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

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".

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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."

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

MOBAs taught me that the correct action is always the one your team expects from you.

I remember being a big lover of red alert 2 when I was 13-15. I generally played on easy mode and never really stretched myself. One day I reached the final mission and really got my ass whooped. Like getting overrun and desperately clicking around while losing everything. That feeling was horrific, terrible - it was the first time I experienced losing so badly and being so overwhelmed. I couldn't play the game for a month after that - I'd just be scared of that mission, of losing control again. Finally after 4-5 weeks I gathered up my courage and sat down to try it again. This time, I played with more focus and attention - I somehow hung on through the endless attacks and surprises. I managed to scrape through and finished the mission. It was an amazing life experience, one that really motivates me to push on when things seem hopeless and desperate. Just give it one more try, even if you'd most likely lose - there's always a chance you can scrape through :)

From Hell Let Loose, a WW2 game that’s more towards simulation than Call of Duty or Battlefield: 1942, I learned the importance of voice communication to coordinate actions. It also helps that I’m much less shy now about talking to strangers. I play as the squad lead and spotter in a tank-crew trio and have to be clear and concise with my words, both into the command channel and to my crew. I am more practiced at giving direct orders rather than dithering or asking what the driver and gunner think we might do (I do like to ask them when we have time to plan, though, especially as the US when trying to flank Tigers).

From videogame Spec-Ops: The Line I learned that we (the US military) used white phosphorous during our assault on the people of Iraq[0]. I may have already known, but the game made it personal.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/White_phosphorus_munitions

In Starcraft it's the importance of humility and learning from others.

You have to learn the best build orders and practice them to a T if you want to do well. Millions of people around the world have honed these to a t.

It's only when you truly understand existing strategies and the meta that you can branch out successfully with your own strategies.

Playing JRPG again has taught me that there is more to storytelling than the mainstream scenarios from Hollywood movies.

Watching day9 explain Starcraft 2 build orders opened my eyes to the powers of recognizing and optimizing for constraints you cannot do anything about, as well as the importance of scouting (I.e. experimenting for the sake of learning), as well as how losing teaches you more than winning.

I think mahjong definitely taught me to play the long game, victory is won not through "heroic" gambits but by consistently making the right decisions over many games.

That, and how there's always something you can do, the state of the game can change at any moment.

Dalmuiti is a card game where you depend on some luck(the cards you are served) & how you play them. It made me realise how most of what people call success is just the luck of birth. In the game if you were given shitty cards you are still very likely to lose & a lot of that is true about life. There’s a tiny chance that you can win with bad cards but you’ve got very little room for mistakes. This makes me think about the folks in SV who are mostly lucky to be born into great circumstances & much of their success had to do with that than they care to admit

playing fallout 3 made me realize that I was not seizing the moment in my life and I was too obsessed on thinking about the future.

I spent a lot of time compulsively accumulating resources while consuming the most boring and poor resources (guns/consumables). In the end I finished the game without really playing with any fun weapon forgetting that I was playing the game to have fun not to get to a goal.

since I realized this I started to enjoy life more and allow myself to relax or spend some money on something just for the fun of it.

Baldurs Gate taught me to love reading. Also English is my second language, and certainly it had a larger part in me reaching A level than anything my teacher ever did.

My coworker brooded on this very same ideas every single day. It became such an obsession for him that he started to spend more of his work time on it. He started to build own game of sort. I and many started to distance from him. This was way back.

It wasn't long before his work slacked and manager had to literally walk him outside the building (read firing).

To this day many in that team couldn't come to make sense of his obsession.

Mass Effect 2. Learned the importance of team building and cooperation.

RuneScape taught 10 year old me basic economics and how to run a business (running lobsters and runes).

World of Warcraft taught me how to manipulate (in game) markets. I sucked at the game but I was good at talking to people to buy bulk materials from them and following auction house trends to make big profits.

Finally call of duty taught me not to get mad.

I've been playing games for a long time. Started with the adventure games like Zork, King's Quest, Masquerade, etc.

What I learned most from some of these games is lateral thinking, especially with Monkey Island and DOTT. Some things will fit in a context, maybe not now but some point in time.

I recent played Onward, the War Sim on the Oculus Rift. I learned that I greatly increase my team's chance of winning if we work as a team and communicate. Going solo/Rambo was not the optimal strategy.

