Most of these come from MMOs for me interestingly enough:
Diminishing Returns:
“Hmm, this new piece of gear gives +8 strength, which will increase how hard I hit, whereas my current piece of gear adds 2% chance to crit - given my current build/stats, how can I tell which is better?”
This is a situation that every person who’s ever played an RPG has come across. Given the overlap between “gamers” and “autistics”, it was always inevitable that math would be used to meta-game and theory-craft into oblivion. A fundamental key to theory-crafting is the concept of Diminishing Returns - if you’ve ever studied economics you probably know something about Return on Investment or RoI - diminishing returns governs the rate of return on investment. Basically, as your investment in something increases, the rate of return on each “dollar” invested will initially increase until hitting a plateau and then decreasing. If you pump every stat point you have into Strength, but totally neglect Accuracy, Critical Hit Chance, and Stamina, your character will be weaker than one who split their points up between the different stats, and that character will be weaker than a third character who min-maxed their stat allocations with knowledge of the game’s system of diminishing returns.
The law of diminishing returns is an economic principle stating that as investment in a particular area increases, the rate of profit from that investment, after a certain point, can't continue to increase if other variables remain constant.
I learned this in terms of RPG stat mechanics in WoW. The most valuable stats for a class tended to all have “soft caps”, which effectively translate to a point near the “Point of Maximum Yield” on the graph of yield/investment. But really, this applies to…practically everything, atleast everything that can be modeled economically. A political campaign can pump $10M into a single region and get 60% of the votes there, or they could spread $2.5M between four regions and get 51% of a much larger share of voters.
Really a powerful tool that so many have never had to engage with and thus are totally unaware of the concept and how it plays a role in their lives.
Triage
Or: Geek the Mage
This one is simple enough, it’s about prioritizing what’s actually pressing and needing to be addressed immediately (the smaller enemy casting self-destruct, about to wipe your whole group) and what needs to be addressed consistently over the long term (keeping everyone healed, decursed, and buffed, and the reverse for the enemies)
The third lesson I’m not sure of any academic links or terms that could be applied here, perhaps most fitting are the ideas of “high trust societies” in sociology.
What I’ve basically noticed over the years, as “social” game experiences evolved, the value of any given interaction with other players has been reduced to almost nothing - and it seems largely to be because of a “lack of consequence” - nothing in these social games “matters” any more. Three examples I’ll give: party finding in MMOs (the old fashioned way, posting in town/lfg chat and forming a group, or calling from a list of friends) being replaced by “random group finder” matchmaking systems. This is made even worse by the matchmaking systems often drawing from a far wider pool than just “your server” - you will never see these people again, thus nothing you do (socially) in the group can have any consequences, so why bother! This brings me to the third example, private voice chats. Anyone who played through the early days of Xbox live or PC community servers knows how those places turned into ghost towns (50,000 spastics used to live here) with the advent of “party chats”.
SimCity: Raising taxes too much causes your total tax revenue to go down. Lowering taxes stimulates business and residential development.
It sounds obvious but somehow public schools failed to teach that to our budding future communists.
It's called the Laffer Curve. Theoretically there's a sweet spot for taxes and productivity, but that assumes the government only use taxes to fund itself and doesn't have a money printer.
Both Ragan and Trump pursued this policy, IRL.
It is a bit complicated, because government services and departments can have a broad range of efficiency. Waste is waste. Governments can more efficent, there just isn't usually much incentive for them to do that.
Why would the government be more efficient? Government jobs boost the fake employment numbers, the fake GDP, and the government-dependent leftist voter base in our fake Democracy™.
Which is how we get things like the 12000$ coffee mug for some random government personnel. There is zero consequence to them wasting like that in their mind.
A significant portion of the hilariously overpriced bullshit ending up on itemized lists is not because of rank stupidity, but laundering / coverup. They're not really paying a thousand dollars for a pencil or whatever, they're paying five dollars for a pencil and obscuring where the rest went.
They also spend every red cent so they can justify to Congress why they totally need a budget increase. Efficient departments only get their budgets slashed.
Well then politicans can get bribes from big companies so they can crush their smaller competion. Guess thats why it happens so rarely these days that big companies get split up for anti monopolist reasons.
