Adults often blame video games for the faults of today’s youth rather than learning from video games to interact with and teach children and adolescents. Video-game designers are masters of neuroscience, psychology, and storytelling, whereas other activities trend away from these disciplines.
Video games develop fluid intelligence or the intelligence used to solve problems through five pathways:
1.Seek novelty.
2.Challenge yourself.
3.Think creatively.
4.Do things the hard way.
5.Network.
(Kuszewski, 2011)
Coaches want to force more effort or attention out of players, often with threats of punishment, as opposed to embracing these same pathways. Video games are games in the same way as sports, but our formal competitions change the game or the play into structured, adult-centered activities. We strip away the very things attracting people to games or sports, then blame players for being disinterested or unmotivated instead of accepting our role in the changing environment.
Sports should provide novel experiences, challenges, creativity, the hard way, and social experiences, but many team environments ignore or suppress these. The biggest complaint when I speak to former players at NCAA D1, NCAA D2, or NAIA programs is boring practices. They do the same things, the same drills, every day. Without knowing their coach’s name, I can describe roughly 90% of an average practice because so many coaches run practices so similarly. Every college practice I have watched is a version of the same practice, even with teams who play different styles and have different strengths and weaknesses.
Coaches argue repetitive practices are necessary, and players must embrace the grind, but boredom directly affects learning, which is the general purpose of practice. “Boredom is a mismatch between an individual’s needed intellectual arousal and the availability of external stimulation” (Willis, 2014). The brain responds by creating a generalized prejudice against the activities, impairing performance, when repeatedly experiencing stressful boredom (Willis, 2014; Eastwood, Frischen, Fenske, & Smilek, 2012).
Relevance increases engagement and reduces boredom when instruction is related to their interests or needed to achieve a desired goal (Willis, 2014). Therefore, coaches do not necessarily have to eliminate their boring, repetitive drills, but they must insure their players understand the relevance to the players’ interests and goals. Players who complain about boring practices often reference the lack of relevance; it is not just doing the same drills every day, but doing the same drills that are unrelated to the game.
Video games produce pleasure, a dopamine effect that fuels intrinsic reinforcement (Willis, 2014). “Novelty triggers dopamine, which not only kicks motivation into high gear, but it stimulates neurogenesis — the creation of new neurons — and prepares your brain for learning” (Kuszewski, 2011). Video games provide a continuous process of learning and are always evolving (Zichermann, 2011).
Sports should provide the same; pickup games, for instance, provide this experience, as each game, each possession, each opponent differ. Players play and learn and the dopamine spurs intrinsic motivation to continue, while priming the brain to learn. Few practices incorporate this novelty, and the boredom suppresses learning. We ignore the important lessons from neuroscience, psychology, and video games, and follow the industrial model for memorizing simple tasks. Playing a game is complex, and repetitive tasks and memorization do not provide the best learning environment.
Coaches rely on the myth of muscle memory, arguing players need hundreds of thousands of repetitions to perfect a technique, skill, or play. The value is in the learning or the process to improve; once players master the activity, move to the next challenging activity (Kuszewski, 2011).
I have written about this with regards to two-ball drills. Learning a novel task and overcoming the challenge stimulates the brain. Once players learn the task, and there is no more challenge, the brain does not work as hard; it gets lazy. The brain is more efficient, and efficiency is not a player’s friend when trying to improve (Kuszewski, 2011). To keep one’s brain making new connections, move to another challenging activity as soon as the point of mastery in the current activity is reached (Kuszewski, 2011). As soon as players can dribble two balls simultaneously, move to an alternating pattern rather than more and more of the same simultaneous pattern. The growth is in reaching the point of mastery, not repeating that point over and over.
Coaches often spend a lot of time limiting players rather than promoting or expecting creative thinking. Coaches prefer predictable, safe plays. Often, they rely heavily on structured, preplanned actions and decisions, and prohibit players from thinking or exploring. I imagine I am one of the few coaches who sees a player commit a turnover on a fast-break and demonstrates to the player that he should have tried a behind-the-back pass instead of the simpler hook pass.
How much creative thinking is allowed when coaches call plays on every possession and/or substitute for players whenever they make a mistake? I attended a college game last week, and the coaches instructed constantly: Defensive coach calling the play, the upcoming action, the coverage, and more as the play occurred, and the offensive coach calling the play, yelling at players to pass, to go, to shoot, and more. Forget thinking creatively; how can players perform in this environment? How different is this environment than a pickup game where players must pick up on cues and the read the game on their own and there is no punishment for a missed shot or pass?
Coaches favor efficiency over effectiveness. Coaches embrace shooting machines to maximize repetitions. However, what is lost when moving away from the hard way to do shooting drills to a shooting machine? Is the connection between a player and machine the same as the one between two players? Do players learn to anticipate rebounds when the machine captures the misses? Do players learn to shoot from different types and locations of passes? Should we prefer a few extra repetitions to the lost connections, disassociation from the rebounds, and lack of variety in the passes?
Sports are a social activity; networking with people of different backgrounds should be a strength of sports. I played pickup games with guys from different high schools, junior-college players, and construction workers at the park near my house in high school. My high-school cross country coach chased away a few girls who knocked on our hotel-room door the night before a race, saying, “We are here to win, not to fraternize with other teams.” Of course, as students at an all-boys high school, many of us ran cross country in the fall of our freshmen year expressly to meet new people, girls included. How many youth team coaches admonish children for talking in line? Playing with and against different people provides different learning experiences, on and off the court.
How can coaches embrace these five pathways toward greater fluid intelligence? How can coaches create novel experiences, embrace creative thinking, challenge players, do things the hard way, and network?
Adults tend to imagine that players want the easy way or do not like hard work, but often it is a disdain for boredom, not effort. The players I referenced with complaints about boring practices in college just ran a marathon, work as a personal trainer, posted a video of long-distance cross-country skiing yesterday, and more. They were not afraid of running or hard work. They actually loved to train and be in the gym; one said a perfect birthday would be in the gym shooting.
They disliked monotony, the lack of challenge, the inability to think creatively or do hard things. Their practices shut off their brains and left some of the most motivated, basketball-loving players bored, and rather than examining the practice environment, their coaches resorted to more running and longer practices, doubling-down on the boredom.
Every single drill does not have to fit all five of these pathways, but if we want motivated players who continue to learn and improve, we should attempt to hit all five in every practice, or we will watch more and more children quit sports to play video games, especially as VR improves.
References
Eastwood, J., Frischen, A., Fenske, M., & Smilek, D. (2012). The unengaged mind: Defining boredom in terms of attention perspectives on psychological science. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 7(5), 482-95.
Kuszewski, A. (2011). You can increase your intelligence: 5 ways to maximize your cognitive potential. Scientific American, 7, 1-8.
Willis, J. (2014). Neuroscience reveals that boredom hurts. Phi Delta Kappan, 95(8), 28-32.
Zichermann, G. (2011). Gamification. TEDxKids@Brussels, June 9.
Whenever I’m asked why I don’t have my players run wind sprints or suicides, I answer that I have never once had to yell “HUSTLE!” at a kid playing tag. In fact, they go harder at tag, it works the same skills (and more), and they’d do it for the whole hour if I let them. Try that with suicides.