Some things you might learn from games are pretty blatant: Trivial Pursuit might teach you trivia, MasterType might teach you about typing, Grand Theft Auto might teach you about driving or crime.
But sometimes games teach people less obvious things—things that are more experiential or ineffable, things that you didn’t know you didn’t know, concepts that stick in your mind, deep things. Here’s my list of games and their interesting real-world updates, as experienced by me or my friends:
Dominion: Don’t invest for eternity. When casually improving or protecting or investing in things, it’s easy for me to treat life (and perhaps even the present period) as basically eternal. In fact I shouldn’t, but it can take many years of living to really feel how likely it is that you’ll leave your perfectly wonderful house within two years, or just keep on aging. Dominion lets me feel that in a matter of hours, by tempting me to invest in a beautiful and effective deck that will do amazingly for the rest of eternity, then making the other player win by haphazardly buying a handful of provinces before I’m done. Which is very annoying, and I do hold against it.
**The Witness: **there is nothing in The Witness (at least near the start, I haven’t played it all) that you can pick up and take with you. No objects, no points, no manna, no health. It’s just you, walking around in a world. Something about that feels like it would be deeply unsatisfying—like what is a game, if you can’t get, y’know, things, dings? Part of me thinks that GETTING is equivalent to satisfaction, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary I keep pointing out to it. And The Witness is not where I came to realize that. What The Witness made me feel is that knowledge is a REAL thing you can GET, like an object. Not some hand-wavey second-rate bullshit thing that philosophers pretend to get off on. In The Witness, while your character walks around, impermeable to the world, you come to know more things. And knowing more things lets you go to places you couldn’t go to when you knew fewer things. The game on the computer concretely changes from you picking up knowledge, that ethereal thing in your mind. This is of course how everything is, but I suppose the absence of any other form of ‘picking up things’ in The Witness made me actually feel it.
**Minecraft: **How many of my difficulties in life are not this-life specific. How to live as a creature with different boundaries of personal-identity, e.g. the world spirit. Much more about these in my previous post, Mine-craft.
Return of the Obra Dinn: If at an event where lots of people are saying their name and what they do or something, I am usually bored and don’t expect to remember these things. Return of the Obra Dinn is a game where you have to figure out from minute clues the names and causes of death of a lot of characters. Once at a networking event, I decided to think of it as like a sequel of Return of the Obra Dinn—I could see all these people sitting around the table, and my quest was to pin a name and a deal to each of them, and this introductory section was currently showing me crucial information. I found that this was a very different mental state. So I suppose I learned that whatever I was normally doing in ‘trying to learn’ things about the other attendees, it is an extremely pale cousin of the curiosity I can feel in a different mental state, and that different mental state is actually fairly different, and naturally invoked in RotOD and not networking introductions.
**Dungeons and Dragons: **Caitlin Elizondo says DnD has given her a few concepts that make a difference to her thinking more generally. The concept of ‘will saves’ has given her more empathy for situations where someone wanted to but failed to do something. The six DnD stats helps her access the framework where there are different types of competency that are valuable for different tasks—obvious in theory, but easier to think in terms of with this structure.
**Poker: **the feeling of being ‘on tilt’
Boggle, Set, Ragnarock: the feeling of flow. Ragnarock is mine, and I would have said I’d experienced ‘flow’ elsewhere, but Ragnarock is sometimes more like an altered state than other such experiences I’ve had.
Civilization IV: I used to lose at a scenario then go back and play it again over and over changing things slightly until I won, which gave me a vivid sense of how suboptimal my native strategy is, presumably also in life. Which is obvious in theory, but it’s different to really feel how much better I would live this day if I was doing it the twentieth time with a laser focus on winning.
Games in general: the experience of addiction, sadly. I’ve always struggled to keep up habits of taking addictive substances, so I infer I’m unusually safe from chemical addictions (I used to play Civilization for five minutes as a reward if I remembered to take my amphetamines). Games are I think the thing I find most seriously addictive. Which has definite downsides, but it is certainly also an interesting experience that helps me understand the wider world better, and where I would be missing something if I just read about addiction in the abstract.
Do you have any to add?
[ETA May 1: I’m adding more I hear in the above list, and also see many good additions in the comments!]
Tactical games that display probabilities taught me more about probability and statistics than actual stats classes. If one wants an intuitive understanding of what numbers like 80%, or 20%, or 50% actually mean—instead of rounding them off to “yes, no, maybe”—then certain XCOM entries will teach that very quickly.
