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".

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?

Within the context of the reality that eventually your cousin will have to work and sustain himself, isn’t it rational to capitalize on the immediate free time he has? He may never again get that same stretch of stress-less time to just dither.

I think, on a playing field where people knew they could just literally sit in a chair all day for the rest of their lives, other motivations would eventually reveal themselves besides sloth. People would shift focus to power, charity, status, popularity, etc. As it stands, those games seem to be what make a society more complex, but they are usually reserved for people who have already figured out the money game first...

I always feel this deep repulsion towards society. At first there was a time when people were free, they could grow what they wanted and live how they wanted nobody gave a damn because you cannot tell me what to do with my life.

Then, as a society, you herd the population into cities where they can't grow their food, put the poor into forced service of the rich or they can't feed themselves or live. The poor lower class beings have the moral burden of working else they are some sort of lowly scumbag. The rich, they don't have this constraint - they are morally obligated to just live their lives.

The thinking that, "but hey! that guy is just going to sit in his chair and not do anything" - Well, that's exactly what people that have lots of money do right now. They just live their lives, they sit in their nice chairs for as long as they want - nobody blinks an eyelid. The moment you think a poor person is not working you start to think he is scum.

Look, its a game that makes things better for everyone and it has its upsides, agreed. The thing is - society does not need to be like it is right now. Between money and institutions people are literally put in a cage with no real escape hatch. The inability to escape all this "money-govt-society" is the problem.

Say a tiger wanted to claim an area and feed itself and be self sufficient he could do it. Now, we like to think we're better than animals. Are we really? all of us? Say you as a person with zero money decided to just build your house using things you find around that area that you don't own and try to live off the land. You cant do that, someones going to come knocking saying you're on someone elses property. That tiger out there is more free than the person. Problem is, there is no escape hatch where you say, screw civilization I want to be free - I don't want what it has to offer, I live on this land here. Only if you have sufficient amount of money are you actually free to live as you want. Otherwise you better stay in your economic-class and feed the monster of society..

> At first there was a time when people were free, they could grow what they wanted and live how they wanted nobody gave a damn because you cannot tell me what to do with my life.

When exactly was that? Because you know, humans are apes. And we don't observe any apes, any monkeys, any primates which are free from their societal norms. So when exactly were humans (or any other kind of ape) entirely free? Before our ancestors even evolved into monkeys?

> Say a tiger wanted to claim an area and feed itself and be self sufficient he could do it.

Unless other, stronger tiger decided otherwise.

And why are you choosing non-social animal to compare to social one? If you want a big cat then pick lion for comparison. Because lions gather into prides (and not without reasons).

"When exactly was that? Because you know, humans are apes."

An ape can leave its group and move to a different territory and not have someone else decide his life for him.

If there is no path for being able to attempt self sustenance, to be able to live and grow your own food, to be able to choose what social group you want to be a part of, you are stuck in the game - you have to make money, whether you like it or not.

All other living creature on earth can get by just fine without having imaginary against their name in a database. The cruelty is in the fact that society holds and hoards all the resources that will let you live and will make those available only if you have those imaginary numbers. It is presented as being for the greater good of everyone, but in essence the whole system is put in place so people that don't have resources can be pressured to do the dirty work of the people that have the resources.

> An ape can leave its group and move to a different territory and not have someone else decide his life for him.

Ah, the myth of the noble savage taken to evolutionary extreme.

I highly recommend Steven Pinker's "The Blank Slate" if you'd like to disabuse yourself of this pernicious old wives tale. Then his "Better angels of our nature" should fix you right up with a more accurate and informed view of the world and society we live in.

Fruits, rotten meat, mushrooms, roots - all of those are still in the jungle. What's holding you back from abandoning the achievements of modern society and embracing the livelihood of primitive, but "free" animal?

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.

I can only agree with in the way that the games do not exactly model "real life". I guess whoever had such a model would likely exploit it for personal gain rather than making a good video game.

