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

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.

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.

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...

Factorio, obviously

Duolingo?

n-back? not strictly addicting but also not that tedious

Rust.

Any 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

Since you sound very new to gaming, definitely run through Portal 1 and 2.

I'm a big fan of games like 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.

Lemmings! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lemmings_(video_game)

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.

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

SpaceChem, maybe? And maybe check out some edutainment games and be aghast at how much you've forgotten since grade/middle/high school.

turn-based strategy: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34049182

Any game you would be willing to mod for.

Civ 6

Lemmings!