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Hi, this is Ray.

Quick confession. There was a period in my early thirties when I tried to learn financial accounting because my business was growing and I'd realized my ignorance about how money actually flowed through a company was becoming a liability. I bought textbooks. I took online courses. I made flashcards. After three months of these conventional approaches, I had absorbed approximately nothing. The concepts wouldn't stick. The vocabulary felt slippery. The whole subject lived behind a veil of "this is boring and I can't make myself care."

Then someone recommended a board game called "Cashflow," designed specifically to teach personal financial concepts through gameplay. I bought it with low expectations. Three sessions of playing it later, I understood balance sheets in a way that the textbooks had completely failed to convey. Not because the game was secretly a textbook in disguise. Because the game forced me to actually USE the concepts in a context where my decisions had consequences, where I could see my financial position change based on what I did, where understanding the principles produced better outcomes than guessing. The accounting that the textbooks had failed to teach me, the game taught me without me realizing it was happening.

This experience pointed at something I hadn't fully understood about how learning works. For certain kinds of material, a well-designed game isn't a less serious version of education. It's a more effective one. The interactive structure of a game can produce engagement and understanding that conventional approaches can't match, when the material is right and the game is well-designed. The research on this has been growing more solid over the past two decades, and the picture that emerges is more interesting than either the enthusiasts or the skeptics typically present.

Today's newsletter is about that. The research on serious games (games specifically designed to teach) and what they actually do for learning. Why some educational games work brilliantly and others fail completely. And how to use them in your own learning without either dismissing them as toys or overhyping them as magic. Let's get into it.

Let me start with the data, because the honest picture is more nuanced than the marketing on either side suggests.

A comprehensive review of serious games and game-based learning found a consistent pattern across many studies. According to the researchers, the reviewed empirical findings indicate a strong effect of serious games and game-based learning on learner motivation, affect, and cognitive outcomes. However, the direction of their impact is not always straightforward as it depends on the interplay of conditions including the game type, design features, learner characteristics, and learning activities. The headline finding: serious games work. The caveat: they work conditionally. The same game produces different outcomes for different learners, for different content, in different contexts. There isn't a single magic effect that applies to all situations. There's a real effect that materializes when conditions align.

A systematic review specifically looking at primary education found striking patterns. According to the researchers, serious games have a positive impact on cognition and generate significant learning achievements. The game-based learning strategy concentrates a high level of motivation, generated by the interest, commitment and fun to solve the activities. This is the dual benefit that makes serious games particularly interesting… they hit both cognitive and motivational outcomes simultaneously. Conventional instruction often produces one without the other. Serious games, when designed well, can produce both.

A 2024 university-level study examining serious games for financial education and patient safety preparation found measurable benefits across multiple dimensions. According to the researchers, these types of active method are an effective tool in financial education and learning about the stock market. These methods also enhance preparation for patient safety, with students experiencing enhancements in both their motivation and their abilities in creativity and critical thinking. The benefits weren't just in retention of specific information. They extended to higher-order cognitive skills like creativity and critical thinking… the kinds of capabilities that pure information delivery often fails to develop.

The honest caveat the research emphasizes: the effects depend heavily on game design quality and how the game is integrated into broader learning. As the primary education review noted, it was also observed that competition among students to reach the highest competencies can increase the level of anxiety, and inadequate methodology and teacher unfamiliarity can cause negative effects. Bad implementations can produce bad outcomes. The technology isn't magical. The design and integration matter enormously.

Let me get specific about why a well-designed game can sometimes outperform conventional instruction. The mechanisms matter because they tell you when games are likely to be the right tool and when they're not.

Decisions with consequences. Games create situations where you have to make choices and then see what happens. The decision matters. The outcome teaches. This is fundamentally different from reading about something, where the information flows in one direction and you don't have to do anything with it. Tycho Brahe didn't learn astronomy by reading Ptolemy. He learned by making observations and being wrong and adjusting. Games can recreate this learning-by-deciding structure in domains where actually doing the thing in reality would be impractical, expensive, or dangerous.

