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Most people treat vocabulary the same way. More words in = More words remembered = More words used But the real bottleneck is not exposure, it is attention and repetition. A 2026 open-access paper in ITL, International Journal of Applied Linguistics  (John Benjamins) caught my eye, it looks at whether incidental vocabulary learning can happen through gaming in an extramural (out-of-class) context, and which learner factors predict who benefits most. Suprapas tested this with

You are going to fail. A lot. When you fail (not if you fail), it is important to learn from those mistakes and to fail forward (cheesy teacher line). Roguelike games take this concept and force it upon their players. And the point is not to avoid failure. The point is to get good at learning from it. That is why roguelikes have become one of the my favourite training tools, especially for anyone trying to build adaptability, resilience, and decision-making under uncertainty.

Everybody has a plan until the timer increases it’s pace (or until you get punched in the mouth). When the timer starts screaming at you, suddenly, nobody cares about the perfect solution. Everyone cares about a  solution. Any solution! That is timed gameplay, and it is one of my favourite mechanics in learning design because time pressure does not just make games exciting, it changes the shape  of thinking. It changes what people notice, what they choose, and what they defau

Trust is such a vibe. Culture deck. Values poster. Maybe a workshop where everyone agrees to assume positive intent. Then someone makes one questionable decision on a Tuesday, and the whole thing collapses like my old camping chair. Obviously they didn’t do enough trust falls. On the topic of trust, this research article came across my inbox about how video games develop trust in real-world destinations. Video games! A 2025 study in Administrative Sciences  argues that when a

Yes. At least, I think so. You can tell when a team has creativity because the room gets louder. Not louder in the brainstorming sense, but louder in the "wait, what if we tried this instead" sense. And you can tell when a team does not have it because everything sounds safe. Most workplaces say they want creativity. Then they build systems that punish every early, awkward attempt at it. We ask people to take risks, but we only reward clean wins. We say "think outside the box

You can love Baldur’s Gate 3 and still hate what it does to your team’s decision-making. That is not a contradiction. It is the point. BG3 is a turn-based RPG built on Dungeons and Dragons style rules, but the real magic is not the combat system. It is the constant trade-offs. You are always choosing between speed and safety, between “perfect information” and “good enough,” between short-term wins and the long-term consequences you will absolutely forget about until they expl

Crafting is not “making stuff,” it is complex systems thinking. In games like Minecraft , The Witcher , and Hogwarts Legacy , crafting looks cozy on the surface. Pick flowers, loot ingredients, stash materials, eventually make something useful. But the skill underneath is not cozy. It is the ability to hold a messy system in your head, while you make choices that still make sense hours later. And then you add inventory friction , the Diablo and World of Warcraft problem. Limi

Analytical thinking is still the most in-demand skill, and I wish I could tell you that solves the problem. But it doesn't. The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025  paints a familiar picture. Tech change, climate transition, and economic volatility, plus demographic and geopolitical pressures, all hitting at once. ( World Economic Forum , 2025) If you work in L&D, education, talent, or leadership, the headline takeaway is not “learn AI.” It is “the mix is changi

Teamwork is one of those words that gets used like a lucky charm. Along with "leadership", "prioritizing", and "circle back". We say them in a kickoff meeting, and everyone nods, but then the deadline hits, work gets messy, and suddenly teamwork means, “someone competent will quietly fix this.” That is not teamwork. It turns into a rescue mission and most teams don't have access to a Henry Cavill, Tom Cruise, or Alan Ritchson. Teamwork is what happens when a group can coordin

There’s a certain kind of game that makes you feel clever, not because it flatters you, but because it gives you systems that actually deserve your attention. Historicity: Florence  is in that category. It is not flashy in the “look at my particle effects” way. It is flashy in the “I made it through winter without anybody dying” way. The best thing, for anyone who cares about learning design, is that the game’s historical layer is not just wallpaper. The history shows up as l

If you have ever led a project where half the team is quietly making decisions based on information nobody else has, you already understand fog of war. You just call it “silos,” “politics,” or “that one spreadsheet nobody shares.” The frustrating part is not that people are malicious. It is that people act on what they can see, and most workplaces are full of invisible information. Fog of war and information asymmetry are not just game design tricks. They are practice conditi

Black Myth: Wukong didn’t just sell copies, it sold a feeling, and that feeling got people on planes Most media induced tourism stories are simple, and a bit boring. A show makes a location look cool. People visit. Local businesses cheer. Everyone moves on. Black Myth: Wukong, though, feels different. Not because it is the first game to push players into the real world, Ghost of Tsushima already proved that a game can turn a place into a pilgrimage, but because of the mechani

Collaboration is the skill every org claims to value, and then quietly punishes when deadlines hit. A launch slips, a client escalates, someone “just takes it on” to get it done, and the team calls it efficiency. Nope. It is a coordination failure that got temporarily masked by one competent person burning extra fuel. In my experience, most collaboration problems are not personality problems. They are practice problems . We put people in meetings to talk about teamwork, then

I think you can learn more about someone in their first 15 turns of a Civilization  game than you can in the first few hours of a training workshop. That sounds like gamer nonsense. It is not. Strategy games like Civilization VI  are not “brain training.” They’re better than that. They are complex, messy, human systems that force your brain to do the same work modern jobs demand, planning, prioritizing, updating beliefs, and making trade-offs without complete information. Und

Every December, the Peacock Theater in Los Angeles becomes the center of the gaming universe for one night. Developers in tuxedos, celebrities presenting awards, world premiere trailers dropping between acceptance speeches, and millions of viewers watching from around the world. The Game Awards has become gaming's answer to the Oscars, and this year's show just reminded everyone why that comparison keeps getting made. Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, a debut title from French stu

You're halfway through a Civilization VI match when your advisors are all telling giving you competing advice, there is a hostile civilization to the North, you were late sending an envoy to the newly discovered City State, barbarians killed your escort and stole you settler, your gold reserves are empty, and your citizens are unhappy. That's not just a game problem. That's Tuesday afternoon in most organizations. Games with resource management mechanics are excellent trainin

The Experiment A few months back, I was having coffee with a friend and he was talking about how some of the kids on his son’s baseball team had such a better understanding of baseball because they played MLB’s The Show. He said they had a better understanding of the rules, certain faux-pas-plays, and best practices in certain situations. They couldn’t always execute (I guess that’s the difference between 10-year olds and professional athletes), but they had a better understa

Smart teams make bad calls for simple reasons. Nobody challenges the first decent idea. Assumptions slide through because everyone’s polite and busy. That isn’t a talent gap, it’s a thinking gap. Critical thinking isn’t a lecture topic, it’s a habit you build under pressure, then carry to work when it counts. Organizations know this. Talent leaders report persistent skills gaps, with critical thinking near the top, and the World Economic Forum expects 39% of job skills to shi

You can watch a team's communication skills collapse in real time. One person stares at a bomb covered in wires, buttons, and symbols. Everyone else holds a manual explaining how to defuse it. Nobody can see what the others see. The clock is ticking. Within two minutes, you'll hear the breakdown. "Cut the red wire." "Which red wire?" "The one on the left." "Left of what?" "Just, the red one!" Then the bomb explodes. That's Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes, and it is one of th

Most corporate training starts with a 47-slide PowerPoint deck explaining everything learners need to know before they try anything. Video games? They hand you a controller and say "Jump over that thing." Within 60 seconds, you're moving, making decisions, and learning through doing. Yet the best video game tutorials represent some of the most sophisticated instructional design on the planet, and most learning professionals have never studied them. While L&D teams debate the