What gaming, learning and happiness have in common

There are two elementary skills governing our knowledge-based society.

Firstly: learning.
Secondly: practising the acquired knowledge usefully.

The one learning style that has proven most successful over thousands of years can be observed when watching a toddler: We learn by playing.
And the good thing about this is that we play, and therefore learn, voluntarily!

Modern brain research shows the following: When we learn new things, and in doing so successfully master tasks, the human brain releases happiness hormones. So happiness is a brain function rewarding learning! Ingenious, in fact: We like playing because we are learning at the same time! Or the other way round: Learning makes us happy because we are doing it while playing!

This insight has special meaning in our ever more complex world. The success of more comprehensive and more complicated entertainment formats during the last couple of years supports this theory, and it seems that the best way to learn how to cope with the complexity of the modern world is by playing games.

Digitalisation and networking have further evolved the quality of gaming. Nowadays it is possible for hundreds of thousands of people to game online and the borders between virtuality and reality are more and more done away with. Just think of the gaming platform Wii where players also need to be physically active.

So playing is the most natural and most human way of learning new things, whether the context is protecting the environment, handling money, history, geography, behaviour or new products and services. That's why ovos makes the game what it originally used to be for us (and our brain): The most effective means of learning for life.