The myth that time spent with a gamepad is irrevocably lost has persisted since the era of the first arcade machines. However, as the industry becomes more complex, the opposite becomes increasingly obvious: modern games do not lull the mind to sleep but rather drive the brain along various cognitive tracks.

Video Games as a Literary Trainer

One of the most vivid examples of skill development through gaming is reading. JRPGs from the SNES era, with their endless sheets of dialogue, could well claim the role of a school textbook for the native language. History knows cases where children reached a "black belt" level of reading (university level) by the fifth grade, tormenting adults with questions about the meaning of complex words, learning them using dictionaries right in the middle of gameplay.

A separate category of gamers has even mastered foreign languages not through textbooks, but through subtitles. A bright example is World of Warcraft, around which an entire community formed that learned the language in the process of playing.

If we talk about the volume of text, the figures sound almost absurd:

  • The dialogue in Planescape: Torment surpasses the Bible in word count.
  • The Trails series by Falcom, according to fan estimates, contains ten times more text than the entire "Harry Potter" series and fifteen times more than the Bible.
  • Just the parts Cold Steel 3 and 4 cover the entire wizard cycle in terms of text volume.

Isometric RPGs like Pathfinder, Tyranny, and Pillars of Eternity easily take 150 to 300 hours to complete, most of which the player spends immersed in lore and reading.

Development of Thinking and Spatial Perception

Games train thinking no worse than academic exercises. Puzzle titles such as Portal, The Witness, and Superliminal are built on playing with perspective and force you to turn the perception of space inside out.

The game Pneuma deserves special mention, where the player controls a god-creator of the universe, and a chatty narrator throws philosophical questions between puzzles. The effectiveness of this approach is confirmed by science: a few years ago in Australia, an experiment was conducted where one group of elderly people played Portal, while the second used a "brain training" app. After several weeks, the cognitive tests of the Portal team were higher.

Hidden Skills: From Math to Navigation

There are also less obvious skills that are leveled up in games. Survival sandbox games like Satisfactory, Factorio, Oxygen Not Included, and Dwarf Fortress train math, work cycle planning, patience, and even working with tables. Satisfactory, for example, literally tests the player on all these skills if they decide to dive into factory optimization.

Furthermore, navigating mansions in Resident Evil or the streets of Vice City, according to the personal observations of many gamers, has formed an excellent sense of direction for years.

Engagement is More Important Than the Medium

In debates about the benefits of games, the pendulum often swings too far the other way, declaring cinema and television passive "chewing gum." This is as one-sided a view as the opposite thesis. As one participant in the discussion correctly noted: "How much the viewer just sits and does nothing depends on how much they themselves engage with the content".

An anime, movie, or series can be watched by analyzing themes and applying situations to oneself, or one can stare at the screen without a single thought. The difference is not in the medium, but in whether the brain is switched on.