Still, the better sophisticated MMORPGS (e.g. AO, or EVE) tend to mimick it as much as possible. Resources may seem unlimited at first sight but these games actually try to implement a universe that offers limited resources and a monetary system that responds to offer and demand, and may be subject to inflation/deflation. Failing to achieve this exposes game owners to attrition by loyal gamers (e.g. sudden price drops/increases in rare objects).

Also, AO was exposed to a hack that involved duplicating objects (I think it was in 2013), the exploitation of this vulnerability triggered a cascade of events that resulted in the deflation of the currency in the game and took months to be fixed. Again, this also raised attrition amongst gamers.

In some online universes, resources are scarce enough so that players engage in the trading of virtual goods through external transactions (i.e. virtual items paid through real money). This also tends to affect the internal currency in the game.

You mentioned the "shelter" example. I think this is where we get an analogy with State intervention (i.e. taxes) when the players do not allocate resources to actually set up theses infrastructures in the virtual universe.

I agree with you, it is an imperfect imitation of our world. But acknowledging this as formally insufficient/imperfect would require acknowledging that we actually understand what characterizes and constitutes our reality, and that we can somehow infer that a theoretical model is unsustainable without even testing it. I think that if I were to accept this, that would mean I surrender and stop believing there are better models :)

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.

A lot of shit employers are worried they would have to treat employees better and the cycle of abuse would stop

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.

Thank you for the reference. My only issue with his analysis was that he proposed an income in the form of a monetary payment. I think this is exactly why UBI is impossible and we should rather have universal service. In other words: one should not receive monetary payment but be granted unrestricted access to vital goods and services instead.

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.

The useful thing about universal basic income is that you get to throw out all the inefficiencies of moderate/centrist policy.

No more deciding who is entitled to what. Just give everyone enough and let them go from there.

The thing that is holding us back from expanding the social programs we have is an obsessive fear of giving the undeserving "too much".

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.

> 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.

This is GP's entire point. Given the freedom to choose what to do, "do nothing" is not a common choice. In a world where everyone has the option to say, "I don't want to work", most won't actually say that, especially in the long term.

> In the interest of fairness, then, all who are able should contribute.

Why fairness? The system we have now is incredibly unfair. UBI would at least provide more fairness by removing wage slavery.

Points 2 and 3 are about trivial implementation details:

2. Addictions are already putting people in poverty, and the best solution is recovery from those addictions. That recovery requires access to healthcare.

3. Children are people who can't really manage finances yet, so it's pretty obvious that their caretakers would be recipient to their income. People aren't having that many children, and wealthier parents tend to have significantly fewer children than parents who experience poverty. Remember you were a child once, too.

4. Of course people who are working will earn more than they have to pay in taxes. It will look like less than they make today if you don't include their universal basic income, but it will be entirely (by definition) disposable income.

4. There's no need to keep people honest in the first place. That's a key feature. You can only cheat social security if you aren't entitled to it, and literally everyone is entitled to UBI.

> 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.

Prove it. I don't see any evidence to support that conclusion, and I see a wealth of evidence that contradicts it.

The reality is that most people don't need to be working in the first place. Right now, half of the wealth in the US is concentrated to only 50 individuals, yet most of the rest of us aren't experiencing scarcity. Those who are don't choose to out of laziness.

> This is GP's entire point. Given the freedom to choose what to do, "do nothing" is not a common choice. In a world where everyone has the option to say, "I don't want to work", most won't actually say that, especially in the long term.

Absolutely wrong? The U-3 unemployment rate always lags 3-7% behind the U-6: https://unemploymentdata.com/current-u6-unemployment-rate/

To suggest up to 7% of people just not looking for a job is "not a common choice" is terribly misleading. Even during good periods for the economy, the number sits around 4%. I don't expect that number to get smaller by adding UBI. Do you?

> Why fairness? The system we have now is incredibly unfair. UBI would at least provide more fairness by removing wage slavery.