As someone who isn't athletically gifted online gaming provided a lot of lessons about losing gracefully and that sometimes you just aren't as skilled as other folks.
That is an excellent point. Learning humbleness is such a vital lesson, and one that is disappearing from the modern world. “Competitive” gaming was a great way to do learn that lesson with no real harm being able to be inflicted. Really you’ve found a fundamental goal of “games” in every form they take, from rough-housing to sports to vidya.
But in the modern world, we see “SBMM” unnaturally enforcing a state of 49%/51% Win/Loss ratios so that no one feels “too bad” for “too long” that they might drop the game. The proverbial “participation ribbon” is all that is left to achieve in modern vidya it feels
Dark Souls in general teaches you how to take it with stride and learn from your mistakes. You fell off the bike? Well get back up and try again. This is why current games journalists hate that series with a passion. They don't want to learn. They don't believe in themselves making mistakes.
Just to make it explicit, I see point 3 being directly echoed in our modern “matchmade” but ultimately disconnected societies. You can open an app and find 10 horny chicks for a night, but when’s the last time you struck up a conversation with a stranger? Made a new friend? We were “made” to live in communities of ~500-5,000 at the most. We can remember the faces of ~500 people, we can build reciprocal relationships because we know we will see these people again. But when you look at these rats nests called “cities” these days you see the direct effects of “nothing I do will catch up to me, why not be a little evil?”
This is a good one I've not necessarily put together before. For me, my WoW days were the last of my time gaming with any sort of online friends. The social aspect was part of the draw. Yeah, sure, there were a lot of elitists and asshats, but you could avoid them or fight back depending on the situation. You could find your community somewhere. The events I remember in that game were more social, the weekly Karazhan run me (healer) and a warrior friend would run, we were way overpowered for it and could damn near finish it ourselves, but we'd grab basically whoever the hell wanted to go and just go figure it out. Or the top guild that used to run old Naxx and put all the loot up for bid then split it up. Matchmaking took all this stuff away, I mean why should you be having fun, you could be grinding gear with randoms, right?
Even prior to my WoW days, while online was really new to me, there were servers I'd drop in for other games. You'd recognize the players, get used to them, joke around, etc. I usually got my ass stomped honestly, I've never been autist enough for competitive really. It was fun though.
Now, you drop in with some random people, do some boring shit, get some fake currency or unlock some crap you don't want. It's why I don't bother. All the fun has been sucked out into a grind. The real world is the same, and that's why I generally have rejected social media and this is pretty much the only place I post, where, you guessed it, you see the same people.
Your last point is the origin of my username.
Back during my hardcore raiding days this was the funnest shit to me. Just finding struggling raiding guilds filled with bads and spending all night trying to drag them through Normal level bosses.
You'd be treated like a god to these people, and you'd genuinely make their entire month at the cost of just time and repair costs. And most of the time there were a few girls in the guild happy to now throw themselves at the alpha on the block, which meant free titties.
And sometimes, you'd make good friends that would last long beyond that little guild.
WoW is a good case study of this as after introducing LFG in the Wrath expansion it killed off server communities as groups were suddenly made up of randoms from other servers you may never see again. So why would those randoms who then employed the Prisoner's Dilemma ever going to act in a cooperative way when they could just take all the loot possible and then never have to worry about seeing the rest of their group ever again?
Repeat however many number of weeks/months/years it's been since LFG came out and you have the current situation where there is practically zero trust between players, even in guilds, because the systems repeatedly put in place are far too lucrative for selfish plays to just endlessly exploit.
dont trust any cunt - eve online
your team might be shit but if you are good enough you can carry them so focus on your own game not their shitty game - lol
dont trust any cunt - minecraft
dont trust any cunt - runescape ( near two decades ago i dont play the new one because of all the pc shit)
all of the above - there is always a bigger fish
poe/diablo/zelda - destroying random shit is profitable
Ah the glorious days of Diablo multiplayer.
Find someone who would give you a dupe of a 255 charges Archangel Staff of Apocalypse, and a bunch of stat points potions to dupe yourself.