Immediate feedback loops. When you make a decision in a game, you find out quickly whether it worked. This compressed feedback cycle is exactly what learning needs to happen efficiently. As I covered in the dopamine newsletter, the brain's learning machinery runs on prediction errors… when reality differs from your expectation, the brain updates. Games optimize for this by providing many fast prediction-error opportunities. Conventional reading provides almost none. This is part of why some skills that seem to defy textbook learning yield easily to game-based learning… the textbook is starving the brain's learning machinery of the signals it needs.

Embodied understanding. When you play a game about financial concepts, you don't just know that "debt has costs"… you feel it when your character's debt eats their cashflow. This embodied understanding tends to be much more durable than purely intellectual understanding. The principle has shifted from abstract knowledge to lived experience, even though the experience was simulated. Star Wars fans might recognize this from Luke's training… Yoda didn't just lecture him about the Force. He set up situations where Luke had to feel the Force in action. The doing was the teaching.

Active engagement. Reading is mostly passive. Watching lectures is mostly passive. Games require active participation by definition… you can't play without engaging. The level of engagement is often dramatically higher than equivalent time spent in conventional study. According to one analysis, serious games and game-based learning produce strong effects on learner motivation and engagement, which then mediate cognitive outcomes. The engagement isn't decorative. It's what drives the cognitive learning.

Safe failure. Games provide a context where failure is okay. You can try things, get them wrong, and try again. In real-world contexts where the consequences of failure are larger, learners often avoid the kind of bold experimentation that produces real growth. In a game, the safety lets you actually push, fail, adjust, and learn. This is closer to what happens in a tabletop RPG when your party fails to defeat the boss and learns better tactics for next time, versus what happens in real life when failure carries lasting cost.

The research is fairly clear about what kinds of learning are best supported by games and what kinds aren't. Knowing the difference helps you choose the right tool.

Games work well for:

Games work less well for:

Different kinds of educational games work through different mechanisms. Worth knowing the landscape so you can pick what fits your situation.

Simulation games. Games that model real-world systems… economic, political, ecological, mechanical. Civilization for history and strategy. SimCity for urban planning concepts. Kerbal Space Program for physics and engineering. These let you experiment with system dynamics in ways that pure study can't match.

Strategic decision games. Games where you face choices with consequences and have to learn from outcomes. Cashflow for financial concepts. Settlers of Catan for resource management and negotiation. Many tabletop RPGs for ethics and decision-making under uncertainty.

Skill-practice games. Games designed to provide focused practice on specific skills. Brilliant for math and logic. Khan Academy's gamified exercises. Duolingo for languages. These tend to provide structured progression with feedback at every step.

Narrative learning games. Games where the story carries the learning content. Many history games use this structure… you learn historical periods by experiencing simulated versions of them. Some health-education games use narrative to teach difficult content like managing chronic illness.

Multiplayer collaborative games. Games that teach through requiring cooperation. Pandemic for understanding epidemiology and collective action problems. Many escape rooms (physical or virtual) for team problem-solving practice.

Casual mobile educational games. Easy to access, low time commitment. Often less effective for deep learning but useful for habit-building and bite-sized review.

Each category has its strengths. Matching the type of game to what you're trying to learn matters as much as the quality of any specific game.

Okay, the practical part. Based on the research and on my own experimentation, here's how to actually use serious games for your own learning.

Pick a real learning goal first. The temptation is to find a fun game and call it learning. The better approach is to identify what you actually want to learn, then find games that target that. The accounting I learned through Cashflow worked because I had a real motivation to understand financial flow. Without that goal, the game would have been just entertainment.

Combine games with conventional study. Games rarely produce complete learning on their own. They're most powerful when combined with reading, practice, or instruction that fills in what the game can't teach. The game produces the engagement and the embodied understanding. The conventional study fills in the depth and the precision. Together they outperform either alone.

