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Ask HN: Video games that will make me smarter and are addictive?
Don't have much video game experience. Wore out a Nintendo Donkey Kong and Nintendo Mario Bros when I was a kid. Then some Quake on Windows.
I realized the potential of gaming when a couple of games helped me progress my pilot certification (Flight Simulator of course, and X-Plane on iPad).
Haven't don't much video gaming, but do have an addictive personality.
So, it is resolved... I now want to take on positive addictions. I want to get addicted to one or more video games that will make me smarter. They could be about strategy, or reflexes, etc. All are good. Smartness comes in many dimensions. (Bonus if they can make me a better listener, or teach me to talk less, or turn me into a morning person, or teach me intuitions related to probability/fat-tails*).
FLOSS/FOSS preferred.
Currently, I have Windows and ChromeOS laptops, and an Android phone.
Your recommendations are invited below.
Thank you in advance.
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* sadly, the game isn't available any more. But Ole Peters of London Math Lab once tweeted a link to a game that helped me understand Kelly Criterion and its relationship to Ergodicity in a way I would never have understood otherwise.
- version_five 4y agoDuolingo?
- idontwantthis 4y agoThat’s what I was going to suggest. Not exactly a game, but it is addictive as hell et maintenant je parle le français!
- 082349872349872 4y agoturn-based strategy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34049182 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34049182
- kratom_sandwich 4y agoThe answer is a bit tongue in cheek, but I invite you to try it out and report back with results (haven't tried it myself): Cambridge University releases a brain-training app that improves concentration akin to Ritalin - https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-01-22/cambridge-uni-develops-app-with-ritalin-like-effects/10737268 https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-01-22/cambridge-uni-develop...
- tastysandwich 4y agoThat's from 2019, so do we know how it has fared since then? Have any other studies confirmed their results? I'm fascinated as it sounds too good to be true (and usually such things are)
- belkarx 4y agoLooks like it's overfitting - the tasks in the video game (based on the demo vid) are very similar to the task used to measure changes in attention (test retest!). Sample size could also be bigger.
- tastysandwich 4y agoAnd the sample was of healthy people, rather than people with ADHD (who benefit from Ritalin).
- helph67 4y agoLemmings!
- helph67 4y agoLemmings! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemmings_(video_game) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemmings_(video_game)
- messe 4y agoKerbal Space Program. It won’t necessary make you “smarter”, but it will teach and given you an intuition for orbital mechanics. I think it’s free this or next week on Epic, and the sequel will be released in about a month or so. It’s highly moddable, meaning plenty of replayability. As it’s a unity game, it’s written in C#, so if you want to get into modding yourself, it’s very easy too.
- runamok 4y agoFree until 1/12. https://store.epicgames.com/en-US/p/kerbal-space-program https://store.epicgames.com/en-US/p/kerbal-space-program
- thinkmcfly 4y agoFree games are not worth it when they are on epic.
- meta-level 4y agoFactorio, obviously
- vagrantJin 4y ago+1 Factorio has some nice problems to solve.
- blockwriter 4y agoI write, and I have found that keeping an old Nintendo DS with Advance Wars on hand is often conducive to entering states of flow. It prevents me from seeking out the internet if a self-contained object of interest is near to hand. When I lack substantive thought to record, I will pick up the game until one formulates, and it is easy to put back down.
- yuppie_scum 4y agoCiv 6
- runamok 4y agoI'm a big fan of games like The Witness. https://store.steampowered.com/app/210970/The_Witness/ https://store.steampowered.com/app/210970/The_Witness/ I don't know that it makes you smarter but it's full of puzzles and brain teasers.
- more_corn 4y agoI played Descent (1 and 2) when I was in high school. My spatial reasoning and navigation skills improved dramatically and are still fast and sharp. I don’t imagine the games are still available though.
- thinkmcfly 4y agoLearning 6dof maneuvering is extremely satisfying. If you're looking for something like this, try playing Elite Dangerous with flight assist off and go practice landings.
