Noita: Real life (physics) does not care about what you want or what feels “normal”/”natural”/”sensible”. The upside of this is that you can abuse it for your own benefit. Cheating is technique, and the only true laws are those of physics. The downside is that the world can and will kill you, often instantly and always with no remorse. Reality does not give a flying fuck how much effort you put into it, and nothing has taught me that better than Noita. You can go through obstacles and dangerous areas “as intended”, or you can dig around them. You can spend hours getting all of the protective perks, and then die instantly by getting polymorphed into a sheep, or being teleported into a vat of acid. Of course, this is an exaggerated form of the real life phenomenon (we at least have conservation laws), but Noita is great for shaking any illusions that life is “fair”, and for giving “security mindset” type intuitions for finding loopholes in rule systems.
Go: The world is big. Newer players are often surprised when experienced players suddenly play moves across the board when the past 20 have been part of a fight that still hasn’t ended. To win, you must play with a sort of timelessness, placing your stone only based on the entire board’s current position, without regard for sunk costs or being “in the middle of something”. You also must quantify and compare the value of potential moves, often probabilistically, because even thought go is deterministic, it is often computationally intractable to calculate entire trees, especially in the early game.
Zendo is the modern classic for simulating scientific induction, but I prefer good old fashioned eleusis.
Hyperrogue: Hyperbolic geometry is very different from Euclidean! This is of obvious use to mathematicians, but also may be of non-obvious use. I think a lot of abstract spaces we care about, like idea-space and mind-space, probably have large regions with negative intrinsic curvature. Scent space, at the very least, seems to be hyperbolic.
Carpe Diem is a game designed by Zvi to simulate multi-resource management and teach you the value of slack. I’ve found it quite useful at that.
Honorable mentions: FTL, for teaching you how useful pausing to think is (pause is bound to the space bar for a reason!). 4d golf, for, well, showcasing 4d geometry. All incremental games, for teaching you that despite millions of years of evolution, your reward system can be hacked by something barely more complicated than a number that goes up when you push a button.
Noita: Real life (physics) does not care about what you want or what feels “normal”/”natural”/”sensible”. The upside of this is that you can abuse it for your own benefit. Cheating is technique, and the only true laws are those of physics. The downside is that the world can and will kill you, often instantly and always with no remorse. Reality does not give a flying fuck how much effort you put into it, and nothing has taught me that better than Noita. You can go through obstacles and dangerous areas “as intended”, or you can dig around them. You can spend hours getting all of the protective perks, and then die instantly by getting polymorphed into a sheep, or being teleported into a vat of acid. Of course, this is an exaggerated form of the real life phenomenon (we at least have conservation laws), but Noita is great for shaking any illusions that life is “fair”, and for giving “security mindset” type intuitions for finding loopholes in rule systems.
Go: The world is big. Newer players are often surprised when experienced players suddenly play moves across the board when the past 20 have been part of a fight that still hasn’t ended. To win, you must play with a sort of timelessness, placing your stone only based on the entire board’s current position, without regard for sunk costs or being “in the middle of something”. You also must quantify and compare the value of potential moves, often probabilistically, because even thought go is deterministic, it is often computationally intractable to calculate entire trees, especially in the early game.
Zendo is the modern classic for simulating scientific induction, but I prefer good old fashioned eleusis.
Hyperrogue: Hyperbolic geometry is very different from Euclidean! This is of obvious use to mathematicians, but also may be of non-obvious use. I think a lot of abstract spaces we care about, like idea-space and mind-space, probably have large regions with negative intrinsic curvature. Scent space, at the very least, seems to be hyperbolic.
Carpe Diem is a game designed by Zvi to simulate multi-resource management and teach you the value of slack. I’ve found it quite useful at that.
Honorable mentions: FTL, for teaching you how useful pausing to think is (pause is bound to the space bar for a reason!). 4d golf, for, well, showcasing 4d geometry. All incremental games, for teaching you that despite millions of years of evolution, your reward system can be hacked by something barely more complicated than a number that goes up when you push a button.