5 ms·

@adrianhon: here's my trick. Instead of creating serious games. Teach people to be serious players! I have learned a ton from the following games: - Poker (s

@adrianhon: here's my trick. Instead of creating serious games. Teach people to be serious players! I have learned a ton from the following games: - Poker (statistics) - Any game (English) - Factorio (programming / software design) - Warcraft 3 (mental arithmetic and resource management) - World of Warcraft (market manipulation -- I created a temporary monopoly on an item and earned 500 gold within an hour as level 20 player, culture -- I met a South African person who spoke Afrikaans while I spoke Dutch) - The Werewolves of Millers Hollow / Maffia (politics, lie detection -- or lack of it, the difference between bad actors and ignorant people doing the exact same thing) - Imperial 2030 (investing)

WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago
- Eve Online (spreadsheets)
- cpv 6y ago
  - KSP (orbital mechanics)
  - MayeulC 6y ago
    Or just plain physics for this one. It's fun learning by yourself, though a little of hand-holding could get you up to speed faster. I believe "Besiege" could be a great way to teach mechanics and physics as well :)
hanselot 6y ago
On this, even the games with horrendous spelling teach you how not to spell. There is value in training your spam filters from an early age.
burntoutfire 6y ago
For most people, poker will probably more likely lead into a gambling addiction (or at least a habit of regularly flushing money down the train at the tables) than an inquiry into probability and statistics. Most people are probably just not inquisitive enough to dig into the maths behind poker.
- Wowfunhappy 6y ago
  I think you need a teacher to put the game in context. Let's put aside for a moment the optics of a school teacher having their class play Poker (even though obviously they wouldn't be using money). I can imagine a lesson plan going something like: 1. Have kids play some individual games with each other. 2. Stop the games, and go over some of the actual math concepts behind Poker. At this point, the kids are engaged and will want to learn better strategies. 3. Run through a game as a group, with the teacher asking the class what they should do each turn. Ask students to explain why they think one move is better than another, get brief discussions going where applicable, and write probabilities on the board. 4. Let the students play another round of individual games to apply what they've learned.
  - tekkk 6y ago
    While I think the intention and idea is good, you should not teach kids how to play poker. Rather, use a board game with cards and simulate somewhat similar environment but with no inclination towards real gambling whatsoever. Sure, if the "kids" at hand are university students, you could use poker. But I find it extremely dangerous to teach kids poker theory, who as theorized by the Dunning-Kruger effect might start believing themselves to be really good at it, and then proceed to spend a lot of time and money on a pursuit that might not lead them to happiness. You can teach statistics without making any new gambling addicts in this world. I know the majority of the students wouldn't be affected and the effect could be even positive, but for some the drive to gamble is so strong that they really go off if that predisposition is nurtured. Although perhaps they are ticking time bombs either way, so no amount of protection will save them. But yeah, you got to be careful teaching kids positive feedback loops on things that might have serious drawbacks.
    - eru 6y ago
      That study by Dunning and Kruger did not find that 'Dunning-Kruger effect' that you are citing here. (What they found is that both more and less competent individuals err in their assessment of their own skills towards average competence. The less competent don't give themselves higher marks than the more competent give themselves.) Btw, the kids who are worse at it would probably get their ass handed to them in the class games already anyway. Even after some training. So that's a good corrective and immediate feedback.
joshvm 6y ago
[For kids] I think you can rule out any online game, or any gambling game (both will be age restricted). Saying that, teaching kids how to play cards is probably worth it. Board games are generally good for mental arithmetic, particularly Monopoly. And there are less "gambley" card games that teach statistics - Bridge, for example. Pretty much any card game which forces you to assess the odds of what your opponents have. There are some decent puzzle video games out there. I grew up playing The Logical Journey of the Zoombinis, which was essentially a series of puzzles where you had to figure out the rules (Mastermind style) or your blue fellas wouldn't make it to the promised land. Some of the puzzles were genuinely hard and it was one of the few standout educational games I remember. I like this Steam review: > This game is exactly how I remember it. And that's a good thing. Zoombinis is about a group of refugees who look for home on a new land. You get to meet many racist locals who discriminate you based on your appearance and you can work as a slave by making countless pizzas for an insufferable anthropomorphic tree stump. 