Why not fairness? How many individuals can you speak to who have done _literally anything_ to invest in their career skills who are earning "wage slavery" levels of pay? If you're 30 years old, and the best thing you can do is make Subway sandwiches... what are you doing with your life?

> 2. Addictions are already putting people in poverty, and the best solution is recovery from those addictions. That recovery requires access to healthcare.

Access to healthcare and UBI are different discussions entirely. And often "access to healthcare" by itself is not sufficient to get people to stop being addicted. You actually have to hold them accountable. I recommend watching a documentary called "Seattle is Dying" [1] to see why just being nice is not a solution.

> 3. Children are people who can't really manage finances yet, so it's pretty obvious that their caretakers would be recipient to their income. People aren't having that many children, and wealthier parents tend to have significantly fewer children than parents who experience poverty. Remember you were a child once, too.

Ah, so we just give people more money to have more children. I don't see any problem with that - it clearly can't be abused.

> 4. Of course people who are working will earn more than they have to pay in taxes. It will look like less than they make today if you don't include their universal basic income, but it will be entirely (by definition) disposable income.

What point are you even making here? The money to pay for UBI has to come from somewhere. If it comes from taxes, the people who are working and making beyond some threshold will now be making less. And what is that threshold? $70k? $80k? $100k? If the government just prints more money, inflation becomes a concern and that impacts everybody.

> 4. There's no need to keep people honest in the first place. That's a key feature. You can only cheat social security if you aren't entitled to it, and literally everyone is entitled to UBI.

Uh... lol? Are you aware of many fradulent benefits were claimed over the last year or so of the pandemic [2]? Many of those claims were people stealing _other peoples'_ benefits, viable either because the recipient was dead, incapacitated, or in prison. There is no "feature" here.

> Prove it. I don't see any evidence to support that conclusion, and I see a wealth of evidence that contradicts it.

If you don't see the evidence, you haven't really been looking very hard. At any given moment in the US, 3% or more of our population could be working and isn't even looking for a job.

> The reality is that most people don't need to be working in the first place.

Says who?

> Right now, half of the wealth in the US is concentrated to only 50 individuals, yet most of the rest of us aren't experiencing scarcity.

Wealth concentration is an entirely different problem than UBI.

> Those who are don't choose to out of laziness.

There are absolutely people who are living in poverty because they are lazy. I can tell you that with certainty because I know people who fit that mold. And I can tell you, knowing people who actually work in social service roles, there are more than you think.

UBI is a non-starter for the same reason communism is. Humans are inherently greedy, and any system we operate in must account for that. Capitalism is effective precisely because it exploits that greed. It's not without its drawbacks, but nothing is.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpAi70WWBlw [2] https://reason.com/2021/02/22/there-has-been-a-mind-boggling...

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

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.

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

I remember Age of Mythology (AOM) was like that. I would spend a lot of time investing in defenses only to realize my opponent - who was more agile and wanted to just get shit done - would attack me early on. He would lose the first battles, but I would lose the war.

I ended up adopting a more agile strategy where castle-building was not that important anymore. Instead, I would try to get shit done as soon as possible.

Fixed fortifications are monuments to the stupidity of man - Patton (I think)

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.

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.

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

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.

kobayashi maru?

I think cadets knew they were playing the Kobayashi scenario in the movies and the books. In games of poker or games of magic, you often don't sit down to a table knowing you're in a no-win scenario. Even uneven stacks in no-limit aren't guaranteed defeat. When encountering a Magic matchup which is heavily in the other person's favor, you might draw well, they might brick a lot or misplay, and you could win a near-unwinnable game. A lesson I've learned from these games is even when I've had all of the advantage, when it looks like I'm ahead on board, there's a possibility of losing to your own misplays and to random chance.

When you're trying to get better at these games, you do your best to isolate chance and make the correct play each time, but simply playing well doesn't guarantee success. No amount of playskill can overcome mulling to an initial starting hand of 2 cards because you never saw a land in your first five hands. A 60 randomized card deck with 19 lands is favored to draw at least one land in its first five 7 card hands, but Fortuna might scowl at any moment.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

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.