WoW Raiding taught me a long time ago about the importance of someone willing to "step up" and be the bitch that deals with problems, because sitting around saying "not my job" just ends up in wasting everyone's time including yours. So while you might be lower on the chart and looking worse, the job is dead and the spoils remain the same. A lesson just as relevant when it comes to soaking an orb to not wipe on a boss as it does with putting in an extra chunk of work at work before it explodes into a bigger issue that you need to clean up anyway.
Before the simplification of stats because retards couldn't handle it, they used to also had hardcaps for them too. They still do, but you'll never hit 28000 crit rating for it to matter.
Having to deal with the idea of needing to get to an exact number of Armor Penetration to hit a perfect breakpoint to watch your damage soar, which then meant needing a very diverse set of gear that meant using weaker pieces than available to properly add up your stacking rating. It was a huge process that required actual effort and planning to your gear rather than "pick one of the 2-3 items from current tier" as it is now. There was also the period of time where you'd have to make the choice between staying at the "soft cap" or reaching for the hard cap, because if you couldn't get within something like 100 points (been a while, can't recall the exact number but it was small) then you were better off taking the raw value on other gear instead of reaching for it.
Which has a lot of useful lessons behind it. Planning, efficiently enacting a long term plan, keeping otherwise useless pieces because a later change to a different gear piece will make it useful again, consideration about lump greater values versus more effective gains from smaller ones and a lot of math.
Something I find still valid today because those ideas are just as applicable in terms of home projects and other monetary planning I have to undertake.
There is also the fact that raid leading in an MMO is basically the best training you could ever have for a career in management. Literally every task you are forced to deal with will be just as prevalent in the real world as it is there.
The most important, and easily forgotten among most real life managers, is the "expectance of arrival." As in, there is only so much you can expect every raider/worker to just arrive on their own to put in their effort, both being there period and putting forth an acceptable level of effort.
If you don't manage burnout and overall low morale? People stop showing up or putting in the effort. They don't give a shit how it looks when they call out sick 6 days a month, they are just uncaring. They might be looking to jump ship elsewhere or simply dropping out entirely. You have to always have the carrot ready to keep them interested beyond their own "integrity and shame" levels, and a lot of time that means putting in that aforementioned "bitch work."
Me in TBC as the dedicated mage tank during t4 and t6.
For those OOTL, there were 2 raid bosses in TBC where a mage had to be the one tanking a particular mob as only mages could grab the defensive shield the mob cast on itself with Spellsteal which was needed to survive the spam of nukes said mobs would exclusively cast. In order to do this role properly a mage would have to sacrifice both raw power and general performance to stack Stamina on gear rather than actual combat stats. Most of the time mages would just grab every green/uncommon quality item they could while still maintaining enough Spell Hit for spells to actually work. Me? I knew all the ins and outs of TBC to the point I didn't have greens for my STA stacking gear, I had blues/rares and purples/epics because I had done both the homework of learning about these better versions but also put in a time grinding them because unlike greens which were random drops from every mob in the game, the rares were from rare mobs themselves. The cloth chest came from a rare dragon named Hemathion that needed flying to even get close to. The drops from Yor needed you to be able to summon the mob which was at the very end of a very long rep grind then an even longer quest after littered with RNG if the right mob would spawn from a cage and then drop the right item with the right set of stats.
Some may ask why I bothered min/maxing this much for just the two fights but the reason was by doing so I had a set of gear that gave far better survival than "just greens" and didn't diminish my combat output nearly as much. Greens would be fine for t4 but the t6 fight needed more health so those blues and purples meant a far smoother attempt than more casual raiders would have experienced.
Also of the 3 other mages we had 1 I wouldn't trust to bring back a wet umbrella when it was raining, while the other 2 were frequently busy so couldn't provide regular attendance therefore I was far more at ease just doing the job myself.
Completely unneccesary though. The only thing that matters is that your spell steal hits. After that all damage you take is very predictable (2sec casts). And that's it. Your damage is irrelevant on the fight due to it being a pitiful dps check.
I feel that exactly. Its why I often was the first to line up for the various "in charge of X" mechanics, like Firelands Rag's floor clearing. I had the regular attendance to keep from ever needing someone else to learn and the competence to keep the DPS loss minimum.
