There are game design gurus like Raph Koster and Jonathan Blow who would point out the connection between fun and learning.
I don’t know if playing Dungeons and Dragons (which was, from my perspective, mostly carefully reading books filled with charts and rules in anticipation of play, rather than playing) taught me to be able to study API documentation; but it might have. Playing with Hypercard and Cosmic Osmo and Myst might have taught me something about the simplicity of the secret text behind the world. Maybe people who play a lot of SpaceChem will do better in multithreaded programming. Maybe people who play a lot of FoldIt will do better in nanotech design.
What I’m trying to say is the premise of “fun is what we do to recover from work” might not be the best place to start thinking about this.
There are game design gurus like Raph Koster and Jonathan Blow who would point out the connection between fun and learning.
I don’t know if playing Dungeons and Dragons (which was, from my perspective, mostly carefully reading books filled with charts and rules in anticipation of play, rather than playing) taught me to be able to study API documentation; but it might have. Playing with Hypercard and Cosmic Osmo and Myst might have taught me something about the simplicity of the secret text behind the world. Maybe people who play a lot of SpaceChem will do better in multithreaded programming. Maybe people who play a lot of FoldIt will do better in nanotech design.
What I’m trying to say is the premise of “fun is what we do to recover from work” might not be the best place to start thinking about this.