Along with anger-management skills.
(There is the hiccup where you need to identify a game and sometimes a difficulty level that doesn’t lie to you about its probabilities. Most do.)
XCOM games famously lie about percentages; they optimize for the player feeling good. Your actual hit chance is higher than displayed, repeated miss streaks are deliberately prevented, and so on.
XCOM:EU (in)famously doesn’t (see all the memes by frustrated players mad that their 92% shot was still a miss); the sequels ‘fix’ that ‘problem’, which is why I will never play them.
An amusing pair of XCOM moments: Long ago, having persuaded my then-partner to try EU, the first sectoid in the first real battle hits her first soldier through full cover for a critical hit that kills him. I later calculated the odds of that happening as ~2%.
Years later, showing off the same game to my current partner for the first time, the first thing she witnessed was my last soldier of the round taking a point-blank shot with a 98% hit rate. He missed, and the target immediately fatally shot him in the face.
That’s XCOM, baby!
This is a typical example of the difference between “input randomness” (randomness informing the player’s action, e.g. random map generation) and “output randomness” (randomness injected between the player’s action and the result, e.g. chance to hit), and why some people say output randomness should be avoided in game design.
I find it confusing that the linked article claims that “output randomness does not belong in a strategy game”. Strategy games, originally, were intended to mimic warfare, where there is a significant amount of “output randomness” due to what Clausewitz called “friction”. The purpose of injecting randomness via dice rolls is to simulate that friction. Sometimes the weaker unit makes a heroic last stand and drives off a force many times more powerful than it.
In fact, one of my critiques of most “strategy” games is that they don’t have enough randomness. Where are the units getting lost? Or orders being misunderstood or deliberately disobeyed?
In a strategy game, he says, I should note for clarity. (It’d be pretty absurd to want to ban ‘output randomness’ in general, of course.)
Well, I’d actually agree with the stronger statement: output randomness sucks in other game genres too. How about we make Mario jump a random height, or make Tetris blocks randomly fail to clear a line, or make the solution to a Myst or Witness puzzle randomly not work? Nobody’s talking about “banning” output randomness, it’s a free market after all, but I don’t see much use for it. None of my favorite games rely on it much, and where they do, I’d rather they didn’t.
I’ve seen this idea about output randomness before, but I’ve never been particularly sympathetic.
Famously the game that the article talks about, chess, has basically calcified over time due in large part to it’s deterministic nature. I find it unlikely that as many games would end in draws if piece moves were somehow randomised.
While input randomness is definitely positive, output randomness allows games to maneuver into interesting tactical spaces that would never be reached in optimal deterministic play, and forces players to think about interesting equilibrium conditions. There’s a reason that despite being an incredibly simple game, poker is still fun.
Edit:
I also reject the idea of input vs output randomness being that meaningful a distinction. In one sense you can view mahjong as being both a perfectly input or output random game, in reality I don’t think it’s either since they’re not actually different.
Hence the “certain” qualifier. As the next comment down notes, EU/EW is honest (on Classic difficulty or above). Its popular Long War mod is honest unless requested otherwise. FFT is honest. I’m not sure what other games out there are honest but I’m sure those aren’t the only ones.
I’ve heard that XCOM2 lies flagrantly, hence I never bothered playing it. I’ve more recently heard that it’s honest on the highest difficulty only, but don’t know if that’s true.
Darkest Dungeon is almost honest, but not quite. I suddenly wonder if there’s a mod to make it actually honest, it doesn’t seem like it would take much.
Oh yeah, similar to this: I had Claude make a box, that a Fire Emoji fell into 99% of the time, and a Rock Emoji fell into 1% of the time. After watching that simulation play out for a while, I felt much clearer on what 1% chance really meant.
Also sadly experienced a pretty intense game addiction, which taught me that I could be feeling miserable while simultaneously experiencing the dopamine feeling of reward. I don’t think I’ve experienced such a simultaneous disconnect between these two feelings in any other way.
Ohh, I have a favorite example of this. Super Hexagon is a reaction game that teaches your eyes to process a certain kind of rotate-zoom movement really fast. When you start playing it, it feels impossible to react to things in time, but then you learn to kinda slow it down with your eyes and it becomes much easier. I was so fascinated by this effect that, after beating the game and getting really good at it, I made my own game with a similar idea and even harder difficulty.
