Ask HN: What are some things you learnt from a game that changed your life?

[behnamoh]

I find it fascinating how some games turn out to reflect much of my philosophy about life. For instance, I played Inside a while ago and was amazed by how much you can achieve by so little. The game was mostly about timing, and you'd be surprised how much of our life is just "hacking time" (I first heard this phrase in Mr. Robot.)

Catan (board game) taught me the power of being forward-looking but also being myopic depending on the type of your opponents. It also taught me that I don't belong to games (situations) where one party is being irrational and acts based on knee-jerk decisions. In Catan, I now try not to reveal my best card and get ahead early on in the game in order to avoid becoming an easy and default target for other players. I think these are really interesting life lessons I (re-)learnt from a game that wasn't even designed with that purpose in mind.

I'm looking for any and all games that can potentially teach me something, but are not "educational" games.

[nokya]

I played an online MMORPG called "Anarchy Online" (AO) while in my early twenties, probably for a little bit more than a year. At a dinner with friends, I started talking about the game and why I liked it.

During that discussion, I came to the realization that even if I did absolutely nothing "productive" in the game, I always had access to food, clothes, health services and shelter. Things were organized in a way that I had to work (kill monsters/bad people, harvest, salvage, heal, repair, etc.) to get money or more direct rewards. For example, clothing and homes were standardized and quite basic. I could "work" to actually get access to a better home and good-looking clothes to customize my avatar. Still, I could decide to do nothing, wander around, watch stuff, and still have my "avatar" alive and well. Anarchy Online gives all users access to a set of basic universal services that include shelter, food, education, health, etc.

~700'000 users playing this universe quite intensively on a daily basis (at that time), would you think they just did "nothing" and sat down?

During that same dinner, I became conscious that this could be a reality. I learned later that I was getting introduced to the concept of universal income (UI).

I started reading about it, talking about it around me. I quickly noticed two things: 1. People around me thought (and still think) it's an impossible/unsustainable model, although there is an increasing amount of research supporting it could be sustainable. 2. Most countries / States that tried UI implemented it as a monthly paycheck given to citizens. I honestly tried understanding why people absolutely want to implement this as a paycheck.

In 2020, we voted about universal income in my country. It was widely refused (78% no). Political parties successfully scared "us" into believing that UI would decimate the country's economy and put everybody into unemployment. It worked.

Today, I am still amazed that I have to work to get money to pay for the most basic things I need to stay alive. I do not think I should get a "paycheck" to get food and shelter. I am not sure the game taught me something that is actually possible, but it showed me an alternate model of society, which I still often think about and do not see as "impossible".

[ne0flex]

Since I've started working I've been aggressively investing close to half my monthly paychecks into high-yield dividend stocks with the goal of attaining my own level of UBI.

A few years ago, when I was unemployed for several months, I noticed that doing nothing all day gets boring real fast. I know that if I had my own UBI I'd definitely go pursue some sort of venture.

However, I also noticed that my cousin, who has been unemployed for the past 4 months, is just focused on playing video games, while his mom supports him. From this, I've concluded that the effects of UBI will vary greatly from person to person.

Before implementing UBI, I think we need to determine what % of the population will get bored and attempt to do something else, and what % of the population will just pool their attention into unproductive time sinks - maybe the Pareto principle will come into play here?

[slovette]

I mean, the only downfall to this is that the fundamental resources you speak of “shelter, water, food...” in a game are infinite duplications of the same model with no “cost”.

In the real world, that stuff isn’t an unlimited, instantaneous resource. Someone has to build that shelter, farm that food, etc.

In order for this to work, we would need to find free labor... that hasn’t worked so well historically. And sure, you could say technology could fill these labor needs to fundamentally reduce the cost of basic resources to zero, but I don’t think that’s really possible either in practice (the robot maker needs some incentive to make the robots that are providing these free services).

Further, you start replacing fundamental tasks with technology and you begin to remove the opportunity for tasks to better your life (like in the game) because technology isn’t just niche applicable generally.

IMO: It works if you ignore the premise that the game represents a complicated issue in the most simplistic way. But as soon as you put some economics to it, it breaks down super fast.

[rolandog]

The people who push fearmongering on UI are those who would be affected if we had the benefit of being able to pass on harsh or dangerous conditions if that meant being able to eat plain oatmeal for free; it's preferable for them that there is no other alternative.

[andrei_says_]

Rutger Bregman has a book called Utopia for Realists.

Quite a few successful studies on UBI - people become more productive, get better education, wean themselves off of addiction. It is an overall better investment than pretty much any other program - including because it doesn’t carry thenoverhead of controlling how money gets spent.

