Ask HN: Best video games to expand teenage minds? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Best video games to expand teenage minds?

So, I am not much of a gamer but I am a movie lover. So I try (with varying levels of success) to get my kids to watch something outside the Marvel / Netflix current list. I can even handle basic media studies, scene construction, story arcs and so on to keep discussions going.

But outside the tent pole AAA shoot-em ups, what does the "best 100 video games" look like? And what does scene construction, story arc and so on mean when you can do anything ?

View on HN

I would say anything from Zachtronics - these games are like core programming concepts as games and are fundamentally different from mainstream AAA shooters. I especially recommend SpaceChem and ExaPunks.

Dwarf Fortress, if your children can manage to play it, has a steep learning curve but is a weird and wonderful simulation of a fantasy environment with immense depth. My college roommate played an immense amount of Dwarf Fortress and had minor fame among other DF players for the magnitude of his projects. For the years that he played that game he would play it non-stop - literally non-stop there was always a computer in our apartment running Dwarf Fortress 24/7 as dwarves worked on his instructions creating enormous monuments and castles. He always had crazy stories about what his dwarfs had done and how his fortress was developing.

Minecraft and Factorio are pretty popular but also pretty different from the shoot-em ups. At least, Minecraft can be, there are mods and variants of Minecraft that are basically fighting/FPS games.

Factorio touches on a key concept in programming. I think of it as gamifying the idea of scaling your code. You get a system working, you build a bigger system, you find a bottleneck, you remove it. You keep repeating this cycle, looking at your metrics, until you realize your factory is a mess of spaghetti that you can hardly keep running - so you refactor...

Dyson Sphere Program might be a bit more accessible than Factorio, at least to start. Factorio I was lost without watching Youtube videos, whereas Dyson Sphere I got pretty far with just the in-game tutorials, and only eventually started checking online wikis to help figure out what all I'd need to build in a supply chain to make certain things.

You can try some puzzle games like Portal 2 - both single player and coop - good for puzzles and working with others. Talos Principal, Witness.

Sandbox/Building games like Minecraft, Terraria, Kerbal Space Program, Cities Skylines, Factorio are sort of 'up to you' to do what you want. It can allow for a lot of creativity.

There are story focused games if you want something like an interactive movie, while also exposing you to new ideas and sometimes cultures. Examples are God of War, Horizon Zero Dawn, Ghost of Tsushima, Uncharted series (good combination of story and puzzles), Detroit Become Human, Nier Automata.

You can also punish them by making them play the Dark Souls series.

Do note that some of these games are quite violent/gorey but I assume you'll have your own tolerance filters you can apply

If they are possibly into history and city building - Anno 1800 might be of interest. I heard it has elements similar to factory builders like Factorio but since its in a historical setting, the graphics are probably more approachable/relaxing for a larger audience.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b1xdE_6C_JU

Also if you are early innings Nvidia GeForceNow free tier can save you some money if you don't have a high end PC with the latest graphics.

0ad is also interesting as its like Age of Empires but easily moddable. Modding might be a good segway into long term interest in computer science.

https://play0ad.com

If you wanted to watch the best 100 movies, you could do it in about a year, watching two movies every week. If you want to play the best 100 video games, it's going to take a lot longer than that, or you're not going to get a good feel for most of them.

A game in the Civilization series takes several hours to finish (or get far enough that you don't care to finish) and you might want to at least play a few times and get through some of the learning curve.

Of course, one can get a good feel for Pac-Man in 30 minutes, although if you want to get good, it'll take a lot longer.

It sounds like you're more looking to broaden horizons than for mind expanding games; broadening horizons would be more of trying lots of different things, and mind expanding would be things like Tetris Effect, Portal, Rez, Polybious Geometry Wars, Tempest (maybe), Katamari Damacy, Audio Surf, Super Mario World 2: Yoshi's Island, Tetanus on Drugs (if you can find it), SeaMan, Odama (gamecube), Toe Jam and Earl (I never figured out wtf was happening in this game, but clearly drugs were involved), maybe A Boy and His Blob, the reverse level in Marble Madness, LSD: Dream Emulator for PS1 (I haven't played it, but it looks wild). Etc

Yeah, I would say to really appreciate most modern games, it would take at least 3 months. Fallout 1 took me a weekend to finish. Fallout 4 takes far too long. Even getting out of the vault the first time takes hours.

Best 100 is super subjective, art styles and setting can turn people off. Teens tend to play what’s popular and games that have a social element will pull teens in even more based on social circles. Games that are very similar like battle royale games may end up having teens shunning one (fortnite) because “10 year olds play that” and play another (Warzone) because it’s perceived to be more adult like.