Oh man, the feeling of going from “this is literally too fast to process” to “huh this seems slow” in Super Hexagon was wild. I’ve read papers about how variable our sense of time can be, but experiencing it firsthand is something else.
Surprised not to see any From games on this list, which are the most commonly I’ve seen cited for personal growth—not in places like here in LessWrong, but on Reddit and YouTube comments in gaming sections. Though the anecdotes are often less about learning new skills and more about gaining confidence or getting back the feeling of control in one’s life. A motivation booster, essentially.
Back when I was more depressed/dysphoric I used to play dark souls whenever it got especially bad. The feeling of competence and control of going through the zones fighting the monsters and perfectly executing each action was incredibly restorative. Even when I died, I always felt like it was my fault, as opposed to some vague undefinable thing I couldn’t hope to fight or stop.
Absolutely this.
Even some of the best players at other games (I’m thinking Starcraft, Hearthstone) can complain about unfair randomness and opponents getting lucky. But Soulsborne bosses do a really good job of training you that everything is beatable, you just need to practice and improve. (Though there are the rare engagements that give you limited control over their outcomes—like Vyke in Elden Ring.)
I think the game most approaching real life dynamics is poker. I can write an article about it
Yes please.
I like chess :) it’s an eternal classic for a reason.
It teaches thoroughness in thinking through the space of possibilities, as well as a healthy aggression. The game is biased towards offense, as is life. Also tenacity under pressure—holding on when you feel lost, and being rewarded with a blunder from an overconfident opponent.
I like to play correspondence on lichess, 24 hours per move. Once (or twice) a day, I pull up the app, and think through my next move—really think, chess punishes rash decision-making.
I do feel it translates to how I approach decisions in real life.
Baba is you is one I’ve written about.
In Ticket to Ride, you draw random goal cards at the beginning of the game. You can choose to discard one, but still you have to play to the utility function you’ve been given. I have things in life that I want, that other people might not care about or optimize for. When I see someone else in real life who is doing better than me on some axis that’s more of a “nice to have” for me, it’s helpful to remind myself that I have drawn a different utility function and am playing a different game than them.
I think that Don’t Starve Together, much like Minecraft and (so I’ve been told) Factorio, has been a lesson in automation/bottlenecks/dependencies. You have to gather enough materials to create things that make survival easier, while the waterline rises and threats escalate. Another thing: Time is the scarce and precious resource, and you need to make wise decisions quickly. Not deciding is deadly. Deciding wrong is deadly.
Love this post! I don’t play many games myself, but would love to see this same top-level post for “less obvious things” learned from books/blogs/etc. (I’d post it myself but am unfamiliar with LW norms on credit attribution/claiming)
D&D taught me about the importance of journaling. Watching how effective Marisa Rey was by using her game journal on Critical Role, Campaign 2, it inspired me to try it out. After about a year into to it, I went back through it, and it brought back so many memories, and I realized I remembered things from the game better than my real life. that’s when I started daily journaling.
3 years later, I’m still at it, and I wish that I had started so much sooner, like as a kid. It helps me collect my thoughts when I’m dealing with complicated feelings. It helps me remember specific details that would otherwise be lost to time. I hand-write, but I use Notability, which can index my handwriting, so I can search for things.
Going back to games for a bit, Blue Prince was one of my favorite games of all time, and my journal from my journey through that game is a treasured possession. For those weeks I played obsessively, most of my time was looking through or reading my journal, trying to pull threads together. by the end, I had about 120 pages of notes, including pictures, drawings, details, tables, etc. I can’t go back and play that game the same way again, but I can rediscover what it was like.
My journal s a gift to future-me. Inattentive-presenting ADHD makes remembering hard, and my journal is my mental prosthesis. I expect that years later, when these were the good ol’ days, I’ll be able to go back and read about them, and relive the memories. I’ll have a better connection to now-me, and I’ll be thankful that I took that time, even when it was hard.
Also, if you haven’t played Blue Prince, go do that—like right now—but be careful: It’s extremely addictive.
You must have played Outer Wilds, right? If by some chance you haven’t, I highly recommend it: it seems like it’s a perfect example of the genre you like.
Three highly addictive games.
Factorio: any time spent doing something manually is a bottleneck, any time spent not driving the exponential is an exponential delay.
Slay the Spire, much like your Civ IV finding: defeat generally doesn’t come from a single major blunder, but from an accumulation of small mistakes over time. It might look like defeat came from a single mistake or some “unwinnable” fight, but in fact that mistake was pivotal because of your earlier mistakes consuming all your wiggle room, and that fight was unwinnable because you didn’t correctly anticipate it when constructing your deck.
