Games that change your mind

Some things you might learn from games are pretty blatant: Trivial Pursuit might teach you trivia, Master Type might teach you about typing, Grand Theft Auto might teach you about driving or crime. But sometimes games teach people less obvious things—things that are more experiential or ineffable, things that you didn’t know you didn’t know, concepts that stick in your mind, deep things. Here’s my list of games and their interesting real-world updates, as experienced by me or my friends: Dominion: Don’t invest for eternity. When casually improving or protecting or investing in things, it’s easy for me to treat life (and perhaps even the present period) as basically eternal. In fact I shouldn’t, but it can take many years of living to really feel how likely it is that you’ll leave your perfectly wonderful house within two years, or just keep on aging. Dominion lets me feel that in a matter of hours, by tempting me to invest in a beautiful and effective deck that will do amazingly for the rest of eternity, then making the other player win by haphazardly buying a handful of provinces before I’m done. Which is very annoying, and I do hold against it. **The Witness: **there is nothing in The Witness (at least near the start, I haven’t played it all) that you can pick up and take with you. No objects, no points, no manna, no health. It’s just you, walking around in a world. Something about that feels like it would be deeply unsatisfying—like what is a game, if you can’t get, y’know, things, dings? Part of me thinks that GETTING is equivalent to satisfaction, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary I keep pointing out to it. And The Witness is not where I came to realize that. What The Witness made me feel is that knowledge is a REAL thing you can GET, like an object. Not some hand-wavey second-rate bullshit thing that philosophers pretend to get off on. In The Witness, while your character walks around, impermeable to the world, you come to know more things. And knowi