Anecdotally there are well regarded games, like Red Dead Redemption 2, that have very well done setting, graphics, story, etc. and I found it boring. I also have grown a dislike for medieval setting games lately so I won’t likely spend $70 on Elden Ring. I’m not going to over analyze that, it just doesn’t appeal to me. I imagine many other gamers have strong opinions about certain genres, etc. as well.

Open worlds and being in control of decisions tend to work well because it gives a space where they are in control instead of adults bossing them around all the time.

The original Deus Ex is a pretty good choice. It's got a great plot, a lot of different way to problem-solve your way through levels, multiple mods to update things like textures to modern standards, and it's cheap.

This question is best served by looking for lists of "classic games" and developing a success rubric. "Good games" occur at any level of technical sophistication. What is of primary importance is that the game has a coherent play concept (e.g. "run and jump" or "push blocks") and it expresses and develops this concept well through software features, level design etc. Games with more direct narrative elements and world-building like RPGs tend to be more thematically driven, using game mechanics as an aesthetic mode of engagement, while abstract games like Tetris rest on the play concept itself being the focus of engagement. When the game is good, every feature and asset is going to make sense in developing the whole, and no contradictions will occur given its base assumptions. (AAA deviates heavily from this in pursuing maximalism.)

The exercise of defining what a game is, is also philosophically useful, because there are a lot of things called games that most definitions will exclude, and there are types of games that feel less like "video games" specifically and more like "computer-assisted games" or "interactive stories". Nobody has great claims to these definitions and they should be held loosely.

Retro game content creators will happily make best-of lists to follow up on - and being an older generation, while they have definite preferences, they also have the depth of knowledge to back it up.

I don't know how old your kids are, but I'm going to keep these PG-13ish and lower. There's a lot of personal bias in here since I grew up loving games. I'll admit that I like a mindless shooter here and there, but I'll keep these in line with your criteria.

* Portal 2 - Great story and puzzle game. The first one is fantastic too and is between 1-3 hours in length on the first time.

* Zelda games - Decent story, good world building, heavy puzzle. I have a history with these games and have loved them for literally as long as I can remember. Some of my earliest memories are playing these games with my dad.

* Firewatch - Very heavy story, simple game play. I loved the story for this game and the art style was fantastic. This was the first game I saw in 4k and I was blown away by how crisp it was.

* Chrono Trigger - Heavy story, classic SNES RPG. Square absolutely killed it in the 90s and this is a fantastic example of that.

* Final Fantasy 7 - Heavy story. Such a great game for so many reasons. Fairly long (40-55ish hours) and requires some strategy.

RPGs in general have a decent track record of good stories. There's a lot of good stuff out there, and playing games with your kids is great. My dad did it with me and those are some fantastic memories. Definitely one of the things that made us so close and we still talk about games on our weekly calls.

I wouldn't dismiss the the 'tent pole AAA shoot-em ups' so quickly, as some of these games are the best candidates for 'expanding minds'. I suggest Red Dead Redemption 2.

There's plenty of strategy around games like Overwatch and PUBG too.

> And what does scene construction, story arc and so on mean when you can do anything ?

I'm reminded of this video, where a game-playing husband discusses his non-gaming wife's attempts to play games. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ax7f3JZJHSw

Part of the problem his wife ran into was that she lacked the 'literacy' for games that her husband (who had played games growing up) had, and so wasn't able to perform basic interactions which he had experience with.

I think deep discussions about a topic require familiarity with the basics. - What kind of discussion can you hope to have or appreciate if you don't share fundamental understanding? You can probably ask what they found fun, or what's cool about it.

> what does story arc mean when you can do anything?

You might be able to appreciate Liana Kerzner's Lady Bits series. e.g. in this video, she discusses what 'agency' means in terms of games. She considers that there's the player's agency, the writer's agency, and the (diagetec?) agency of the characters in the story.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pbd1XWGp1tA

> outside the tent pole AAA shoot-em ups, what does the "best 100 video games" look like?

According to Metacritic, it looks a lot like Zelda, Mario, and Grand Theft Auto (among other notable games): https://www.metacritic.com/browse/games/score/metascore/all/...

I'm sure you'll get lots of answers, but one of my top 10 games is the Portal series. The puzzles and humor and story are well worth it IMO. The Civilization games I also recommend.

Whether that expands a teen's mind I'm not sure but I certainly enjoyed it as a teenager.

When I was teenager, Xenogears greatly influenced me. It introduced me to various concepts of philosophy and psychology.

Before this game, my world was pretty simple and easy to understand, after it I had a lot of questions and wasn't really sure about anything.

For me, Minecraft was amazing. I started on real logic with its redstone logic system. I started getting familiar with server management & Linux while trying to create a multiplayer server. I wrote my first code by writing plugins in have and interfacing with existing plugins. I learned how to solve problems by combining different components that other people made. It was truly amazing.

I don't know if it is still that great. I think the technical community is definitely smaller now, and the game itself is more of a game than it was back then. However, I still think it is really cool, and definitely different from all of the shooter games.

