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!]
Image by AndreasAux from Pixabay
I really liked this article! I used to say that the biggest lesson I learned from World of Warcraft was how important it felt while I was playing it (like grinding 40 hours of an unenjoyable game mode for a battle axe), and then how immediately unimportant it became the moment I quit. Later in life I noticed the same pattern in many other domains like certain social ladders or some kinds of jobs.
Oooh! Blood on the Clocktower. It's a suspenseful, social game about betraying and killing your friends, but it actually teaches you about probabilistic hypothesis-building and Bayesian updating.