It is cheaper to provide UBI than not.

[matt_s]

Maybe it would be easier to slowly build to UI - kind of like leveling up a character.

- Universal health care would likely have the most impact on a lot of people and companies if there was a system to fund it across the board for basic health coverage (i.e. healthy visits, major events and mental health covered, progressive co-pays for other stuff)

- In the US there already is universal education up to just before university, extend that to 2 years college at first. I know the K-12 system probably needs work, the idea here is to benefit the most people.

- Food and shelter are tough because these will look more like hand-outs from the government. Subsidies already exist for lower income people, maybe it starts there with expanding those programs.

If you start out with UI as the goal its likely going to get push back, much like some biz person wanting a waterfall software project to build a startup with the goal of a fully functioning SaaS at the end of the project. Iterations with benefits getting delivered over time is a better approach.

[dolni]

I think that you stretched the game analogy far beyond what reality allows for. Virtual avatars don't actually "need" anything. Sure, there are things you _want_ in the game. You won't freeze to death without clothing, you won't starve to death if you don't eat, and even if you did, you would just respawn.

I think UBI as a model sucks, for a bunch of reasons.

1. It allows people to do nothing. People who are able should work. People who can't, we can help. But it shouldn't be an abusable system where one can simply say "I can't work" and no questions are asked. Everybody in society can't just say "I don't want to work" -- everything would fall apart if we did that. In the interest of fairness, then, all who are able should contribute.

2. What do you do when someone blows their UBI on drugs or gambles it away? Do you just let them starve to death? Maybe they don't have a drug or gambling problem, but they just suck at managing money and routinely overextend themselves. How do you handle that? If your answer is "just give them more money", then we have a big problem where now anybody can game the system for as much money as they want. If your answer is "tough shit", I think you will miss some nuanced situations.

3. Do people with children get more? Can we put a cap on that, or do people just get to have as many children as they like, and everyone else has to pay? Kids in the US are already fairly heavily subsidized through tax breaks.

4. All the people who are doing the work to make UBI viable get nothing from it (sure they get a check, but that's just going to be some amount less than whatever extra they pay in tax to support the system). There's nobody there to ask questions and keep people honest. And yes, there is administrative overhead for social services you need to qualify for, but I'd argue that has its benefit in encouraging people to be productive members of society and not moochers.

I don't think UBI would result in mass unemployment but I do think we'd have a good number of people at the bottom doing absolutely nothing productive with their lives.

All that said, I do think that social services need an overhaul. I just don't think UBI is the way.

[DeliriumTrigger]

What I took from AO is no matter how far you run or hide if you startle a mob they will always get you.

[bigcorp-slave]

I used to play competitive multiplayer games, including one game that was about controlling resource points. It could get very intense, but it taught me an extremely important lesson: if you spend all your time playing defense, no matter how well you play it, you are going to lose. It may feel like you’re winning when you hold the line, but you are losing. Sometimes you have to look for opportunities to slip past the obvious fight and make strategic attacks elsewhere.

Secondly, from World of Warcraft raiding: a good player is nothing without a good team. But a team needs a certain density of good players to be good.

Finally, kind of a meta-lesson: one day, while playing the resource point control game, I found myself getting very angry. I was worked up, red faced, yelling. And I had this moment where I realized - I don’t have to feel this way. Nothing is forcing me to. So I put it down, uninstalled it, and never played those types of games again.

[ed312]

Would you mind sharing what this "resource point controlling game" was? (Any chance it was called "Natural Selection"?)

[aaron-santos]

Board games taught me to find the game within the game. There's usually a much smaller game idea hidden within. Within board games, Kingdom Builder for example is a game about point efficiency. Ticket to Ride is a game about risk pacing. And Terraforming Mars is a game about strategic synergizing. Avalon/The Resistance taught me what my tells are when I'm lying.

Video games taught me different things. Disco Elysium taught me that I can try out ideas and see how they feel. Papers Please taught me that I can choose not to follow the rules. Roguelikes/DF taught me the art and fun of story sifting.

[runawaybottle]

This is typically called the ‘meta game’ and is a big thing in competitive online games.

Sadly, it’s a bad thing when it enters the real world. Life is very easy, but when people make a meta game out of, I don’t know, who has a better lawn, we become ridiculous.

[this2shallPass]

Any good websites that talks about this kind of thing, and recommends strategies for different games (and nice to have, life)?