Doom has thought me how to navigate a city with nothing but a paper map :).

I thought GPS had rendered this skill obsolete, until I found myself in a foreign country with a non-working smartphone one day.

I like Slither. Very simple reminder that it is a dog eat dog world. Many valuable lessons within the game...stay hungry, don't get impatient, keep your skills sharp, etc.

Go taught me about the difference between strategy and tactics.

Tribalwars: didnt change my life but man pillaging between tribes must be frustrating as fuck back then

Tibia

As a livelong gamer and lover of video- and boardgames I might have a point of wisdom to share here.

1. You can learn a lot about other people when you play with them.

I found that especially in cooperative titles like Pandemic a lot of the players personality comes to light. If I will ever be in a position to recruit people a round of pandemic with candidates might be one of the best things you can do to assess the following skills:

Communication Strategic Thinking Decisionmaking under Pressure Leadership Teamwork Shortterm vs Longterm Thinking

Also a person that you got to know as a shy and calm introvert might be the complete opposite in a competitive gaming situation, where he might continuously rage and will not stop complaining about everything, completely dropping a facade.

You will also notice people, that have a tendency to cheat or look for other shortcuts (finding shortcuts or "hacks" within the rules is fine and something that I value in other players). Situations where someone asks to take back a move after new information has been revealed, or tries to get additional information through illegal means, because the game is "too hard" or "it won't hurt" or "I will not change my decision based on that" are likely to do so in other situations as well. Especially if playing alone or feeling unwatched.

How people deal with wins and losses - big and small - obviously will tell you a lot as well.

2. You can have a perfect strategy, everything planned out and still lose.

This has been mentioned below and applies especially to games that have rng involved, e.g. Poker. Making the right decisions and losing shortterm, does not mean that your strategy is flawed.

The law of large numbers is at work.

3. Games are mostly about imposing arbitrary rules on a known situation. That's where a lot of the fun comes from.

You can apply the same mechanism in your daily life to make a chore or repetive tasks "interesting".

- Set a new highscore in doing the dishes with only one hand. - You are only allowed to change the plugs of your vaccum cleaner three times for the whole floor. - When cooking for the next week the temperature of your oven is limited to 100° Celsius. - Answer your emails for a day without using words that start with a vowel. - Try to rhyme every sentence that you speak.

Introducing such limits will improve your creativity and bring joy to mundane things.

4. Playing MtG did more for my vocabulary than all english classes I had in school.

5. Persistence is key to reach a goal.

I grew up with an Amiga 500 and a lot of the games that I loved had no save feature. Okay Boomer! When I finally got to a new boss on level 2 with three lives that's all there was. I had three attempts to learn what he does and depending on how difficult it was to get there I might have to replay the 1st and 2nd level again for some hours to get another shot at him. It was annoying, but it got me better and better and lead me to refine my strategies and value every resource I had.

This is a skill that I unfortunally lost over time. Pursuing goals is really hard for me knowadays and I often ponder if - as I still play a lot - the way that games have changed also changed my approach on other things. I find myself often looking for quick fixes - a youtube video on best strategies for a game, tactics for a specific boss. For me all that available information took away the need to really deeply dig into a game and get to know it inside out. And I think that is true for me on a professional level as well.

I feel this question was tailored for me!

I grew up to love history. And read mythologies like the Mahabharata and always glorified wars. I was like 13-14.

It was written in the newspapers that war was bad, my History teacher taught us so, and my father always told me so. But I never bought those. To my early teenager tiny-brain, war was something glorious where you fought for your country/clan. And killing other people effectively was fabulous!

This all came to change when I played Call of Duty (1). It is set in WW2. There were so many deaths! And those deaths were so horrific! I had a sort of an epiphany that each corpse (and there were a lot) lying in there is somebody's brother, son, lover, and so on. And they were dead. Quotes about war was flashed across screen after each "mission".

There was a church scene and so many people died there. The condition was so horrific. I realized for the first time in my life that war so horrific and always a bad thing.

Very few transformations in very few persons' lives are dramatic. But this was exactly as I write. Call of Duty (1) taught me to hate wars. I grew up to be a person to whom wars are a very bad thing.

Especially for the people who have to fight.

I loved to play Call of Duty but decided that wars are cool only in games. Not in real life.