides a unique medium to investigate how motor skills are developed through intrinsic motivation, rather than financial incentive.…”

“…Online video game platforms, in particular, provide an unprecedented opportunity to reach more than 400 million intrinsically motivated people who voluntarily hone their cognitive and motor skills over weeks, months and even years (Eichenbaum et al, 2014;Green & Bavelier, 2003). Specifically, first person shooter games, where players use tools and weapons as intuitive extensions of themselves in a virtual 3D environment, provide an ideal testbed for studying motor skill acquisition over a long duration of practice (Stafford & Vaci, 2021). Successful shooters are those who can efficiently identify and localize relevant visual targets (Green & Bavelier, 2006), as well as rapidly and accurately hit their targets -a refined motor skill.…”

Developmental psychologists should adopt citizen science to improve generalization and reproducibility

“…Just as importantly, whereas it can be a struggle to recruit subjects into the laboratory for a half‐hour study, the same people will willingly pay money to spend dozens of hours playing a given game. Psychologists are increasingly using performance on both commercial and custom‐built games to study cognition among adults (Brändle et al, 2021; Coutrot et al, 2022; Stafford & Haasnoot, 2017; Stafford & Vaci, 2021; Steyvers et al, 2019; van Opheusden et al, 2021; Westgate et al, 2015a). For instance, Westgate et al (2015a) studied the cultural accumulation of knowledge by studying 25,060 players in 1 h One Life.…”

Videojuegos y conocimiento intuitivo: la potencialidad de Portal para aprender física

“…La tercera línea comprende la interacción entre videojuegos y procesos o demandas cognitivas asociados al aprendizaje conceptual (Stafford y Vaci, 2022;Young et al, 2012, Tobias y Fletcher, 2007. Gran parte de las investigaciones en este eje analizan funciones cognitivas específicas para medir el aprendizaje: la memoria de trabajo (Lee y Heetert, 2017), la atención (Connolly et al, 2012) y también otro indicador de aprendizaje con videojuegos (Girard et al, 2012) conocido como inmersión o flow (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990).…”