Since 2016, the Game Learners Project has been dedicated to sharing video game benefits as highlighted in relevant academic research. Our goal is to enhance the public’s understanding of the positive effects and long-term benefits of gameplay. To achieve this, we reviewed hundreds of research papers to create a taxonomy that categorizes games by genre and highlights their unique benefits.
Our full taxonomy is integrated into an application that enables you to search for and explore the benefits of specific video games. The app also features a scoring system, also derived from our taxonomy, that ranks games according to their positive impact.
Additionally, we have authored a supporting research paper that provides a detailed explanation of how our taxonomy underpins the scoring system and its role in evaluating and ranking games. We extend our gratitude to the researchers whose work has been instrumental in shaping this project and enhancing our insights.
Reading Ability: Playing action video games improve attentional skills, which benefit reading speed and improve the reading skills in dyslexic children.
Attention: Action video games can enhance the gamer’s useful field of view and leads to faster recovery from the attentional blink.
Aptitude: Action video games have extremely effective reinforcement and reward scheduling.
Reaction Time: Action video games allow the gamer to see what is occurring in the game and react.
Hand Eye Coordination: Most reactions that are required in action video games occur via the hands and opposable thumbs.
Visual Processing: Action video games can increase the spatial resolution of visual processing across a visual field.
Visuomotor Control: Action video games improve the responsiveness of the sensorimotor system to input error signals.
Social Awareness: Some indie video games cover the holistic and accurate portrayals of the physical limitations of human beings.
Spatial Thinking: Indie video games require gamers to simultaneously transform the environment, the objects in the environment, and one’s egocentric reference frames, illustrating the complex nature intrinsic to video game spaces.
Self-Efficacy: Game-playing resulted in significant gains in factual information and in the gamer’s perceptions of their ability to successfully negotiate and implement practices.
Story Telling: The game world is usually like a story, in which the gamer plays a character, moves through the story solving problems and interacting with other non-player characters (NCPs) and objects in the game world.
Technical Education: Topics that require knowledge of abstract concepts and mastery of advanced problem-solving skills (e.g. chemistry & physics) can be learned because an adventure environment can immerse the gamer in the subject matter in a way that is often impossible in the real world.
Problem Solving: Gamers must use general problem-solving skills like inferring, monitoring, and deductive reasoning when playing adventure games
Language: As gamers play an adventure game, they develop important skills such as spelling, reading comprehension, critical thinking, and creativity.
Socialization: Adventure games foster cooperative work among gamers as the goal is not necessarily to complete, but to problem solve.
Foreign Language: RPGs require a lot of reading (and comprehension) in order to play them well, entail a focus on meaning/urgency (while real-world consequences are diminished), and contain very complex feedback and reward mechanisms.
Socialization: RPGs are language centered communication games.
Therapy: Some games allow for the opportunity for users to explore their mental dungeons and slay their psychic dragons.
Politics: Games contain elements of military strategy, the politics of conflict, or the dynamics of modern counter-insurgency operations.
Drama: Some RPGs contain gameplay that mirror drama activities that explore character, narrative, situation, etc.
Negotiation: RPGs put gamers in close to real situations just as well as good communication tools.
Learning: RPGs require gamers to act together and in a coordinated fashion to succeed at the proposed challenges, which aids the social construction of knowledge.
History: RPGs could support deeper learning and discussion, and also pique gamers’ interest in a topic, leading to higher-level thinking both in and outside the classroom.
Critical Thinking: RPG’s encourage positive feelings by reducing the magnitude of any failure (by leaving several possible solutions, not just one – or even by a possibility to restart or load a game that did not go well).
Cognitive Flexibility: The emphasis on active maintenance of many different units, each having its own timing hierarchy and schedule in these games is found to help combat age-related declines in cognitive abilities
Attention: Games involve meaningful hand movements and intelligent control of the game’s view-screen in order to see and act.
Perception: Games involve meaningful hand movements and intelligent control of the game’s view-screen in order to see and act.
Decision Making: Games involve meaningful hand movements and intelligent control of the game’s view-screen in order to see and act.