Some amazing points here on basically “small group project” dynamics, leadership in large and small scales, like you say, directly relavent to a new project at work, or the newly released raid, or just any interaction between 2+ people
Regarding the absurdities of theory crafting I’ll say something seemingly esoteric and obscure to prove my salt - I played alliance, on Mal’Ganis lol
I've played Feral for 18 years. My life is salt, and I exist in perpetual seethe at the fact that Rogues get to ever be upset at anything.
Another hilarious relevant lesson is the idea of "hybrid tax," as in getting taxed harder on the possibility that you might do something because you are considered more "privileged" despite being at a sheer disadvantage both realistically and because of it.
I'm sure you can see the lesson there about racial dynamics in the real world and the inherent unfairness of taxes.
Guess what?
The classic.
All I learned from the “hybrid tax” revelations were that supporters tended to be groomers lol, atleast iirc that was the case with the two guys who forced it into vanilla, who were later fired and swept under the rug
I don't believe most of the accusations levied against the guys at Blizzard.
Not because they don't seem like the kind of guys to do it, but because the accusations were both so laughable and evil, but also so unprovable and clearly from a group of people out to destroy all the "senior leadership" of the company.
"Don't worry guys, we kicked out all those icky white men who founded and carried the company for the last dozen years and more. Now we have Danuser to help usher the game in a stunning and brave direction!"
/Danuser actively larps on Twitter as a game character, simps for another game character, writes some of the worst content in the history of WoW that will have lasting repercussions nobody will be able to fix, and then gets quietly fired last November.
WORTH IT! 🙄
I'm genuinely shocked at how little focus Danuser gets from people. Like, its a meme about what a pathetic cringe sack he was when he literally wrote an entire shortstory to remake a canon character into a new body so he could self insert as the guy, but that meme doesn't reach very far.
I believe he has more sexual harassment and inappropriate bullshit compared to everyone else in Blizzard combined, but because he was inoffensive to the company itself (only being offensive to those who had to deal with his slop) they let him slide.
Hah true enough, eventually it got to the point with the OG blizzard devs where either you had left or you stayed long enough to be accused of sexual misconduct
I loved the days of complicated stats. I even liked resistances, although that seems to be an unpopular opinion. All those old Vanilla items with weird stats that seemed out of place, yeah I probably had one of them in a bank somewhere. It was fun stacking and seeing how it would affect someone. Go screw around with a mage in PVP having just stacked health and frost resistance, you can't really damage them, but it was fun to try.
You might not have liked me though, I was a rogue for the most part. Although I almost never raided the rogue, I raided as a shaman, ran around and farmed some mats for the weeks worth of potions, elixirs, food, etc. and stayed off that character until it was time to run a raid. There was no match for sneaking around old dungeons and places you don't belong and I loved farming rare drops if I could solo them, etc.
Ironically, that's one of the benefits of "Classic Hardcore" currently. It offers all that wild shit a new lease and value because of the hanging sword above you. My one buddy who only plays HC has dozens of farms set up for otherwise useless little items that weren't worth it otherwise.
I think one of the issues with Complicated stats that Blizzard didn't think about that made them so unpopular was the "item to raider ratio." When you got 25-40 guys but only have 2-5 items per boss dropping, you can't effectively build up resistances and other stats. And then when you are down to "we need 3 whole items from this entire 12 boss raid" its not very fun to run older raids to gear up.
They just needed more diversity in terms of acquiring the stats and certain items, but instead they just made the items less worth getting period. There was no longer a single piece of value to gear that wasn't Ilvl related except a handful of trinkets that only could last for a little longer.
And I didn't always hate rogues. Its just that once Mangle was removed, and Brez was spread to multiple classes then every raid had no reason to bring a Feral over a rogue, because a bad rogue could outpace all but the best Ferals in almost every tier. And anytime we were able to outperform them due to stat inflation or awesome trinkets (Rune of Reorigination i still miss you), they would nerf us quickly.
Its literally Blizzard intentionally pitting us against each other and then favoring one side a lot more.
Swtor came up with a good way to get around weekly lockouts and dry loot runs. All gear, all of it, weapons included were shells which contained 2-4 components that have an item its stats. Wrists and waist only had 2 components IIRC while most armour had 3 and weapons had 4 where the 4th would also alter the colour of weapon fire and lightsaber blades.
