GameWise: Fostering Wisdom Through Video Games

We live in a world that urgently needs wisdom to deal with ongoing crises. Educational systems, however, have tended to prioritize knowledge and cognition over aspects of wise problem-solving, such as dealing with difficult conflicts or making complex moral decisions. Video games may open up a completely new and broadly attractive approach to fostering wisdom. Many contemporary video games immerse players in complex life challenges and decisions (outside any situations they are likely to ever encounter in their own lives), encouraging them to take unfamiliar perspectives and to reflect on existential questions. Can people gain wisdom-relevant insights and skills from playing video games that they can then draw upon in real life? Research suggests that wisdom can best be fostered through interventions that are contextualized, emotionally intense, and personally meaningful to participants. This project tests the hypothesis that experiences in video games can be sufficiently emotionally intense and personally meaningful to foster wisdom-related capacities that are relevant for real life. According to a pilot study from our lab, such learning experiences are quite frequent; many participants reported gaining insights about themselves, interpersonal relationships, or life in general from playing video games. In an interdisciplinary collaboration of researchers from the fields of wisdom psychology and game studies and engineering, this project investigates whether playing video games can (a) lead to a broad range of life-related insights, (b) activate existing wisdom-related capacities at the state level, and (c) foster wisdom-related capacities sustainably at the trait level. Study 1 is a large-scale survey of the life lessons and insights people report having gained from video games, relating those insights to relevant characteristics of players and games. The other two studies use experimental designs to test whether wisdom-related capacities can be fostered through video games. Study 2 investigates the potential of short-term video games, some of which will be developed in a game jam in the context of the project, to activate peoples existing wisdom-related capacities (such as openness, empathy, or self-reflection) on the state level. Study 3 tests whether playing relevant commercial full-scale video games over an extended period of time can foster wisdom-related capacities on the trait level, with effects that are maintained over at least six months and show transfer to real-life challenges. In sum, the project explores the potential of video games as a new, attractive route for fostering wisdom in a broad and diverse audience an important goal in a time in which other popular media tend to fuel non-wisdom through polarization and radicalization.