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> It was never fun to grind through killing 100 Goblins, but you did it so that you could get the magic sword at the end.

I think you're taking exactly the wrong lesson from that. It wasn't fun to grind through the goblins, but it wasn't challenging either. You did it because you could turn your brain off. I opine that if it did require thinking then the world would now be overrun with goblins...

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I think he took the right lesson in that case. I at least did it for the rewards. I for one don't do tedious and mind-numbing tasks, that involve serious involvement over time, just to turn my brain off. I might do the dishes, but that is very time constrained, and not something I repeatedly come back to doing unless I have to.

On the contrary, games usually inspire work by precisely _being challenging_. That's what normally keeps people coming back to play them for their own sake (the autotelicity of games).

A lot of my kids math and reading is not hard either. He just needs to do a lot of it, over and over. He is 8 so he is learning a lot of times tables and spelling.

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