According to Jane McGonigal, who has plenty of research to back her claims, games are excellent learning tools, but the learning is enchanced, when you have an idea what you want to learn. What can we learn from games? Planning, problem-solving, resource management, most importantly self-efficacy and so-forth. Games can also train our memory, reaction times and many other skills.
This is something that’s being actively studied, but the problem is that these studies tend to focus on video games. This is understandable, because you don’t need to organize a game group to study these things and obviously, the market for them is much, much larger than other kinds of games (as evidenced recently by the success of Red Dead Redemption 2).