Eventually BoA shells were added so that you could freely move things between alts, the only things that remained character bound were non BoA shells that came from content of which there were still many. These actual content shells also didn't usually have their appearances added to a collections tab like WoW does with transmog. While there is a similar system it's mostly limited to unlocks done with MTX currency, so raid appearances would only be something for the character present for the kill and lot.
However what the system did mean was that if you had more than one class, be it a dupe on the same faction or mirror class on the other faction, you could then gear them with BoA shells fitted with components sourced from alts, who could in turn continue gearing those shells to send back again later. This would include Tier components.
The only limits to this were the differences in primary stat some components would have so Str gear would be fine for JKG to JKS, or even SWJ and SWM, but any other class and subclasses would be using something other that Str.
Additionally the Swtor equivalent to rings and trinkets weren't BoA so those you would still need to source but in general it meant you could use alts to take care of sourcing and improving something like 10 of your 14 or so gear slots.
This is why I disliked Locks and Hunters from TBC onwards while maining a mage :p both ended up as literal 1 button spammer classes and with Sunwell offering a zone wide Int buff that made ArcInt redundant mages found themselves benched for what was often dogshit players but playing braindead and OP specs.
Most non-mainstream MMOs did something similar. I know Guild Wars 2 did the thing where all bosses just drop "tokens" of some sort that you'd just exchange for the gear you wanted. And some of the fanservice Korean ones did the same.
While is forces a grind I think that is overall a better option instead of a consistent dropping of garbage people don't need, or Blizzards hidden system of personal loot which just feels like its always working against you.
And seems like WoW is moving towards the alt-outsourcing system currently, with the Warband system. Which seems like a smart move currently in making alts not require a massive grind just to be worth playing, but I know that it will soon enough just make it to where you need 3-4 alts grinding concurrently to feed your Warband to keep up.
In my history, they almost always hated ferals, but I was in mid-Vanilla to mid-Cata only. I do remember early Wotlk they were ridiculous if played right. We had. A cat in our Naxx raids that outDPSed everyone.
Catering to those that demanded everything, like battle res for everyone, was a failure. There’s some things that needed out, like ridiculous corpse runs. I’d have almost figured to make the raid size a bit more fluid to keep from guys being left out, but that would have been exploited somehow too. Min 25, max 40 and scale it somehow. Just random thoughts though from someone who hasn’t touched a game in a long time.
MoP was Feral at its strongest, but that was entirely due to Rune of Reorigination being a ridiculous trinket that defined the entire class.
We have tiers when we are stronger buts its usually due to things like that more than the class itself being balanced well.
Personally I think 5-10 should be the max for a raid, it keeps things complex without a lot of the larger negatives bigger raids get. But that's just my opinion.
Amen to this. Leading large EverQuest and then WoW raids prepared me to step into management better than any other thing in my life. The overlaps were, frankly, shocking.
Management is deeply unpleasant though so I was glad to step out of that and back into a technical role at another company.
Thanks to Psych majors historically having zero ability to get jobs after graduation, my college put in an entire required class on resume building and interviewing.
I literally put my GDKP and CM leadership on my resume and after my professor got over his initial shock and listened to my explanation helped me build a fantastic resume out of it.
I also did the same trajectory as you, used it to step into management, did my time, realized I fucking hated it, and am now doing labor work (where I belong).
Eve online taught me that the enemy isn't on the screen, it's behind it.
I don't think even that matches the sheer level of nastiness of EVE. That game's biggest stories are all out of game activity, actual social engineering, doxxing and fraud type shit. And it's all driven in a game that codified pay to win shit - you could trade subscription fees as currency, IIRC. So they just cut out the gold selling middleman and did it themselves.
Damages from fuckery in EVE have actually been measured in dollars because that mechanic allows a direct conversion.
I've personally destroyed more than ten thousand dollars worth of ingame items in Eve. Not counting normal things like regular ships, but irreplaceable BPOs and POSes and such.
Never got on a Chribba killmail and that's about my biggest regret for the game.
This. It also taught me VBA and how to use PivotTables.
