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.)
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1Surprised 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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
1You 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)
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!]