We can use video games for skills training but should we?
Not all skills are created equally
LFG: Learning from Games is a series dedicated to making the complex world of video game research just a little easier to understand. I post about twice a month in between my Science Shorts, Coming Soon, and Impressions series. Welcome to LFG #04-2026, where we explore the limitations of using video games for teaching.
👋🏼Hello JOMT Reader!
Learning a new technology can be hard. It usually takes some time for our brains, senses, and bodies can coordinate gracefully so that we can do everything from typing using more than two fingers to operating heavy machinery and flying a spaceship. In the world of healthcare and medicine, there is a plethora of specialized tech that professionals are trained to use.
One very useful piece of tech is the ultrasound. It uses soundwaves to look inside your body without needing to cut you open or swallowing a tiny camera.1 With the right training, ultrasound imaging can answer some questions about our bodies in real time. For ultrasound, there is a lot of hand-eye coordination that needs to be trained.
There are several different movements like sliding, tilting, rotating, and rocking the probe that has to be coordinated with what is happening on the screen. Each of these movements change what is seen on screen, and knowing how to manipulate the probe to see what you want takes practice.
Most students learn to use the ultrasound using a mannequin as the simulated patient. But researchers in Austria asked a slightly different question: can ultrasound skills be trained using a video game?
Let’s find out!
A non-inferior training method
The researchers approached this question similarly to how generic drugs are studied before being approved. For generic drugs, researchers only need to show that the generic is not worse than the branded drug. This type of study is called a non-inferiority trial. So the researchers conducted a non-inferiority trial, comparing students trained traditionally with students trained using video games.
Video game training for ultrasound is not worse…?
The short answer is no.
The longer answer is, it’s complicated.
First, the short answer. Students using video games for training performed similarly to those trained traditionally. Both sets of students scored lower on skill assessment scores after the training compared to before. For other measurements, like how fast they completed the assessments and the mental effort the skill assessments required, there was no significant difference between these two groups of students. But more on the significant differences part in a bit.
If you take a closer look at the results though, there are differences between these two groups of students. For example, students trained traditionally completed the assessments faster after training compared to before. On the other hand, students trained using video games were slower after training compared to before.
In a similar twist, students trained with video games reported needing more mental effort to complete the skill assessment compared to students trained traditionally who reported needing less mental effort.
So here is the funny thing about significance. Both of those differences were reported as non-differences because they were not statistically significant, meaning that the results are likely a result of random chance (i.e., rolling dice would’ve produced similar results). But that doesn’t necessarily mean that it isn’t actually significant.
One common reason why a difference can be not statistically significant is that there were too few people in the study to show this difference. For this study, less than 50 people were included in each of the training groups. 50 people may not have been enough people to reach a decisive conclusion.
Video games aren’t a panacea
Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn’t stop to think if they should. - Dr. Ian Malcom, Jurassic Park
Just because we can use video games for training, doesn’t mean we should. As this study showed, video games aren’t always useful for training skills, especially if it is a contextual skill like using an ultrasound probe on the contours of a human body.
My best guess as to why students trained using video games were slower after training and required more mental effort is the missing contextual information. Playing a video game might teach you about probe movements, but how that happens on the curves of a human or mannequin is where the magic happens.
Students trained using video games had to make up for this missing context on the fly during the assessment, meaning they had to think about what they were doing more. Hence the slower times and increased mental effort. Traditional training prepares you to deal with the context so those students were able to complete the assessment faster and with less mental load.
Final remarks
As long as video games can provide that context without requiring the student to fill in the blanks (like driving or flight simulators), it can be useful for training contextual skills. Otherwise, sticking to traditional training methods might yield better results.
One area that I think I’d like to see more research on is whether video game players are faster at learning these types of contextual skills. Each game we play forces us to learn new mechanics and controls, which might make us faster at picking up new skills. But only more research will tell!
If you want to read the article that inspired this post, you can read it here for free: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s12909-026-08995-1
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https://www.nibib.nih.gov/science-education/science-topics/ultrasound
The National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering has an excellent summary of ultrasound and its uses in medicine.
Excellent analysis. You are spot on. The skill they are using to teach is mapping motor movements (control of the ultrasound want) with what you see on the screen. With the video game, they were removing the motor movements, which is the primary skill they are trying to train. As soon as I started reading this, I thought there's no way to train this with a standard game, you'd need VR with a controller shaped kind of like the wand and a soft body-like surface... which is basically what they already do but for cheaper with the actual equipment and a mannequin.