Interesting, do you mean something about how the free-form nature of the game and player interactions meant that understanding the psychology of the other players was way more important to success (like poker? I never played Eve, just heard some of the stories) than most other games?
Yes, but also the other less savory implications as well.
Psychology is important to win, sure. If you surprise most people, the caveman part of their brain will lock up and you can get a few good hits in before they can make themselves react. It also includes understanding tactics like attacking during the opponent's sleep schedule.
But also that attacking the other person behind the character is effective as well. Eve is filled with doxxing, hacking, even outright espionage. If the other guy stops playing then you've won.
And beyond that, it's the understanding that it's real people spouting the vile things leftoids believe online. Those are people, and those people are enemies.
This is why I never liked the "it's just the internet, it's not real" statement. Whatever there is to say about bots posting these days, it was firmly real people for many, many years before, and no one can pretend that the celebrities or politicians openly posting are bots. It feels like a psyop to not react or respond to open hostility and let them gain territory.
Measured play, or personal handicap for public gain. If you are the best (gear, levels, skill, group organization, etc.) and consistently crush new/casual players, your game will die off much faster because very few people are willing to put up with a constant shit stomping.
If you hold back (use less impressive gear, do not stack your team with your buddies, choose sub optimal but still functional strats), you are still able to win, but it makes the game less lopsided which then encourages less good players to continue playing.
That’s a bit why I’ve never really gotten into online RTS games. I’d get to a level where the AI was easy, try online. Get into a match, okay let’s build this to harvest resources, this to build units, holy fuck there’s 500 blimps attacking already. I’m not offered an avenue to learn and try things, there’s no time. At best it’s go find some autists plan online, copy-paste it, and pray I don’t miss a single click. How is that any fun? I didn’t learn shit either, I just plagiarized.
Kirov airship reporting.
Hide your power level.
Around zombies never relax
Don't be a sealclubber.
Good one, a lesson often learned by playing console party games like Goldeneye or Smash Bros or Mario Kart with siblings or close friends you see all the time. I dealt it out with smash and was often humbled in other games. I think your point and petey’s points are connected for sure. Maybe in a word, “Sportsmanship”?
Helps also if you play games where both teams dont have the same size for balance reasons than you can fight twice your numbers with a good grp. But sadly there arent many pvp games which have that mostly ESO and Dark Age of Camelot come to my mind there. And even then you often have the bad players just running in a zerg since even twice the numbers arent enough for them to feel save and get easy progression without much risk.
Some great points here - btw if you’re interested I’m trimming all armor sets for just 2k gp and a dozen lobsters
No that one actually works, look:
Hunter2Edit: fuck
Be Aggressive
Initiative. Map control. Taking risks. Opportunity chasing. All gaming lessons that translate well into real life. The aggressive player wins more than he loses and generally evolves into a better player over time.
Another really good one, from “peekers advantage” in modern day camp-fests to the older forms like map control/map knowledge (mostly neutered these days with the featureless ovals most games opt for), to advanced movement techs, to gameplay mechanics like kill streaks (i.e. “investment dividends”) or even just the psychological snowballing effect of hearing the announcer yell ”M-M-M-M-MONSTERKILL” - can’t have that these days, wouldn’t want someone to ever feel bad while playing, that might eat into MTX profits. Very multifaceted point
I learned the truth of my flesh, and it disgusted me. I craved the surety of steel.
In other words, I found humans to be flighty, unpredictable, back-stabbing, and wildly erratic in their quality, while computers were solidly predictable, fair, reasonable, and even if they cheated, they did so in honest and clear ways.
I also learned humans can work together to make great works. The modding scene is amazing. But that first lesson is ever-present: Those generous benefactors, coworkers, co-programmers and collaborators can turn on you in a moment, to get some personal thrill or commendation at your expense. Your friends can lift you up, and help, together, to make truly amazing things... But choose your friends carefully.
And that sometimes, you don't have that option. You need to work with a snake. And you need to manage that, because for one reason or another, you need that snake's skills for the time being. They WILL harm you, eventually, so risk-assessment and social-threat-assessment are important skills to gain.
If you played 5th generation or earlier console games, you learned persistence. Game difficulty was higher as a rule, guides/walkthroughs cost money so you'd try to figure it out yourself, and lives/continues had yet to be abandoned as a mechanic.
