I'm not sure about learning games, but video games in general have definitely improved my skills in life. Especially when it comes to problem solving and persistence. I tend to work at difficult problems the same way I work on tough levels in games.

I do think many games today don't teach this though. You need to be able to lose. Old games made you lose constantly, you had to learn the patterns and build up your reflexes and coordination. Much of life is actually like this. It's a valuable skill to be able to keep going at something until you get it. I've seen a lot of people just give up on things at the first hint of difficulty, video games taught me not to do that and because of this, i'll push and keep learning skills even when it gets frustrating and not so fun. There's a lot of things I would've given up on if I hadn't learned that the rewards for pushing through are usually worth it.

>Forcing oneself to interact for 30 minutes a day is not feasible. Even if the benefits were are as palpable as actual exercise.

This makes no sense. People exercise for 30 minutes a day, or read, or clean, or play video games, or watch TV, or tend to a garden, or do yoga.

Why are all these feasible but exercising your brain is not?

> Forcing oneself to interact for 30 minutes a day is not feasible.

There is this thing called self-discipline which many of us exercise. Last January I bought a guitar as a complete novice, and 30 minutes a day later I've written over a hundred songs and some of them are quite good.

Sometimes I didn't have 30 minutes a day. That meant an hour the next day, or a few hours over the weekend. It's all about what your goals are, not feasibility.

I can lose hours at very simple games as well, though. I put more hours into .io games than I'd like to admit.

Maybe these games are so far mediocre because there haven't been many made yet, and most creative endeavors are mediocre. It doesn't mean that it's not possible to make an awesome memory-training game.

There have been a few interesting arguments about dual-n-back games. They have been shown with very solid evidence to improve cognitive performance. They are interesting in the beginning but get frustrating/difficult very fast, essentially you always play at a frustrating level where you final frequently. It is somewhat exciting but certainly not addicting/motivating in the sense of Civ or other well-developed 'addicting' games.

One of the theories on why they are effective (doubting the main interpretation that they train your working memory/cognitive processing) is that the game trains you to endure frustration and at some point also boredom. Dealing with frustration and boredom are actually important success skills - so if there was a way to get the game more engaging there's a good chance that the positive impact would be reduced.

tl;dr: issue is still under debate, but it might well be that the need to endure boredom/frustration in at least the dual-n-back games might be a feature (that improves impact) rather than a bug.