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Ask HN: Video games that will make me smarter and are addictive?

25 points by reactspa ↗ HN
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.

------------------------

* 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.

46 comments

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version_five
Duolingo?
idontwantthis
That’s what I was going to suggest. Not exactly a game, but it is addictive as hell et maintenant je parle le français!
kratom_sandwich
The 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-develop...

tastysandwich
That'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
Looks 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
And the sample was of healthy people, rather than people with ADHD (who benefit from Ritalin).
messe
Kerbal 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
Free until 1/12. https://store.epicgames.com/en-US/p/kerbal-space-program
thinkmcfly
Free games are not worth it when they are on epic.
messe
KSP doesn’t have any DRM, you can copy it and have as many installs as you want.

I usually have a vanilla + two or three modded installs.

Once you‘ve downloaded and copied it, you can just get rid of epic.

autoexec
At that point why bother with epic at all. You can get it though alternative channels just as easily.
messe
Because at least it has the semblance of legitimacy?

Look, I’ve fairly liberal views on piracy (arrrr, etc.), but this isn’t the time or place to get into that discussion.

autoexec
"free" games aren't even free when they're on epic. The cost of installing epic is too high.
cheald
You can use something like Heroic and completely avoid using the Epic launcher.
travisporter
The fictional Seveneves by Neal Stephenson references this
blockwriter
I 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.
more_corn
I 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
Learning 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
Descent 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]
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karmakaze
Just 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
n-back? not strictly addicting but also not that tedious
unmole
Do N-back results replicate? It used to be quite popular but I haven't heard anything about it years.
Pako
Definitely 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
Rust.
karmakaze
Just 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
Dark 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.
swcm
I love Zachtronics games, especially Shenzhen I/O and Opus Magnum.

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.

tmtvl
SpaceChem, maybe? And maybe check out some edutainment games and be aghast at how much you've forgotten since grade/middle/high school.
karmakaze
I'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
In 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
Any game you would be willing to mod for.
gfd
If 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
MHRD 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
2 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.