Something I hate, it seems from a mental standpoint games dumbed down so much too. Difficulty is only presented as I guess what I'd call "kinetic" difficulty now. It's just parry timing basically. If there's a "puzzle" in a game, you need only look for the glowing switch. So the ubiquity of guides made games stupider. Although I blame fake journalists and their followers in a lot of ways too. I still remember I had some on Reddit years ago that argued with me that defeating a boss in their game was a supreme accomplishment, while completing difficult puzzles in my game was not an accomplishment, because it could be easily cheated with a guide and therefore I didn't have to improve.
The X spacesim series was quite good to learn simple economics about demand/supply and how to manipulate it. Lots of social dynamics and people behaviour and even some psychology if you play multiplayer pvp games. Especially if it arent instanced fps games where you have a lot of options like changing your gear appearance with transmog options to make yourself look weak if you are strong to find fights especially against weaker solo stealthers and make yourself look strong if you play on weak class or cant afford good gear yet to avoid fights. Since most people which play pvp games are opportunists and only attack strong targets if they have a huge advantage. Certainly helps to also understand the mindset of most criminals. What some people might only learn if they join a gang in real life or law enforcement which are pretty much just a legal "gang" aswell which work for corrupt politican a lot.
Depends how much time you want to invest tho. A good player also sees that the company/devs nerf shit on purpose and you dont wanna bother constantly changing classes/gear/speccs and maybe even pay ingame money for that shit. So that you should rather quit if that happens too often even if you like the gameplay.
Mario Kart taught me to hate communism and their pet word "equity". The way the game bombards you with broken-as-fuck items by shitters destroys any motivation you have to be the best. It's better to coast on second and steal the race when first place gets Blue Shell'd for the fifth time, which is a pretty damn Machiavellian lesson for a Nintendo game.
Dragon Age: Never deal with demons. It doesn't matter what they say. It doesn't matter how extenuating the circumstances appear to be. It doesn't matter how desperate you are for another option. Demons will always go out of their way to leave you worse off than you were before you interacted with them.
Great point, the companies saw us using math to meta-game them, so they did the reverse. The fucked up part though is we were meta-gaming “fun” and they are meta-gaming “raping our wallets”/ “wasting our time” (synonymous these days as you point out)
For sure, thats why I usually avoid most online and Ubisoft/Blizzard/EA games anyway these days. No point in getting invested in that shit if they can patch in some new monetization later or break your gear/character so you have to buy the next new thing. At least Diablo3 worked offline on console.
I taught my nephews about metal casting by showing them how they could make a netherportal in minecraft without a diamond pick. For myself I'd say crusader kings 2 more than any game really put in perspective how the competing realms of royal power, religious power and economic powers interact in a way reading history never quite captured.
Already been said, but playing runescape as a kid definitely has made me into a bloodhound that can sense a scam coming from a mile away.
Then just all sorts of stuff like math, strategy, long term planning, etc. Zelda games, strategy games like Civ and Fire Emblem and things like that are fun and great for kids in my opinion.
True persistence and learning from your mistakes, from pretty much any Souls and FromSoft game.
Budgeting
Years of playing Street Fighter gave me a better baseline to start from than the other guys at my gym when we first started sparring. Space control, conditioning and corner pressure are just as real in meat space as they are in fighting games.
One that I've made into a career:
I've had to temper that in real life though: there are no solutions, only trade-offs.
Tell that to Solitaire 🤬
Edit:
This is why I started playing Freecell instead.
Edit 2:
I was angry enough with Solitaire being unwinnable at times I ended up teaching myself how to play Freecell.
The Australian Aborigines had 60,000 years and couldn't get past the third scientific upgrade in Civilization - I mean they had ceremonial burial and that was about it
I used to play an old MMORPG ( T4C ) and the level of autistic min-maxing to be found requires in-dept guides for every different character build.
Erased a wall of text nobody cares about. I will just say there are entire websites in multiple languages detailing how to farm EXP just so you can mix-max stats for level-up HP and mana growth while your character is basically useless with no damage output for over 100 levels, in a game with a 199 level cap only reachable long term on servers with the X10 EXP setting.