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.

Yeah I totally agree. The only one I’ve played recently that recreated the magic of childhood for me was Breath of the Wild.

I played a lot of that. Fantastic game. Huge amount of playtime.

I think if I was a kid still it would be the best game I had ever played.

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."

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.

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

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

Nothing so pithy anyway. I'm not really competent to advise on chess matters, being a pretty bad player still. Steinitz did little more than provide me with a way of understanding where I went wrong when I make my inevitable mistakes.

I understand that Nimzowitsch's two books, My System & Chess Praxis, might satisfy a desire for fundamental principles. I haven't read them though.

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.

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

Like what?

I relate to u/pitched on getting sucked into Diablo 2 and missing out on other experiences. I’m still growing up emotionally, and back then I was basically a child, like Tom Hanks in the movie “Big”, and also in graduate school. I missed out on: making more/closer friends, making more connections with people (networking towards career options, etc), physical exercise (I was active but needed more training for my core; this is clear now as I age), emotional maturity, reading books (always been a reader thanks to my parents reading to me a lot, but Diablo 2 and World of Warcraft put a big dent in time spent learning from authors), practicing music (“It’s Never Too Late”, book by John Holt on learning cello later in life), practicing other art, writing letters to friends and family, … the list goes on, and those are the main ones off the top of my head. I tend not to stray into regret about the time I sunk into these games, and instead to reevaluate how I spend my time and attention in the present moment. In looking back, it seems I was hiding from emotions, from unresolved adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), and those game pass-times made it easier to avoid facing my fears (or failure, of being vulnerable, and more I may not yet be aware of). I graduated largely thanks to a couple caring friends who saw my potential and invested in me. I try to be open enough these days to be helpful to others with whom my life experience resonates, so that they might be more-aware of opportunities as they arise, and more-able to switch gears and go.

All of these things hit for me but it’s really that last sentence that I was trying to focus on. Being able to feel this kind of addiction taking hold and switching gears is very, very important. And not just for games, being able to put down a bad novel is the same skill, I think. It’s important to know what you’re getting out of what you’re doing and make sure that it’s helpful.

I don’t think games are bad as a class though. The perfect example in the opposite direction for me was Neverwinter Nights. I had a lot of fun making campaigns, building teams and hosting servers. That first time I tried to get someone to connect to a 192.168 IP is something I’ll never forget!

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

I'm not sure I agree with this lesson. I've sunk 1000s of hours into DOTA 2, and would agree with you in such a game where emotions run high and considered, reasoned responses aren't possible, but I think it's a poor takeaway from the game. Sometimes it is correct to stand your ground and stand up for what you believe is the correct course of action. I'd instead emphasise the importance of emotional control and the importance of morale as a better lesson from MOBAs.

Nearly every time standing your ground splits your team and gives your opponents an advantage.

The best thing you can do is communicate your intentions to your team, but if they don't want to go with along with it it's almost always better to just stick with them. I think being willing to give up your own (obviously superior) plan is a form of emotional control.

In DOTA, sure. In real life, that lesson isn't uniformly applicable, and could lead one to give up and go with the herd when that might not be the right thing to do.

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.

Honestly starcraft has taught me the opposite of that. It taught me that paying attention and making things up on the spot works well into 5k MMR (upper 90th percentile of performance).

It taught me that most people overthink. Then go and try to do fancy things without doing basic things correctly first.

I believe a fair amount of that translates into real life. People think too much about non important things and neglect the actually important stuff in the process.

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

100% plus resource allocation and development.

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.

It was the original Battlefield that really drove this point home for me. If everyone can get at least one kill per death, your team will win. So if there is a war, there can’t ever be more than a 50/50 chance of me making it home alive.

An interesting and insightful thing about CoD1 was also how easy it was to die - if I remember right it only took one or two hits.

And just imagine with friendly fire turned on. Even if it was all accidental (no trolls), you can die from any direction at all times.