Business school can be boring. All those facts and figures and formulas are dry and confusing — and if you stare at them too long they burn holes in your eyes.

There’s got to be a better way to study business, and according to an item in the Wall Street Journal, that better way could involve video games.

A professor of information systems at San Francisco State University has created a way to analyze business processes, the Journal says, by developing a virtual business that contains a handful of avatar-like executives who answer questions posed by the students.

The questioning is limited; there’s only so much one of these virtual bosses can divulge because of programming limitations. Nevertheless, the students apparently respond to the course and retain class information better than through the usual wrote way of doing things.

And that, the professor told the Journal, is due mainly to the kids’ familiarity with video games.

“Students today are not like me,” professor Sam Gill told the Journal. “Gaming is a big thing to them. Students can relate better to material if I’m not standing in front of them.”