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Comment by dogprez | Hacker News Reader

I thought the idea that games can improve thinking and reasoning was debunked? Dedicating your life to chess doesn't mean they can put you in the general's chair and you'll be a military genius, just means you'll be good at chess.

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I don't think it's so black and white. Past a certain point playing chess isn't going to help you with anything besides chess. But I think games can serve as an introductory tool - for example a game isn't going to teach you to be a SWE, but it can provide a more approachable way to gain some initial familiarity with programming ideas.

Is a game the best way to learn or stay mentally sharp? Not when taken at face value, but after a long day of work most people can't sustain something like taking an online course. Playing games can be a good way to stay mentally active when the likely alternative is watching TV or browsing Reddit every night. You'll find studies on cognitive effects of gaming are highly dependent on the games used and the control conditions they were being compared to.

Yea, I read through this thread a bit. I think everyone is mixing up skills and "thinking and reasoning". A game that is exercising a skill will be transferable to other times you use that skill, like mental math from Monopoly. However "thinking and reasoning" isn't a skill. I'm not sure how you improve them but I imagine it's a factor of [natural talent, diet, sleep, gut fauna, cardiovascular health, diversity of experience, self-esteem, sense of security, etc].

Chess should help in impulse control and realizing the possibility and power of strategic thinking, which is thinking of a sort. For a lot of young people, that sort of wisdom could be very helpful in real life when a scam/easy money/grab the cash and run option shows up. The puzzle nature of tactics also trains the mind to intensely concentrate on one task.

Can’t see how chess would help much in “guess the next number”-type IQ tests. Chess at a certain level requires a very specific sort of pattern recognition that doesn’t really transfer. Sharp people do gravitate towards chess, and it is wonderfully egalitarian (cheap/ubiquitous) and culture-neutral.

exactly right. the only thing you get better at by playing a game is that game.

That seems like an overly strong claim. It's probably true for many games, where skill in the game leads to no meaningful skill or knowledge outside the game short other games with the same or similar mechanic. But that doesn't mean that games, universally, cannot have some value in imparting either knowledge or skill applicable beyond the game itself.

Take Factorio, as a for-instance. Intended or not (I've never read what the creators themselves thought about when making the game), it does, if someone pays attention, end up teaching the player both how to apply logic and some understanding of systems theory and basic operations research (optimizations). In particular, trying to manage the flow of objects (much like a real factory) through various points and the assembly/processing time. Now, are people sitting down and ending up with a basic understanding of operations research in a technical sense? Probably not, but in an intuitive sense, I'd wager that most come away with something.

Kerbal Space Program is another game that actually does end up forcing players, short absolute brute force like I've seen some people pull off, to consider the rocket equation and orbital dynamics (even if simplified). It spawned multiple series of YouTube videos teaching people higher level math and physics topics.

Human Resource Machine and 7 Billion Humans (second a sequel to the first), can't really be brute forced. You have to learn some semblance of programming skills in order to complete all the challenges, short of cheating and finding solutions online. I suppose someone could try every program permutation and never learn anything, but they'd probably not have finished level 2 or 3 even if they started with the games when they were released.

no reasonable trial has found any video game to increase intelligence, which I believe is what the OP was asking about.

While not (directly) a thinking game, I have always thought that playing basketball and handball in my youth taught me how to lose in dignity. Lose without blaming the referee or the other team. It's probably somewhat easier to accept others being objectively better than you in casual adult life situations (e.g. job interviews) when you had to cope with losing in ball games as a kid.

I think this is true at the highest levels, but my experience with Go has been anything but. I've matured both on and off the board through playing it.

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