Dota 2: a team of 4, plus one mechanically-incompetent manager/morale guy, is much more effective than 5 individuals who hate each other.
On the topic of DnD (and also Civ4), I learned quite a bit about philosophy from Planescape: Torment (and some from Torment: Ages of Numenera much later as an adult), and about philosophy and tech and futurism from Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri.
Edit to add: I realized I phrased my reply in terms of what the games taught, rather than what they changed my mind about. Partly that’s because I encountered them early, but I still think they should count and did change my preteen mind about many things.
Age of Empires—as a child, in RTS games I always massively underinvested in economy. I wanted to build all the cool units and buildings, and I kept having this idea that my economy was already huge because it was however many times bigger than it started. (In Tiberium sun I beleived having 3 harvestors was huge because in my head it was 3× default.). When playing these games with humans you suddenly realise you are thinking too small. They are just doing everything at 5x your scale and it doesnt really matter what plays you might be making right at that point. If Dominion teaches you the game is finite so you should at some point switch from building for the future and start scroing points now, RTS games teach you that exponentials are real and that if you dont spend the early game growing for the later game you should ensure there is no later game.
All games—playing the game as its creators clearly intended, vs playing to win.
One of the main ways that people cheat at first person shooters is wall hacks, x-ray vision. Being able to see exactly when an opponent will pop out is an almost unbeatable advantage when wielded by a skilled player. Blacklight retribution was an FPS where you could activate wall hacks at will as part of the game. The only caveat: you couldn’t use your weapons while doing so, forcing a trade-off between information and execution. Since everyone has this power, the game elevated up a meta level. You can influence what others think your actions will be, though you don’t know exactly when you are being observed. This taught me the interplay between intentions and revealed intentions via legible action.
There’s a reason that naughts and crosses is still the quintessential kindergarten game, it simultaneously develops some kind of geometric intuition about the centre of shapes being especially important, while teaching kids some very basic game theory (if I just enumerate every game...)
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.
Semi related: Hosting Trivia has shown me how bad ‘enemy’ players can be at modeling each other.
Like, I have seen the classic trick over and over. Where one team knows the answer to an obvious question, and once they’ve quickly written it down, they start loudly yelling the wrong answer in an attempt to trick nearby teams. But questions that are obvious to one team, are obvious to a lot of teams, and this trick basically never works.
Also,
If you want to maximize your Trivia team’s chances of winning general trivia, the best team formations look like this:
Best: Two 25-30 year olds, who religiously play YouTube trivia videos for fun at home
Betterer: One old lady who has been playing Trivia for years, and logs the correct question answers in a notebook that he carries at all times.
Better: 5 old guys and 1-2 terminally online young person
Good: 5 old guys
Half Life 2: Really implanted the idea of “Ok, stop for a second and breath. If you rush into this next action, you end up dying. So, what are you doing to do. You have a bit of time to hide in this shipping container and make a plan”
The Binding of Isaac: In TBOI, your items mix together in unexpected ways. Some mixes are super cool and powerful, other mixes are pretty annoying. So, you want to be choosy with what powerups you pick up. If you don’t figure out what all your options are first, you can miss out on cool opportunities, because you’re locked into one type of powerup. It’s best to scope out the situtaion before making your final decision. Put another way, your first plan isn’t necessarily your best plan.
Dwarf Fortress taught me to set my own goals, and that losing is fun. You can’t “win” DF, there’s no end of game: you build a fort and then just keep running it until either everyone gets killed or you get bored and start a new fort. But it’s not actually that hard to just wall yourself off from the outside world and survive indefinitely if you’re good at the game. [1] What kept the game interesting for me was setting my own goals and challenges, ranging from “I want to make a cool library” to “I want to build a fort cast from obsidian on top of a volcano in a biome with thralling clouds”. But—the most fun I’ve had playing DF are the times I’ve messed up, my fort overrun by goblins/forgotten beasts/were-gila monsters/clowns and all my hard work destroyed, because losing is fun, because the fun of a game like DF comes from the memorable experiences and the stories you write and tell yourself.
Or at least, it was in older versions—they’ve recently added enemies that can dig
Dnd/TTRP in general: scheduling is very hard and I respect anybody who pulls it off for adults and without the coercive force of it being people’s job to show up.
Sidereal Confluence is a very useful object lesson on trade being positive-sum.