Gaming as a gateway to … education?

Or, as this article puts it: Do first-person shooters make you smarter? The author talks about how playing Call of Duty led to his son actually learning stuff.

His education started in the 6th grade, with him digging online to learn more about the equipment that soldiers used in World War II. He wanted to know about the guns he was using in the games. Then he got interested in squad tactics and specific campaigns, like the Normandy invasion. He began reading Stephen Ambrose’s books about WWII, and eventually read most of them. He watched Band of Brothers on DVD. (The HBO series, based on an Ambrose bestseller and produced by Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg, was a huge influence on the style of all the WWII first-person shooters, so it was natural that a game fan was led back to the original films.) To learn more about the battle of Stalingrad (which is featured in Battlefield: 1942 and the first Call of Duty), he read Antony Beevor’s Stalingrad, along with Vasily Grossman’s A Writer at War (that’s him in the photo). That led to a deeper interest in European and American history which is still blossoming. Suddenly, I had a kid who was devouring lengthy, adult-level books and had become interested in huge swathes of world history. All because of a bunch of video shoot-’em-ups! 

I’m not sure how applicable this is as a general rule. Does playing Doom cause you to research literary depictions of Hell, or the history of the Marine Corps? From an MMO standpoint, does CoX lead you into graphic arts as literature

On the other hand, I had a similar educational arc from my old table-top wargaming days back in junior high and high school. I still know gobs of stuff about WWII, but also WWI, the Napoleonic Era, and other periods. I subscribed to Strategy & Tactics for a while, and you can learn a lot about history from the history of armed conflict (and it’s causes and effects).

Hmmmm … still have a lot of those games down in the basement …