I endorse every recommendation you give. I’ll add one for Offworld Trading Company, which teaches aggressive minmaxing and adjusting your strategy in real time in response to changing conditions; and for The Witness, which is insight porn but doesn’t teach anything.
Here are a couple of specific comments on the games you listed and what they teach you:
I think Slay the Spire is an important rationalist game. The game punishes every bad decision, often in ways that you don’t necessarily notice at the time, so it’s easy to get to the end of the game and think “oh, I was just unlucky”, whereas in fact it’s very frequently a skill issue: spending more time thinking on any given move will almost always increase your win probability. You have to be constantly on your guard against: doing something that’s “ehhh probably good enough”. If you can win every fight with one more HP, that’s at least 30HP saved over the course of the game.
Factorio teaches the skill “address the bottleneck”. Again, it’s quite easy while playing the game to end up running around tinkering at the edges, or performing processes manually, ultimately wasting a lot of time vs the correct answer of rearchitecting to improve some component by orders of magnitude. You have to be constantly on your guard against: sinking into the pattern of maintaining systems by hand.
I endorse every recommendation you give. I’ll add one for Offworld Trading Company, which teaches aggressive minmaxing and adjusting your strategy in real time in response to changing conditions; and for The Witness, which is insight porn but doesn’t teach anything.
Here are a couple of specific comments on the games you listed and what they teach you:
I think Slay the Spire is an important rationalist game. The game punishes every bad decision, often in ways that you don’t necessarily notice at the time, so it’s easy to get to the end of the game and think “oh, I was just unlucky”, whereas in fact it’s very frequently a skill issue: spending more time thinking on any given move will almost always increase your win probability. You have to be constantly on your guard against: doing something that’s “ehhh probably good enough”. If you can win every fight with one more HP, that’s at least 30HP saved over the course of the game.
Factorio teaches the skill “address the bottleneck”. Again, it’s quite easy while playing the game to end up running around tinkering at the edges, or performing processes manually, ultimately wasting a lot of time vs the correct answer of rearchitecting to improve some component by orders of magnitude. You have to be constantly on your guard against: sinking into the pattern of maintaining systems by hand.