While on the topic of games that change your thinking or give you skills, any recommendations?
A few I benefited from:
Chess: for general lessons of resourcefulness, creativity, calculation, pausing before acting, and practicing being comfortable with irresolution (e.g. when two or more pieces could be traded but you have to resist the urge to simplify if doing so worsens your position). Chess also opened my eyes to how much distractions and inadequate sleep affect cognition (my elo can drop 100 points when badly lacking sleep, and another 100 if playing in a public place with distractions).
Vim Adventures: not exciting enough to recommend for gaming alone, but it made it bearable to repeat vim key strokes for 3-4 hours per day for a few days straight until I had the muscle memory to use it for most coding tasks without too much clumsiness.
DuoLingo: less of a 'game'; more of an educational tool, but still worth the mention as it made learning foreign language much easier than doing so via book/audio.
It sets you up with a logistical mindset, you learn to think about setting up a "supply chain" before you do something. This becomes a very abstract skillset that you start to apply in multiple areas of your life.
Secondly, it takes your thinking to a higher, more abstract level when you learn to build factories that build factories that build...
Thirdly, you learn polymorphic thinking in a high level. Like, products that are then taken through different processes produce entirely different things, and then some of them are fed back to this system.
I have played the game for low two-digit hours, but it augmented my thinking in a concrete way.
I will highly recommend Factorio.
Chess has also benefited me in being more far-sighted in shorter terms. Especially in situations with real rivals, or even without.
Scrabble had helped me learn in an early age that clever tricks and pragmatism help me win more than qualities like "elegance", etc. It was a lesson 'thrown in my face'.
I have noticed the same effect from studying different methods of information organization (such as ontologies or mind maps).
Experience with a structured mental path is a fundamental part of learning. I've seen many educational games that explicitly teach skills, but don't necessarily offer an experience path for the application of those skills. Factorio is more along the lines of what an educational game should be.
I actively collect methods of information organization, so "which have I studied" is too broad to list in a comment.
Learning resources - the greatest learning resource is teaching yourself how to learn, and understanding how your personal learning system works.
When I go to learn something:
- I don't use just one source. I look at multiple sources, comparing different perspectives as part of the learning process. No one author will explain things in "just the right way" to make things click.
- I build a dynamic MECE (mutually exclusive, collectively exhaustive) "framework" as I learn a subject, which can organize every piece of information I might need to save. If a piece of information does not fit the framework, the framework is changed.
- I use image search to quickly find different perspectives of a particular concept.
Information organization recommendations: In general, I would start with "the basics" - a process - even if you're sure you understand it well. See if you can organize what you know into a MECE framework, and find out if your understanding of the information is "siloed" (based on a condition, such as context). Ask yourself how broadly you are able to apply your understanding, or pick an "unrelated" subject and organize it from a process view as an exercise. Look at different models of a process and which components are always included, and which are not.
Factorio is amazing and the way it makes you remap certain parts of your brain works differently depending on the person, and the paths they took in the game, so it is a little hard to describe.
Based on how other people try to explain it, I'd say the closest comparison matches the experience of being a "traditional" programmer being exposed to haskell.
You've kind of just got to play it to experience it yourself.
There's two parts to factorio:
1. You have to figure out what the next goal you need to focus on is, and then work backwards through the steps you'd need to achieve to get there.
2. You need to wrap your head around the task at hand figuring out how to build pipelined systems in a limited space. You might think you need A which can be turned into B which can be turned into C, which is correct. But it turns out the next step you planned requires some of your C to be turned into D while still making C, then you need to combine come D with B to make E, but suddenly you're not getting enough C to make D because you're using too much of the B to make E. You can swap some of the things that turns A into B to make B at a faster rate, but the A to B thing takes up more physical space, so now you need to move the things around in space without ending up getting tangled.
Repeat these two things in a loop for the basic game loop, then add in the occasional emergencies that you didn't foresee that can wildly change your current objective.
The difficulty curve in the game is designed in such a way to always let you figure out what your next objective is, but without you knowing all the pieces to get there.
And there are multiple paths to the end so you need to figure out how you're getting there.
Plus each of the ways you can use to get to the end work in different ways, sometimes subtle, sometimes utterly different.
Because Factorio is always training your brain in different ways, you'll find that you're way of problem solving has become better every 10 hours or so. You'll randomly get ideas out of the game of how to improve things or do things in a different way and you can try them out whenever you get back to the game.
Even when you finish it, you can go back and retry it to see just how much you've retrained your brain. You might even want to try the different paths to brain train other methods.
You can finish the game for the first time in about 50 hours. Depending on how much you game, this may be a lot, or hardly anything, but I'll point out that it's not one of those repetitive daily-mission grind-fest second job games. It's much more like reading a really good book series that you're enjoying.
Play CTFs, maybe the Flare-On challenge if you particularly enjoy reversing. Microcorruption is a just small taste of what the full CTF scene has to offer. picoCTF and pwn college are good starting points for beginners.
while True: learn() comes to mind. Solving puzzles that involve thinking in terms of flows, accidentally learning some machine learning, and things that would transfer to tasks like designing computer networks, or scaling apps where the challenge is some choke point.
