I recently read a post on social media about how the evolution of gaming design has impacted Gen Z development, including critical thinking skills. This made me think back to my own experiences gaming—both as a child and as an adult.[1] And now as a law school academic and bar success professional, I also started to wonder how much, if at all, this impacts what I do on a daily basis working with Gen Z law students.

In a recent interview with Newsweek, a licensed counselor and social worker described how games have changed the way Millennials (1981–1996) and Gen Z (1997–2012)[2] have developed the necessary skills to function in the world. As the clinicians explained, early gaming (Millennials) required players to struggle as they advanced through levels, memorizing patterns to get to a satisfying end. However, modern games, more prevalent among Gen Z, tend to provide detailed answers on how to advance, stifling some of that cognitive processing that earlier games provided. For example, when a player gets stuck in their game nowadays, they can pull up YouTube and search for a walkthrough of a particularly difficult quest, boss, or level, or players can pay (often a small sum) for an advantage to help them advance the level. Many gamers nowadays don’t have to struggle, fail, and retry until they succeed as we did in the past because the answers are available at their fingertips. Dr. Jarod Cooney Horvath, in his recent written testimony to the U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, & Transportation, echoed similar concerns about the decline in Gen Z’s higher-order reasoning skills, the first such reversal in skills with a newer generation,[3] due to the negative impacts of digital platforms in the classroom, which “train attentional habits that conflict with sustained learning.”

But video gaming is not inherently “bad,” and the challenges or growth a person experiences can vary. For example, “action” games can improve visual attention and contrast sensitivity, though they can also increase anxiety and reduce emotional regulation. Strategy games on the other hand can improve coordination, visual spatial thinking, and memory. And in fact, one study found that, compared to non-gamers, those who play video games can demonstrate stronger decision-making skills. Yet, as noted above, that may in fact depend upon the type of game that a person plays, especially in their developmental years.

And much like how newer games focus less on the challenge of making the right decision to advance when you have a built-in tool pointing you in the right direction, AI and other technologies now provide students with a similar solution in their education. No longer do law students have to try to struggle with the language, reasoning, and length of a Constitutional Law case, for example. Students can easily put the case information into ChatGPT or they can Quimbee a case, and it will quickly spit out a brief to help them feel prepared for being on call in class. I even recently learned about an AI tool that allows students to put their notes in, where it will summarize, reorganize, and create an outline from their notes. As an academic success educator, overreliance on guides and technological tools worries me some. Not just because much of the learning necessary to succeed in law school occurs when students struggle with the material, but also because many of these skills are necessary for successful legal practice. Struggle is a natural component of such learning[4] and when law students are handed the answers by technology, they lose their learning opportunity and the growth of their critical thinking skills.

Based on some of these data points, it seems then to indicate that where Millennials developed resilience from gaming, Gen Z seems to have developed pressure to succeed based on comparison and completion.[5] To help continue to foster skill development, legal education can look to what video games provided earlier generations, such as the ability to try, fail (with lower stakes), and try again.[6]

Perhaps this is one of the things I love so much about the work I do in academic and bar success: I can help provide students with the necessary context, highlighting patterns in learning (regardless of subject matter) and creating spaces where students feel safe to struggle. As it turns out, some of the skills that I learned as an “elder Millennial” gamer get to come out to help law students grow in their own success.

(Erica M. Lux)

[1] Over the years, I have largely stuck to aesthetic problem-solving and simulation games, such as Spyro (my childhood fave), Stray (which is a fascinating experience in game design and puzzle solving) and Sims (I have played every version since I carted my old PS to grandma’s over the summer break and honestly, who doesn’t love building a dream house). Admittedly, I have never been good at FPS or MMORPG games that started building in the 90s and are now pretty prominent in today’s gaming landscape, though I continue to try my hand at them.

[2] Stephen J. Beard & Veronica Bravo, Gen Z, Millennial, Gen Alpha? Find Your Generation—And What It Means—By Your Birth Year, USA Today (Oct. 8, 2024), https://www.usatoday.com/story/graphics/2024/10/08/generation-names-years-explained/74701974007/.

[3] The data does not mean that Gen Z is getting “dumber.” In fact, lots of data shows that members of Gen Z are developing different skill sets compared to older generations. However, in the legal profession, for example, critical thinking is essential to the successful completion of law school, licensure, and law practice, so understanding the challenges that this generation may face with this skill is important in supporting law student academic success.

[4] Catherine M. Christopher, Normalizing Struggle, 73 Ark. L. Rev. 27 (2020), https://scholarworks.uark.edu/alr/vol73/iss1/2/.

[5] Yamily Habib, Your Childhood Video Games May Explain Why Millennials Grind and Gen Z Burns Out Faster, We Are Mitú (Dec. 10, 2025),https://wearemitu.com/wearemitu/entertainment/how-video-games-shaped-millennial-vs-gen-z-brains/.

[6]  See e.g., Katherine Silver Kelly, The High Stakes Hypocrisy of Success in Law School, Alb. L. Rev. (forthcoming 2026) (identifying the challenges of one high stakes final exam in a course and outlining evidence-based solutions to foster resilience in the face of challenges within legal learning environments).