10/10. Highly recommended. I wondered about general RPGs or adventure games, but while those are fun (and good for language), the puzzles tend not to be that educational IMO. A lot of the time your performance depends on how well you can guess what the developer intended - these are not perfect worlds, but you play as if they are, so actions you might expect to perform often don't work. I definitely used GameFAQs a lot growing up. That said - I did learn about the concept of reliably seeding PRNGs to make enemies drop the best loot in Golden Sun. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoombinis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoombinis
- Stevvo 6y ago
  More toppings! There's something on that I don't like.
lostgame 6y ago
I learned a lot about statistics from Pokémon. My friend went to school for statistics because of it.
watwut 6y ago
The time spent vs how much one learned is pretty bad tho. And also related, games like world of warcraft are massive time sunk.
WalterBright 6y ago
> Imperial 2030 (investing) I expect you'll find that investing for real is very different from investing in a game. Investing for real means trying to control your irrational impulses such as greed vs fear of loss.
foobiekr 6y ago
I really like Factorio but I think it's a bit of a stretch to describe it as teaching programming or software design. Maybe, conceptually, data flow. Certainly, Human Resource Machine does teach programming.
- _jjkk 6y ago
  Factorio quickly demonstrates to the player the danger and cost of bolt-on / ad-hoc / spaghetti code solutions, and likewise the benefits of a bit of forethought. Doing some pre-planning of your factory's eventual layout will have you advancing through the tech tree much, much faster (and without rebuilding critical sections all the time!)
  - dlhavema 6y ago
    I wouldn't attributed this to programming but pre-planning in general benefits a lot of places. That goes to the comment in the article that "a bad plan is better than no plan". I totally know what you mean a spaghetti factory is just as hard to deal with as spaghetti code... until you have bots and you can actually copy paste your factory around to cut and paste your factory it's super hard to fix the problem.
- Balgair 6y ago
  Factorio is very close to Eagle and other PCB designing tools.
  - imtringued 6y ago
    I have only used KiCad and I actually don't see the similarity. In KiCad you start by designing a circuit schematic first. In Factorio you start building whatever you want. You have potentially have to create your own custom parts including their physical footprint based on existing chips. In Factorio every part is already included in the "part library". The PCB design phase automatically connects parts with traces correctly. The human designer is just responsible for the layout. In Factorio you keep the design in your head and place each conveyor tile one by one. PCBs usually have multiple layers and it's common to have dedicated VCC and GND planes just for power transmission. Although the electric grid in Factorio is technically a separate layer, you have to extend the grid by placing transmission lines. I will accept that the idea of non overlapping traces/conveyor belts is similar but overall the workflow just isn't the same. To be fair I haven't actually done anything beyond following a bunch of tutorials on making PCBs. I have yet to send a design to a manufacturer. It's possible that Eagle and Altium are significantly different to KiCad but I personally stick with opensource tools and even if they may have significantly worse UX I actually love the extra challenge. Just shows that other than paying bills to stay alive nothing on this planet should prevent you from learning electronic design, mechanical design and software development on your own.
mrhappyunhappy 6y ago
I did the same in WoW :) Bought up all the versions of a certain item in AH and sold at extreme markup over time. As more came up on AH I’d just buy them all up and continue. This lasted for quite some time and I diversified into other items. Let’s just say I could afford anything in that game :)
- purrcat259 6y ago
  If you would humor me, what kind of item are you talking about? Pets?
  - mettamage 6y ago
    In my case it was the egg needed for making a gingerbread cookie on Christmass. There was only one low level area that would drop them 100%. So I farmed it en-masse, no one else did.
Balgair 6y ago
One trend I've found interesting is take industrial design software tools (things for CAD, PCB, FPGA, etc) and then 'dumb' them down and add hostile creatures to destroy the player's designs. It's not a bad method. Literally, make simple code and add hostile bugs to it.
- eru 6y ago
  Coding-inspired puzzle games appeal to quite a few people. Zachtronics does some very good abstract ones. Quite a few of his games are even outright gamifying assembly programming. Things like factorio are on the more 'applied' or concrete end of the spectrum.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

