Today’s “born-digital” kids—the first generation to grow up with the Internet, born 1990 and later—crave gameplay in a way that older generations don’t. Most of them have had easy access to sophisticated games and virtual worlds their entire lives, and so they take high-intensity engagement and active participation for granted. They know what extreme, positive activation feels like, and when they’re not feeling it, they’re bored and frustrated. They have good reason to feel that way: it’s a lot harder to function in low-motivation, low-feedback, and low-challenge environments when you’ve grown up playing sophisticated games. And that’s why today’s born-digital kids are suffering more in traditional classrooms than any previous generation.
Having grown up with quite a bit of access to games and rich virtual worlds, I’ve definitely been guilty of not feeling engaged in the traditional classroom environment and in certain workplaces also.
While this might not be necessarily a bad thing, it is a pretty worrying prospect as the generation of kids (that grew up with mobile phones even from a toddler age) will begin to engage in the workplace environment.
We might also observe a shift towards more dynamic workplaces with greater autonomy and variety of work. Hopefully. Otherwise, we might be preparing to see historically low work satisfaction levels in the upcoming years.