Polytopia is chess-like to me, in that there are many scenarios where you need to move precisely in order to pull off an attack or defense. While chess would be considered to be heavily focused on military and territory, Polytopia requires you to balance military, territory, economy, and technology development. It generates a lot of questions for me, that I end up trying to answer with small coding projects, like what’s the optimal way to expand using this tribe on this map type, or whatever.
Helps with reflexes and hand eye coordination but more importantly it fosters a zen mindset. Have to roll with the punches and work the problem instead of getting frustrated after you envitably die for the 1000th time.
In general transferring skills through games is quite hard, except for the skill you are actually practicing in the game (i.e. by playing chess you will mostly improve your chess ELO). There is some research going on to broaden this area though [0].
Where gaming and more recently the 'educational' apps one sees advertised on certain websites and youtube channels definitely do help is raising awareness and motivation to the featured scientific disciplines.
From experience, I can say that there are many games with transferable skills.
At the top of my list is Factorio, and second is actually World of Warcraft.
More generally, there is a lot to learn from game design that you can learn through playing. The question of how to make taxes palatable, for example, is really no different to the question of how to challenge a player without frustrating them.
I believe the value of games are poorly understood, partially because chess, a game that has nothing left to teach us, muddies the conversation
> "because chess, a game that has nothing left to teach us"
That's a wild and weird take. It may not teach the collective "us", if your "us" is a very small set of well-established, experienced, smart, and mature people always in their element, then, yes, Chess has arguably nothing left to teach "us".
But it can be a very good learning experience for the absolute majority of people.
What about Go, or Checkers, or Call of Duty, or...?
That's the issue. Yes sitting down and concentrating on difficult tasks for long periods of time is good exercise. So is jogging, which isn't sitting down. Or rowing. Or lifting weights. Or...
Chess probably has much less benefits than learning a musical instrument, for example.
I will say that playing counter strike for money has given me confidence in stressful situations in a workplace, as well as helping me navigate tension between team members/co-workers.
It is mostly soft skill type stuff. For example, something goes wrong and veers from an original plan, and you have to come up with a solution and adapt in the moment.
An idle game like cookie clicker can teach you much about what addiction could look like for you. It depends a lot on the person what kind of game will "click" and if they will "click" at all, but if they do you will be utterly addicted for a while.
This sounds like an awful idea!
I have an addictive personality, and cookie clicker and similar idle games have taught me a lot about how I feel when I'm addicted to something, how it affects my decision making capabilities, how I can detect it early, what I can do to get out of the loop.
This is not something you'll pick up automatically by playing these kinds of games, you'll have to deliberately and mindfully interact with them, but if you do you can learn a lot about how you respond to addictive stimuli and hopefully prevent a lot of way, way worse addiction in the future through these lessons.
I recommend the vim adventures demo for the gaming alone. Haven't tried the rest of it, having balked at the price tag (knowing vim well enough that I think I'd be paying for the gaming alone).
Portal 2 has some truly unbelievable custom maps that hit the sweet spot for brain games mixed with hi-if graphics IMO. If you’ve never played the low-grav lunar levels or used the time traveling gun, you’re missing out.
Into the Breach is the closest you’re ever going to get to a chess sequel.
I love the Talos Principle 1 and 2, if you liked Portal you will probably like them, they rely less on platforming and more on puzzles that require you to use the puzzle elements in creative ways. The puzzle elements are easy to understand, like a jammer beam gun which jams a force field door when placed. One of the early and obvious tricks is if you have two jammers, how you can bring them both with you through a door.
They also have quite a bit of humanist philosophy, in my opinion they do a good job of being relentlessly optimistic in a way that feels genuine without being overbearingly techno-optimist.
DuoLingo is deceptive at best. It's made addictive at the outset so you feel good. You feel like you're learning. But long term the platform has what is now dubbed enshittification. It gets exponentially harder to keep up with reviews, there are known problems with the lesson structure that will never be addressed, etc. And if you pay money, they'll make it easier for you. Hm.
Real critique example: Duo relies on 1:1 translation. Native language learning isn't even close to 1:1. Every language learner hits a point where they can say, "I know exactly what this phrase means in the target language, and there is no direct translation in English". To finish a language in Duo, you will have to memorize dozens/hundreds+ of totally misleading and bad translations like this.
Tldr. Selling kids DuoLingo for language learning is like selling kids cigarettes to help them learn to build a fire.
A few I benefited from:
Chess: for general lessons of resourcefulness, creativity, calculation, pausing before acting, and practicing being comfortable with irresolution (e.g. when two or more pieces could be traded but you have to resist the urge to simplify if doing so worsens your position). Chess also opened my eyes to how much distractions and inadequate sleep affect cognition (my elo can drop 100 points when badly lacking sleep, and another 100 if playing in a public place with distractions).
Vim Adventures: not exciting enough to recommend for gaming alone, but it made it bearable to repeat vim key strokes for 3-4 hours per day for a few days straight until I had the muscle memory to use it for most coding tasks without too much clumsiness.
DuoLingo: less of a 'game'; more of an educational tool, but still worth the mention as it made learning foreign language much easier than doing so via book/audio.