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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.