[emidln]

Playing poker and magic (really any strategy game with chance built-in) , sometimes you'll make the play with the highest likelihood to win and still lose. You can have all the advantage, play perfectly, and sometimes the cards don't fall your way. Looking to better your own plays without tilting too hard to bad luck is crucial to succeed at a high level. On the flip-side, identifying where luck was a component of your win allows you to make the most of reviewing old game states.

[mrfusion]

kobayashi maru?

[runawaybottle]

Certain competitive online games (well truthfully, all) are never balanced. It’s too much like real life, as in, not fair at all.

If you try to play the game just to have fun, you will basically never progress unless you are an elite gamer (gifted muscle memory).

If you find out how the game is unbalanced, and play the advantageous strategies, then you can win consistently. Even if it’s not fun.

Software field has something similar going on. Leetcode is the most optimal thing one can do in software at the moment. It’s not fair, but that’s how you win.

At scale, most online competitive games employ matchmaking algorithms that make sure you never really break even unless you are brilliant. Super depressing. You stay at a 50% win rate unless you optimize for the efficient winning strategies. It’s super fucked up.

It’s some odd version of video game Taylorism, and I fear software is going to suffer from this as we scale with more and more people. As I mentioned earlier, it’s already odd that we use Leetcode (an absurd advantageous strategy) to get ahead.

It’s depressing.

So yeah, long story short, when I get tired of losing in these games, I basically suck it up and do the optimal thing and start winning. It’s a really dirty thing and I hate doing it.

[muzani]

I learned more from games than school, and could go on quite a rant on this. But I'll go with Football Manager.

This wasn't really about football, but about management as a whole. I learned to look really deeply into why things were happening. E.g. conceded goals were rarely the goalkeeper's fault, it depended a lot on defense giving them too much space. Also the value of positioning, not just in football, but how much it matters more than technical ability.

I learned that morale matters a lot, often more than other things. Saying motivational/optimistic things isn't how you increase morale - that's a good way to get the players cynical. You have to be realistic.

Also creating rivals helps in making the team focused and the audience happy. You don't have to be violent, but everyone loves a good rival match.

Depth matters a lot too. It's usually better to have a team wholly made of good people rather than one with a few stars and a lot of below average players. The stars are also able to play multiple positions, and sometimes you might not want a star player in their favorite position.

[chitowneats]

Competitive card games like MTG or Hearthstone teach you to "play to your outs". What this means is to identify the ways in which you can maximize your chances of winning when you are in a losing position. This was helpful for me overcoming a tendency in life to just quit when it looked like I was at a disadvantage.

[bick_nyers]

Or trick your opponent into thinking you have the out when you don't, so they fear over committing their resources. In tournament settings, stress and emotions run high and it's important to be able to play confidently even when you are most likely to lose. Even in Hearthstone with how limited interactions there are, you can still find a way to communicate false information to your opponent. As world champion Firebat recently said in a video: "if you play enough you aquire the ability to know what your opponent has in their hand based on small hesitations...how long it takes their eyes to register things".

Edit: I guess since we are looking for parallels in life the takeaway is this, maintain confidence and self-awareness especially when losing, and always consider how you present information to others. You can reframe most things to appear better without being deceptive.

[behnamoh]

Ha, that's interesting! In the Catan game which I mentioned, they reduce your ELO (sth like your overall score) if you just quit a multiplayer game. You end up gaining half as much "experience" if you lose, but you'd earn negative if you quit.

I'm also the kind that tends to just quit and start again. But games like these have helped me at least "play to my outs". Still, I think a skill which I learnt is how to quit "smartly". Some games (situations) just don't belong to me, so it's important to not conflate perseverance with stupidly continuing a game which I should've quit minutes ago.

[musicale]

To add my fuel to the fire, I think one of the biggest things I've learned from competitive multiplayer games (at least the ones that aren't pure races or two-team contests) is that at some level they all devolve into "vote who wins" and its variants (usually some combination of kingmaking, popularity/influence contests, and sheer luck.) The darker "vote who wins" games depend on deception for influencing the other players' actions (so I try to avoid those games.)

Many real-life situations also seem to be variants of "vote who wins" so it can be helpful to recognize those situations and act accordingly.

Even if you're stuck in a "vote who wins" game, it is still usually worth it to play the core game as well as you can, even if the outcome will primarily be decided by the metagame.

[pitched]

By “vote who wins”, you mean when the weaker players will team up against the stronger player to have a better chance of winning? Or something more like being accepted into a good guild gets you onto good raid teams which gets you better gear which gets you into good guilds, etc.?

I wish I knew more about game theory because there are probably good names for all these things. I think the first is tall poppy syndrome and the second is relative age effect?