Treat games like training, not entertainment. When you're using a game for learning, approach it deliberately. Take notes on what you're learning. Reflect on what specific concepts the game is teaching. Connect the game mechanics to the real-world principles they're modeling. Without this deliberate engagement, the learning can stay implicit and not transfer to other contexts.

Don't be embarrassed by games that look childish. Some of the most effective educational games look like simple kid games. The aesthetic isn't the point. The learning structure is. Adults can absolutely learn from games designed for children if the underlying mechanics teach what you need to learn. The cultural pressure to use "adult" learning tools often pushes people toward less effective options.

Look for games with active communities. Games with engaged communities of learners often produce better outcomes than games played alone. The community provides discussion, advanced strategies, and the social motivation that helps sustain engagement. Online communities for strategic board games, for example, often function as informal continuing education.

Be skeptical of games that promise too much. Some "educational games" are mostly marketing… shallow gameplay grafted onto curriculum content with little real integration. These tend to produce neither the engagement of good games nor the learning of good instruction. Look for games with serious design behind them, ideally with research support for their effectiveness.

Try multiple games in the same domain. Different games will surface different aspects of the same content. Playing several games about a topic (each emphasizing different mechanics or concepts) often produces broader understanding than playing one game intensively.

Accept that engagement varies. Some educational games will click for you immediately. Others won't, no matter how well-designed they are. This is normal… learning preferences are personal. If a game isn't producing engagement after a few sessions, try a different one rather than forcing yourself through one that isn't working.

A few honest caveats, because educational games have been oversold in some quarters.

They don't replace real practice. Playing a game about medicine isn't the same as practicing medicine. Playing a game about negotiation isn't the same as negotiating. The game can prepare you and build foundational understanding, but it's not equivalent to actual practice in real contexts.

They don't work for all learners equally. As one comprehensive review noted, the impact depends on the interplay of conditions including the game type, design features, learner characteristics, and learning activities. Some learners click with game-based learning. Others don't. If you've tried educational games and found them not particularly effective for you, that's information about your learning preferences, not evidence that the approach is universally bad.

They take time to find the good ones. The educational game market has a lot of mediocre products. Finding genuinely good games takes some searching. Don't conclude that "educational games don't work" based on one bad experience with one mediocre game.

They can't substitute for foundations. Like all the other techniques I've covered in this newsletter series, educational games sit on top of sleep, nutrition, attention, and the other foundations. The depleted learner doesn't extract good learning from anything, including games.

Here's what I want you to take from all this. The cultural framing of games as fundamentally separate from "real" learning is wrong in a specific way. For certain kinds of material (and they're more kinds than most people realize) well-designed games are not less serious than conventional instruction. They're more effective. They provide decision-feedback-adjustment cycles that books can't match. They produce embodied understanding that abstract study can't reach. They generate engagement that pure instruction often fails to produce.

The trick is matching the game to the material. Some things are best learned through reading. Some through doing. Some through structured games that compress doing into accessible forms. The skilled learner has multiple tools and uses each for what it's good at, rather than insisting on one approach for everything.

If you've been struggling with a topic that resists conventional study, please consider that the right educational game might unlock it in ways the textbook can't. The materials in this category have gotten dramatically better over the past two decades. Worth exploring what's available in your specific area of interest before assuming the topic is just hard to learn.

You're not being childish for using games. You're using a teaching technology that often outperforms more "respectable" alternatives. The respectability isn't what teaches. The engagement and the structure are. Whichever medium provides those for your specific situation is the right medium to use.

In One Piece, Luffy doesn't learn to be a captain by reading captain manuals. He learns by being on the Going Merry, making decisions, facing consequences, watching his crew grow through their own decisions. The journey is the curriculum. Games can give you a compressed version of that (decisions, consequences, growth) in domains where the actual journey would be impractical to take. Use them when they fit. Skip them when they don't. The whole library of learning tools is bigger than the conventional ones, and you don't have to choose between them.

Keep learning (and keep playing the right games),

Ray