- karmakaze 4y agoDescent was my fave game from the era. There are so few 6dof games. An action/arcade version for VR would also be great to find.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- karmakaze 4y agoJust discovered that there's a "Descent Overload/VR" by some authors of the original Descent series. This is different than "Descent Underground" which was a Kickstarter that used the name under license or something like that.
- belkarx 4y agon-back? not strictly addicting but also not that tedious
- unmole 4y agoDo N-back results replicate? It used to be quite popular but I haven't heard anything about it years.
- jesuscript 4y agoAny game by Paradox Interactive. It will increase your patience threshold if you manage to learn the ins and outs of any of their games. https://www.paradoxinteractive.com/games/victoria-3 https://www.paradoxinteractive.com/games/victoria-3 Since you sound very new to gaming, definitely run through Portal 1 and 2.
- Pako 4y agoDefinitely not everyone's cup of tea, but IMO Path of Exile helped me understand just how much spaghetti a code base can actually contain, with all of its interwoven mechanics and calculations. People spend hours theory crafting and optimizing a character to make numbers get bigger, and it takes a lot of planning skill to, well, plan all of it.
- shaunxcode 4y agoRust.
- karmakaze 4y agoJust did the Advent of Code in Rust. It was fine but can't say I appreciate what it does for me over F#/OCaml.
- hcarvalhoalves 4y agoDark Souls series, Bloodborne, Sekiro, Elden Ring… from From Software will test your reflexes, patience and perseverance. Once you beat one of those try Demon Souls.
- aaron695 4y ago[dead]
- tmtvl 4y agoSpaceChem, maybe? And maybe check out some edutainment games and be aghast at how much you've forgotten since grade/middle/high school.
- swcm 4y agoI love Zachtronics games, especially Shenzhen I/O and Opus Magnum. https://www.zachtronics.com/ https://www.zachtronics.com/ Updating to say that these are logic games. Opus is more visual but just as logistically challenging as Shenzhen. Shenzhen will teach logic from a more programming perspective. As a software developer used to modern development it’s been refreshing to think things thru without modern tools.
- karmakaze 4y agoI've been playing StarCraft II rts since the pandemic. It's free to play, frustrating and addictive. Playing 1v1 means you have to outplay your opponent and the matchmaking/ratings work well. I like it for the speed. For pure strategy playing online Go (board game) is good for a lifetime of improvement.
- rg111 4y agoIn this criteria, nothing is better than Factorio, IMHO. Get Factorio, and you will soon solve interesting problems and design systems, and sink hours into it. This game is the ultimate boxed environment for learning to _automate_ and build sustainable systems. The experience is great. Oh, and this game is Turing complete, and people have made Conway's Game of Life, and adders, and computers in the game. And the game is very fun to play as well. And it can be played in Linux, too. Shopify reimburses their engineers if they buy this game.
- FrostKiwi 4y agoAny game you would be willing to mod for.
- gfd 4y agoIf flashcards count as games, then Memrise (or Anki which is FOSS but you have to setup the gamification aspects yourself) If ELO rating grinding counts, then chess or competitive programming. Or any game with a competitive scene.
- waste_monk 4y agoMHRD is good. Learn a simplified HDL and, starting with NAND gates, build increasingly complex things such as multiplexors, memory, an ALU, until you eventually end up with an (extremely simple, but functional) processor. It's essentially the first part of nand2Tetris as a game, but you are constrained by having a very limited amount of screen space (N lines of M characters, don't remember exactly how many, but essentially one screen's worth on the 80's era hardware the game is emulating for your dev environment) to work with for each component (e.g. if you were building an 8kb memory module and tried to copy/paste the code that makes up a 2kb module 4x times you'd run out of lines or characters, but instantiating 4x2kb modules would only take a few lines).
- thensome 4y ago2 Dots for chill puzzles. Not really a game, but iNaturalist for learning about your local flora and fauna. Gris for empathy/symbolic understanding of emotions. It has good puzzles, and the art and storyline has no talking. I feel like it gave me a lot of good ideas about using drawing and music to represent emotion, so maybe it is useful for teaching people to talk less.