[martinmakesgame]

Catan is a great game! Playing with irrational players or becoming a default target isn't a problem I have though. I "win" when I help others to win. There's no point in playing to win if there's no enjoyment in it and I feel better when I help someone else. I'll try to trade resources as much as possible to give advantage to others. I want others to have fun much more than any extrinsic pleasure from winning. I now generally play this way with most of the games that I play with other people. A competitive game is more fun when tried to play cooperatively even when it isn't supposed to be played this way. Even better if you don't tell the other players.

[dnh44]

Final Fantasy 1 for the NES (spoiler alert) has a plot twist at the end where you save the world by undoing a time travel paradox created by the villain. This results in no one being aware that you've just saved the world, or that it even needed saving.

As an 8 year old I learned that one shouldn't need or seek out praise or recognition from others for doing something that I felt was good.

[mod]

I love these old jRPGs. I couldn't have told you the plot, but I remember the mechanics of this and FF2 very well.

Modern rpgs are truly fantastic, but I don't enjoy them nearly as much.

[uvnq]

Chess. Almost everything useful in chess I've found I can generalize to decision making in general. It's made me better at totally unrelated things like jiu jitsu.

For example, generally, you want to make decisions that increase your options. In competitive situations you want to restrict your opponent's options.

Find the fundamental patterns of whatever you're learning and get really good at those. Often times if you learn the 15-20% of concepts that show up everywhere, you'll learn the rest of the concepts faster since they're mostly just rehashed versions of them. In chess you'd learn tactical patterns for example. Just learn the 10 most common ones and it'll help you see like 70% of the tactics/checkmates you encounter.

Look for factors that increase the probability of wins, and then increase those factors. Not everything requires an extremely precise plan. For example getting a good position in chess (active/well placed pieces, control of the center, etc) increases the probability that tactics will come out of nowhere.

Getting advantages increases your ability to get more advantages. In economics this is called the Matthew principle (I think).

Since acquiring advantages can increase one's ability to acquire more advantages, advantages "right now" are worth more than advantages later on. Essentially, it seems that advantages have a time value.

One weird thing I've noticed is that space is a super important thing to know how to use. Chess, jiu jitsu, war. Whatever that means for the specific field/context you're trying to get good at - how can you use your ability to increase/decrease space/territory (or whatever is analogous to it in this context) to your advantage? Is control of the "center" or other specific areas important in your situation?

Synergy - finding ways to combine your advantages can be very powerful. Same with finding ways to exploit multiple of your opponent's weaknesses at once.

[musicale]

So far it sounds like the biggest (life) lessons are "they taught me not to waste time (and money) on addictive games."

I actually like "educational" games (or gamified tutorials) like Rocksmith (guitar) and Duolingo (languages) because they drill you on skills that you can use outside the game.

Action games (and musical instruments) seem to be good for manual dexterity and eye-hand coordination; I recall reading that surgeons who are FPS players (or concert violinists) tend to make fewer physical mistakes.

I still want to try playing through an RPG in a (human) language that I do not know, with dictionary in hand to translate as I go along, in order to see how much it would help me to learn the language, or at least some useful phrases like "the citadel of evil necromancers has unleashed its undead army."

[vbsteven]

That last one is an interesting idea. I learned English as a 10yo with access to a PSX and FF7. Maybe it’s time to replay the same game now in French or Italian.

FF7 is my favourite videogame and I know it well. That context might help when learning a new language.

[giantg2]

Games have cheat codes and bugs/glitches. There are players that choose to take advantage of those and create an unfair contest. There is basically nothing a legitimate player can do to stop it. This is true in real life such as in the justice system, business, etc.

When playing a game, no matter how good you think you are, there is always someone better. Even if you are at the top now, someone will eventually replace you. So too in life.

[stevenicr]

Ultima IV - taught that to be truly great you needed to do more than just get strong, you needed to practice being humble, having empathy for the poor - all sorts of things of balance had to be achieved to win.

The Sims - playing after thumbing through the 'pattern language' book .. it's interesting to see things play out - and to watch others play - they learn that things they want are expensive and there's not enough money to do what you want and then you die.

Watch Dogs- being able to peer into the lives of every passerby - seeing just 4 lines from a DB - it's easy to pre-judge people - which people are worth stealing from, which people 'deserve' violent 'justice' - things like that - realizing that there are many that see all the people in a similar way - - it's play to kill sherelly since he's greedy, and knocking google employees unconscious is okay because they only have 1 black employee. The ends justify the means for all the sub-groups/tribes it seems..