Visuomotor control: Games involve meaningful hand movements and intelligent control of the game’s view-screen in order to see and act.
Attention: Shooter video games have an emphasis on discrimination and rapid visual information processing, and the need to monitor the entire screen.
Memory: FPS games are associated with enhanced flexible updating of task-relevant information without affecting impulsivity.
Action Control: Gamers develop different action control strategies to rapidly react to fast moving visual and auditory stimuli, and to flexibly adapt their behaviour to the ever-changing context.
Socialization: Gamers create and maintain social relationships to maximize the social enjoyment of play, rather than just to win the game.
Socialization: Some casual video games provide important social connections for gamers, and a chance to connect with other people in their social network.
Memory: Some games have sound effects turned on, which allow gamers to experience reinforcement for making memory matches (e.g. music getting louder and faster as the player’s performance improves).
Visual Processing: Timed games that have a matching function promote visual search and reaction time.
Relaxation: Casual video games can improve your mood, induce physical relation and cause you to experience improvements in autonomic nervous system functioning.
Physical Health: Casual exergames are engaging, require little overheat to set up or time comment to play and can motivate gamers to exercise in short bursts multiple times a day.
Focus: Since temporary improvement in concentration can result from exercise, exergames can produce similar levels as treadmill exercise and is perceived as more fun.
Attention: Several tasks in casual games may involve working memory and reasoning demands in several fast-faced situations.
Behavior Change: Casual video games enforce a real time feedback loop with small investments that encourages gamers towards both short and long term behavior changes.
Improved Performance: Simulation video games provide a transfer of learning that results in improved performance by allowing gamers to experience phenomena which could be dangerous, expensive or impossible to observe in the real world.
Learning: Simulation video games are simplifications of real-world phenomena, they facilitate learning by omitting what would otherwise by distracting elements in a real-world situation.
Problem Solving: Simulation video games often use problem-based learning methods that stimulate gamers to immerse themselves in problematic situations and experiment with different approaches.
Business: Some simulation video games provide a live case experience where gamers can uncover the value of doing business in an integrated manner.
Adaptive Thinking: Gamers may learn from contextual information embedded in the dynamics of the game, and through the risks, benefits, costs, outcomes, and rewards of alternative strategies that result from decision making.
Exercise: Some simulation game intensity meets the minimum American College of Sports Medicine recommendations on the quantity and quality of exercise for developing and maintaining cardiorespiratory fitness.
Collaboration: Puzzle video games have shown to have a positive effect on collaboration.
Critical Thinking: Puzzle video games can help gamers grow in making deductions, recognizing assumptions and interpretations.
Math: Puzzle video games that feature arithmetic promote collaborative learning which is shown to enhance learning effectiveness.
Executive Function: Puzzle video games frequently demand the user to strategize, plan and reframe.
Response Time: Gamers had faster response times after 35 hours of an arcade video game compared to a no-practice control.
WAIS IQ: Gamers had a higher WAIS IQs after playing an arcade video game compared to a no-game control.
Health: Interactive arcade video games that require physical activity to play can be utilized as part of an overall aerobic exercise program.
Aptitude: Arcade video games may use immerse learning experience, such as virtual reality, that could help gamers improve knowledge.
Musical Perception: Gamers playing arcade video games that involve music show a generally high musical perception aptitude as it increases skills measured in other subtasks, but not tuning.
Math: By completing one of the classic platform video games and navigating through brick structures, you are actually doing the equivalent of solving complicated mathematical equations.
Foreign Language: Platformer video games are suitable for gamers to learn a new language.
Aptitude: Platformer video games provide dynamic content, and a unique environment that can maintain engagement in users.
Desire: Playing platformer video games can be linked to a significant gray matter increase in right hippocampal formation, right dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) and bilateral cerebellum which correlates with a gamer’s desire to play the game.
Musical Recognition: Some platformer video games have repetition and variation of musical scores throughout the game.
Lateral Thinking: Platformer video games may feature puzzles that can be solved with alternative solutions.
Math: Racing video games, with arithmetic drills built in, are effective tools as the gaming elements provide a sense of enjoyment to participants.