WrtCdEvrydy 6y ago

- Eve Online (spreadsheets)

cpv 6y ago
- KSP (orbital mechanics)
- MayeulC 6y ago
  Or just plain physics for this one. It's fun learning by yourself, though a little of hand-holding could get you up to speed faster. I believe "Besiege" could be a great way to teach mechanics and physics as well :)

hanselot 6y ago

On this, even the games with horrendous spelling teach you how not to spell. There is value in training your spam filters from an early age.

burntoutfire 6y ago

For most people, poker will probably more likely lead into a gambling addiction (or at least a habit of regularly flushing money down the train at the tables) than an inquiry into probability and statistics. Most people are probably just not inquisitive enough to dig into the maths behind poker.

Wowfunhappy 6y ago
I think you need a teacher to put the game in context. Let's put aside for a moment the optics of a school teacher having their class play Poker (even though obviously they wouldn't be using money). I can imagine a lesson plan going something like: 1. Have kids play some individual games with each other. 2. Stop the games, and go over some of the actual math concepts behind Poker. At this point, the kids are engaged and will want to learn better strategies. 3. Run through a game as a group, with the teacher asking the class what they should do each turn. Ask students to explain why they think one move is better than another, get brief discussions going where applicable, and write probabilities on the board. 4. Let the students play another round of individual games to apply what they've learned.
- tekkk 6y ago
  While I think the intention and idea is good, you should not teach kids how to play poker. Rather, use a board game with cards and simulate somewhat similar environment but with no inclination towards real gambling whatsoever. Sure, if the "kids" at hand are university students, you could use poker. But I find it extremely dangerous to teach kids poker theory, who as theorized by the Dunning-Kruger effect might start believing themselves to be really good at it, and then proceed to spend a lot of time and money on a pursuit that might not lead them to happiness. You can teach statistics without making any new gambling addicts in this world. I know the majority of the students wouldn't be affected and the effect could be even positive, but for some the drive to gamble is so strong that they really go off if that predisposition is nurtured. Although perhaps they are ticking time bombs either way, so no amount of protection will save them. But yeah, you got to be careful teaching kids positive feedback loops on things that might have serious drawbacks.
  - eru 6y ago
    That study by Dunning and Kruger did not find that 'Dunning-Kruger effect' that you are citing here. (What they found is that both more and less competent individuals err in their assessment of their own skills towards average competence. The less competent don't give themselves higher marks than the more competent give themselves.) Btw, the kids who are worse at it would probably get their ass handed to them in the class games already anyway. Even after some training. So that's a good corrective and immediate feedback.

joshvm 6y ago

[For kids] I think you can rule out any online game, or any gambling game (both will be age restricted). Saying that, teaching kids how to play cards is probably worth it. Board games are generally good for mental arithmetic, particularly Monopoly. And there are less "gambley" card games that teach statistics - Bridge, for example. Pretty much any card game which forces you to assess the odds of what your opponents have. There are some decent puzzle video games out there. I grew up playing The Logical Journey of the Zoombinis, which was essentially a series of puzzles where you had to figure out the rules (Mastermind style) or your blue fellas wouldn't make it to the promised land. Some of the puzzles were genuinely hard and it was one of the few standout educational games I remember. I like this Steam review: > This game is exactly how I remember it. And that's a good thing. Zoombinis is about a group of refugees who look for home on a new land. You get to meet many racist locals who discriminate you based on your appearance and you can work as a slave by making countless pizzas for an insufferable anthropomorphic tree stump. 10/10. Highly recommended. I wondered about general RPGs or adventure games, but while those are fun (and good for language), the puzzles tend not to be that educational IMO. A lot of the time your performance depends on how well you can guess what the developer intended - these are not perfect worlds, but you play as if they are, so actions you might expect to perform often don't work. I definitely used GameFAQs a lot growing up. That said - I did learn about the concept of reliably seeding PRNGs to make enemies drop the best loot in Golden Sun. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoombinis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zoombinis