Rainbow six siege - concealment is not cover; not for you, not for them. COD is not great this battlefield 4 was better, Six does it well.

The Three Dwarves - it's possible to make a good game for three people to pay at once with co-op needs.

Civ 6 / Empire Earth - no matter how great you are at X (science, military, whatever) - a few barbarians can ruin you, and some zealots could take you over before you can take them out - be humble and enjoy the build when you can't control the other tribes.

Driving different vehicles in the GTA and similar games is helpful to learn - pity that there is not a non-hooker version for 15 year olds to learn some things with.

Max Payne - you can make a dirty, cussing, killing game ,where the good guy does dope to keep going - and sell a lot of copies.. because a lot of people enjoy it.

Watching younger folks play assasins creed you can see how younger minds are being solidly influenced to fight for racial justice.. things like kill the owner / free the slaves and such.

There are many great lessons in many games - I'll be remembering random ones for days/weeks now.

[strken]

Planetside 2 has taught me a lot about leadership.

In the game, which is an MMOFPS that plays a little like the Battlefield series, most people don't play as leaders. However, you can lead either a squad of up to 12 players, or a platoon of 4 squads, meaning up to 48 players. You fight in a 3-way conflict with up to thousand players on a given map.

Staying positive is incredibly important. You can't always win, but you can usually find a way to have fun and leave your players happy even after a loss. This is equally true of real life: winning the fight immediately in front of you might not be possible, but in the long term it's better to find an objective you can achieve than to keep forcing your team to attack a problem they can't solve.

Team-mates who have a microphone and communicate with you are incredibly important because they give feedback on your choices and call out things you've missed, but you might only have a few in your platoon, or even none at all. People won't always communicate problems or opportunities to you unless you've carefully nurtured an environment where they feel safe and get rewarded with social approval for speaking up.

If you keep throwing your platoon into fights they lose, they'll become disengaged, and either check out and stop following orders, get upset and play worse, or just leave. You. deal with this by giving them some easy fights where they outnumber, outflank, or outskill the enemy. In real life, after a tough few weeks, throw in a day off or a sprint that's deliberately light on cards.

Speed and agility are incredibly important, as is planning a couple of steps ahead. If you have players who are just a bit faster than others, who have just a bit more initiative, you can go straight from fight to fight with no downtime and without time for the enemy to respond. If you pre-empt enemy manouvers, you can create options for yourself at very little cost that save you significant time in the future. Similarly, adding kill switches to new features, or refactoring your error handling to give more info, can save you hours of downtime. Already having feature X under development when a competitor announces they're working on it can let you quickly respond to market demand.

You should remove actively disruptive players as soon as possible to protect your well behaved players. Trolls, racists, those with anger management issues, or just extremely negative players should be immediately told off, and kicked out if they don't stop. If you don't do this, you'll lose your best players trying to retain your worst.

[EdwardCoffin]

Learning The Theory of Steinitz [1] was important in my learning to play chess less badly than before, and is applicable elsewhere in life too, I think.

[1] https://exeterchessclub.org.uk/content/theory-steinitz

[marto1]

Woah. That one felt like reading Sun Tzu for chess! Know of any more basic theory like this ?

[TangoFox]

I'm not sure it "changed my life", but in my job (Air Traffic Control), there are times I have to work nonstop while traffic piles up. I feel like most other people would be overwhelmed and view the situation as hopeless and give up.

There was a game that I played on my phone which I feel helped prepare me for that experience.

It's called Twenty (by Stephen French). It's a race against the machine to get rid of blocks while rows of blocks are added to the playing field in ever-decreasing intervals.

You have to learn to work faster and faster without making mistakes in order to get a high score. In Air Traffic Control, you have to learn to work faster and faster without making mistakes in order to keep the flying public safe.

Where I think others would view my job as stressful, I view it as a challenge to master.

[slipwalker]

pen-and-paper RPG taught me to "role play", fake it until you make it. In corporate environments, i believe it is an essential skill to anyone.

[kwyjobojoe]

GTA 1 and 2 taught me how to reverse parallel park years before I got my license

[pitched]

For me, the most important one was Diablo 2 because I spent way too much time in it. I got totally pulled into the addictive/gambling side of farming and trading gear, and, there were definitely some opportunities in life I missed because I was spending way too much energy on this.

I know this was the opposite thing you were looking for in your question but what this taught me is how exactly it feels when I get myself caught in this trap. I’m much better now at seeing myself falling into that mindset and then making changes, which has made a world of difference.

[gaws]

> there were definitely some opportunities in life I missed because I was spending way too much energy on this.

Like what?