The ghost effect: when games look educational but aren't

Your kid is focused. Tapping, swiping, collecting. Twenty minutes goes by without a peep. It looks like learning. It might not be.

A 2024 paper in Frontiers in Education gave this a name: the ghost effect (Jose, 2024). It describes what happens when the game mechanics become the point, and the learning fades into the background.

How it works

Most gamified learning apps use the same toolkit: points, badges, stars, progress bars, leaderboards, level-ups. These are borrowed from game design, where they're effective at keeping players engaged. The question is whether "engaged" and "learning" are the same thing.

Jose and colleagues found that they often aren't. Children develop what the researchers call ghost behaviours: they appear engaged through their interactions with the game, tapping, collecting, progressing, while avoiding the cognitive effort that would produce genuine learning (Jose, 2024). The reward system gives them a clear, easy goal (collect the stars) that can be pursued without doing the hard part (understanding the content).

The motivation problem

There's a second mechanism at work. External rewards, the points and badges, can substitute for the child's own curiosity. Developmental psychologists call this motivation displacement.

For older children, the picture is mixed. A 2025 randomised controlled trial found that gamification can harm academic performance in children who already have high intrinsic motivation, while helping those with low motivation (Various, 2025). For toddlers, whose intrinsic curiosity is still developing and arguably more fragile, the risk of substitution is harder to dismiss.

A child who taps a screen because they want to see what happens next is in a different cognitive state from a child who taps because they want the star. The first is exploring. The second is optimising.

What to look for

The difference between genuine engagement and ghost engagement is sometimes visible. A child who is learning tends to pause, look, try different things, repeat actions to see what changes. A child in ghost mode tends to tap rapidly, move through steps without pausing, and focus on the reward animation rather than the content that preceded it.

In the app itself, the question is straightforward: what is the child's main feedback loop? If it's collecting something (stars, coins, stickers), the game is probably rewarding activity rather than understanding. If it's making something (a pizza, a painting, a smoothie), the feedback is built into the creation itself.

Creation over collection

The ghost effect tends to show up in apps built around collection and progression. It tends not to show up in apps built around creation and narrative, because there's nothing to optimise for except the thing the child is making.

A cooking game where the child chooses ingredients, mixes them, and serves the result doesn't need a points system. The serve step is the payoff. The story is the structure. There's no shortcut to game that avoids the learning.

For more on how the structure of a game shapes what a child gets from it, see games that know when to stop.