Transferring Skills from Video Games to Real Life

Is playing video games really a waste of time? How to put your video game skills to good use

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Aug 03, 2025

Our previous post covered some of the skills you and your kid can learn through playing video games, but how can you help these skills transfer to other parts of life? Many times we see that skill learning is very specific to the context. One example is in basketball where practicing free throws does not do a lot to improve your jump shots from other areas of the court.

In vision research, we see that training can be very specific to the part of your field of view that is being trained. In these studies, participants keep their eyes on a central location, then in one spot in their periphery, they practice being able to identify slight differences in tilt, often whether the stimulus is +/- 5 degrees from the base angle of 35 degrees. These studies have shown us that (1) people can actually learn to be really good at this and (2) as soon as you change anything – the base angle or area of vision – the learning disappears.

For a long time we thought that was the full story. If you practice specific skills then you will improve on those skills but transferring that effect to other things, even very similar things, is difficult or impossible. What we know now is that this can be overcome and the key is what you pay attention to while you’re training. Going back to the vision training, researchers found that if you train two different parts of your vision at the same time, using different base angles, your training can transfer from one part to the other, so you’ll improve at discriminating around both base angles in both locations.

We also see this in education. Research into the differences between novices (undergraduate students in their first physics class) and experts (physics professors) in terms of how they understand a set of word problems also helps to illustrate this point. The original research found that when they were asked to categorize physics word problems, undergraduate students would group the problems by the surface details of the problem, but professors would group them based on the methods to solve the problem (Chi et al., 1981). A replication study found that the previous experience of the undergraduate students mattered a lot. Those who had already taken calculus courses were able to group the problems by method while students who had taken algebra courses grouped the problems by surface features (Mason & Sing, 2011).

In both of these examples, one of the key pieces of success is learning to generalize through practicing different versions of the same skill (Raviv et al., 2022). In the vision training, participants trained two different areas of vision and two different angles. In physics, the professors had seen countless examples of these problems and could abstract away the details to understand the nature of the problems. Similarly the students with a calculus background had seen enough similar problems in their calculus courses to recognize the similarities. The students with a background only in algebra, on the other hand, had not seen problems like these before, so they focused on irrelevant details.

Research has also shown that playing action video games makes you better at “learning to learn” (Bavelier & Green, 2024). Action video game players are especially good at controlling their attention, both focusing and spreading out their attention across the screen. This means they are able to pay attention to lots of details and figure out what the important ones are very quickly. Other types of video games are also set up well for learning and transferring skills. Games use the same skills in multiple contexts, often building on abilities you’ve already developed. And multiple games, even in the same genre, will push the player to use skills differently – this makes the games more interesting and helps you learn!

Transferring what your child learns in a video game to real life

Games are designed to keep you engaged, but good games do this through building your intrinsic motivation and challenging you. Games require perseverance and tenacity, cognitive flexibility to think about what you’re trying to accomplish differently, and planning, sometimes several steps out. These are all critical skills for success in school and life, so how can we help our kids transfer these skills from video games to the outside world? Here are two tips:

Draw their attention to a skill in the video game and how it is applied in other places: That homework problem seems really hard? Remember when you faced that really tricky problem in [video game they’ve played]? And you had to keep trying several times before you could get it right? The same thing goes with homework.

Challenge your kid to think of similar situations on their own (with your help): Frustrated with the rest of your group on a group project? How would you handle that kind of problem in one of your games?

The biggest challenge for parents in helping our kids to transfer skills is for us to notice when the same skills are being called for. In order to do this, we need to know a thing or two about what our kids are playing. Sometimes we may need to do some research on these games on our own (highly recommended before introducing a new game!), but a lot of the time, we can actually challenge our kids to think of similar situations. This is an especially good tactic, as it teaches them to think like this on their own in the future! Here’s an example from Ashley’s own life with her 6 y.o., who has been playing games on his Nintendo Switch for about a year and a half now. Whenever he gets really frustrated with a game (but hopefully before he gets so frustrated that he throws the Switch), she reminds him that he has two choices in this moment – he can either take a deep breath and keep trying or take a break. They also remind him of this same choice when he gets frustrated trying to do other things, which is currently when he’s trying to do a “cool trick” as 6 y.o.s love to do (IYKYK) but can’t repeat what he just did. As he gets older and encounters more frustrating situations, we’ll continue to remind him of these choices.

The point here is to start to introduce you to a world in which the skills we learn in video games can be brought to life. This is not to say that video games aren’t just there for pure joy! Sometimes we sit down to play a game so we can relax and do something fun. Not everything needs to be a learning experience. But when it comes to video games, it is important to remember that they are not only engaging and fun but have the added bonus of being extremely useful for success in the outside world.

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