Mental Rotation: Racing video games could provide the practice needed to improve performance on mental rotation tasks.
Motor Skills: Racing video games are re-creations of racing events.
Surgical Skills: Your aptitude in some racing games can predict your level of laparoscopic skills and even improve it slightly.
Health: Interactive sports video games can have greater improvements in health-related physical fitness than that seen after traditional cycle exercise training.
Sports Involvement: Sports video games can combat sports attrition during adolescent periods of development as well as promote interest in sports.
Self Esteem: Sport video games provide a safe environment for adolescents to develop sport related skills and knowledge and experience the thrill of victory,
Sport Skills: If gamers are engaged in learning skill strategy in the game (e.g. golf and putting), they can make progress with that skill.
Foreign Language: MMORPGs provide valuable opportunities for vocabulary acquisition and the development of communicative competence.
Socialization: MMORPGs were found to be highly socially interactive environments providing the opportunity to create strong friendships and emotional relationships
Problem Solving: Gamers in MMORPGs have to devise a plan, ask for help, and collaborate with others in order to come to a solution to a given quest.
Information Literacy: Individual and collective information literacy in MMORPGs is essential in order for a gamer to solve the many challenges presented in game.
Technology: MMORGs’ inherent motivational elements can engage and maintain gamers’ attention and diminish their technology anxiety.
Teamwork: MMORGs’ could create a problem-based learning environment for gamers to learn teamwork skills.
Family Satisfaction: The more frequently family members play video games together, the more family satisfaction and family closeness they have.
Family Closeness: The more frequently family members play video games together, the more family satisfaction and family closeness they have.
Relaxation: There is an association between co-playing of video games and lowered internalizing (e.g., depression/anxiety) and aggressive behavior.
Socialization: Gamer’s who co-play with their parents reported more prosocial behavior toward family members.
Health: Some fighting video games allow gamers to control a character while exercising.
Visuomotor Control: Gamers have enhanced ability in sequence learning which can be generalized to the learning of arbitrary spatiotemporal structures of visual-motor behaviors.
Martial Arts: Some 3D fighting video games are influenced by martial arts and can help grow interest in its gamers to learn martial arts.
Socialization: Fighting video games are largely a shared experience that serves as a connection between friends and strangers by allowing gamers to compete against each other.
Grammer: Using a board game as a supplement to a text book allowed gamers to be motivated to learn grammar as they believe that board games are an interesting and useful method to be used in the classroom.
Algorithm: Board games can motivate gamers to learn the concept of minimum spanning tree algorithms.
Socialization: Board games have been found to increase social interaction and provide an enjoyable, seamless experience.
Law: Games such as Clue, Battleship, Mastermind, Pictionary, Scattergories, Scrabble, Monopoly, Risk and Boggle can teach gamers skills such as strategy, communication, language arts, vocabulary and negotiation, which are all beneficial for a profession such as a corporate trial attorney.
Information Literacy: Games can be made to provide a pervasive and unobtrusive presence beside the online tools games use to research, write and document a writing assignment.
Aptitude: Games allow gamers to experience novelty, curiosity and challenge.
Goals: Games can assist gamers in setting goals, ensuring goals rehearsal, providing reinforcement and maintaining records of behavioral change.
Science: Concept mapping integrated as part of the gaming scenarios helps gamers organize what they have learned throughout the game-based learning process, which improves gamers’ achievement and decreases their cognitive load.
Academic Achievement: These games can help stimulate a gamer’s characteristics, arouse interest and intrinsic motivation.
Numerical Identification: Gamers who played numerical card games improved their symbolic magnitude comparison skills and numerical identification skills.
Science: Some card games can offer real factual information about science subjects that can be used as the basis for classroom discussions and project work.
Discussion: Games, with their experiential and motivational features, provide a vehicle by which to engage gamers in conversations to facilitate the explicit teaching of conversational skills and address the lack of authentic conversation strategies in textbooks.
Socialization: Physical games can create social environments, which can fosters interaction discussion of ideas encountered.
Foreign Language : Since card games are highly customizable, and they have high replay value, they have an advantage over narrow domain dialogue systems to make a meaningful impact on language education.