Stevvo 6y ago
More toppings! There's something on that I don't like.

lostgame 6y ago

I learned a lot about statistics from Pokémon. My friend went to school for statistics because of it.

watwut 6y ago

The time spent vs how much one learned is pretty bad tho. And also related, games like world of warcraft are massive time sunk.

WalterBright 6y ago

> Imperial 2030 (investing) I expect you'll find that investing for real is very different from investing in a game. Investing for real means trying to control your irrational impulses such as greed vs fear of loss.

foobiekr 6y ago

I really like Factorio but I think it's a bit of a stretch to describe it as teaching programming or software design. Maybe, conceptually, data flow. Certainly, Human Resource Machine does teach programming.

_jjkk 6y ago
Factorio quickly demonstrates to the player the danger and cost of bolt-on / ad-hoc / spaghetti code solutions, and likewise the benefits of a bit of forethought. Doing some pre-planning of your factory's eventual layout will have you advancing through the tech tree much, much faster (and without rebuilding critical sections all the time!)
- dlhavema 6y ago
  I wouldn't attributed this to programming but pre-planning in general benefits a lot of places. That goes to the comment in the article that "a bad plan is better than no plan". I totally know what you mean a spaghetti factory is just as hard to deal with as spaghetti code... until you have bots and you can actually copy paste your factory around to cut and paste your factory it's super hard to fix the problem.
Balgair 6y ago
Factorio is very close to Eagle and other PCB designing tools.
- imtringued 6y ago
  I have only used KiCad and I actually don't see the similarity. In KiCad you start by designing a circuit schematic first. In Factorio you start building whatever you want. You have potentially have to create your own custom parts including their physical footprint based on existing chips. In Factorio every part is already included in the "part library". The PCB design phase automatically connects parts with traces correctly. The human designer is just responsible for the layout. In Factorio you keep the design in your head and place each conveyor tile one by one. PCBs usually have multiple layers and it's common to have dedicated VCC and GND planes just for power transmission. Although the electric grid in Factorio is technically a separate layer, you have to extend the grid by placing transmission lines. I will accept that the idea of non overlapping traces/conveyor belts is similar but overall the workflow just isn't the same. To be fair I haven't actually done anything beyond following a bunch of tutorials on making PCBs. I have yet to send a design to a manufacturer. It's possible that Eagle and Altium are significantly different to KiCad but I personally stick with opensource tools and even if they may have significantly worse UX I actually love the extra challenge. Just shows that other than paying bills to stay alive nothing on this planet should prevent you from learning electronic design, mechanical design and software development on your own.

mrhappyunhappy 6y ago

I did the same in WoW :) Bought up all the versions of a certain item in AH and sold at extreme markup over time. As more came up on AH I’d just buy them all up and continue. This lasted for quite some time and I diversified into other items. Let’s just say I could afford anything in that game :)

purrcat259 6y ago
If you would humor me, what kind of item are you talking about? Pets?
- mettamage 6y ago
  In my case it was the egg needed for making a gingerbread cookie on Christmass. There was only one low level area that would drop them 100%. So I farmed it en-masse, no one else did.

Balgair 6y ago

One trend I've found interesting is take industrial design software tools (things for CAD, PCB, FPGA, etc) and then 'dumb' them down and add hostile creatures to destroy the player's designs. It's not a bad method. Literally, make simple code and add hostile bugs to it.

eru 6y ago
Coding-inspired puzzle games appeal to quite a few people. Zachtronics does some very good abstract ones. Quite a few of his games are even outright gamifying assembly programming. Things like factorio are on the more 'applied' or concrete end of the spectrum.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]