The game itself doesn't matter, it's all about how you play. You can mindlessly play chess/bejeweled/doom/etc, or you can actively try to find strategies and improve. I see kids publishing detailed wikis and mathematical models for idle games that you'd assume would be completely mindless. I also see adults mindlessly play games on their phone you'd assume would require intelligence such as chess.

Minecraft but playing with a purpose, Build this, build that, make this farm, automate this, etc.

Factorio.

And if they can handle something more hardcore, Unreal World and Cataclysm: Dark Days Ahead.

Somewhat of a copypasta from an earlier comment of mine, but I'd just be recommending the same games anyway:

The Witness - a masterpiece of puzzle and level design, definitely expanded my mind. Nothing in that game is frivolous. Might be a little confusing at first, but if you explore and experiment its rules will become clearer to you.

The Outer Wilds - a technical masterpiece and a game where you can beat the game very quickly if you know what to do, but you have to put in about 10-15 hours of exploration all across a solar system to gain the knowledge of what you need to do in order to beat it. An excellent creepy, puzzly, and deadly mystery. Also a little different than other games in that instead of collecting trinkets and doo dads, what you're collecting is pieces of knowledge at different locations that can help you figure out mysteries at other places, and see some incredible landscapes that interact with each other and change over time.

Persona 5 Royal - The combat can get a little samey in this game, but the style, soundtrack, and world is amazing. Also love how you have to decide what activities you spend your free time on, as you can only do a few at a time.

Danganronpa series - Bonkers murder mystery graphic novel that's very creative story stretches across multiple games. Figuring out who killed who can take some lateral thinking. It uses pink blood so it doesn't seem super gory but the deaths are kind of dark if you think about it too much. It's a pretty mature game. Phoenix Wright games can give a similar experience but are much more wholesome and more appropriate for younger audiences. Still about solving murders though.

Civilization series - masterpiece of 'just one more turn' gameplay. I don't play it too many times in a year, but whenever I do sit down to play it again, I tend to lose a weekend to it. And it might lead them to go "hey that Terracotta Army is pretty cool, let's look that up on Wikipedia and find out more about it"

Baba Is You - clever puzzle that requires you to change your thinking entirely to solve its puzzles, as by pushing together and breaking apart words of sentences (as if they're blocks) you can change the rules of the level in very surprising ways. You really need to think outside of the box to solve these puzzles.

Zelda: Breath of the Wild - a huge world to explore that just barf a bunch of icons on the map and tells you to go there to do some minigame thing like Ubisoft does. You see something that looks different and interesting in the distance? Go there, and you will likely be rewarded. Also tons of interesting physics puzzles that require some brain scratching to figure out.

God of War - great story, feels like you're playing a movie at times, gorgeous visuals, super fluid combat (actually tried going back to breath of the wild after a playthrough of this and BOTW's combat felt pretty boring in comparison), and even some clever puzzles thanks to being able to throw an axe that freezes things that you can recall from anywhere.

Into The Breach - Clever tactics game, kind of like chess in an environment with mechs, that helped refresh the formula by telling you exactly what the enemy is about to do on their next turn, so it becomes a puzzle in figuring out how to minimize or redirect their targets/movements and/or who needs to be eliminated most this turn.

Strongly agree on The Witness and Outer Wilds. (Albeit haven't played the others) In fact, there are two of the the best single player games I've had, regardless of expanding minds.

The Talos Principle is really good.

It's a remarkable game for a few reasons.

At its base, it's a solid puzzle game that presents a steady set of brainteasers and challenges. Each builds upon the next, slowly teaching you more depth with a very limited set of elements. It's very well made, it has a lovely ambient soundtrack, gorgeous environments, and a story that is woven through quite elegantly.

The second part is that the game encourages you to think outside the box. Without spoiling too much: each area has stars sprinkled around, each of which seems impossible to reach at first. Getting the stars requires you to be creative, to question what you've assumed, and sometimes, to play in a way that feels like cheating, but was, of course, actually entirely intentional. It's great. There is an entire set of optional puzzles which you have to work to even see.

The third part is that this is a very philosophical and accessible game, which uses religious motifs, monumental architecture and allegory to do its thing... but it was actually made by the people who made Serious Sam, a first person brainless monster shooter which is the exact opposite. Talos is what you get when people who understand the medium incredibly well decide to do something entirely different, while winking and nodding at the player the entire time, and yet, without detracting from the core premise. It wears its FPS heritage proudly on its sleeve through its many, many easter eggs. Some of its best puzzles also invoke hints of speedrunning, of exploits, of going out of bounds.

Once you finish the main game there is a DLC for those who can't get enough, including a final area of puzzles that feel like they were left on the cutting room floor because they were just too devious or mean, but which still manage to surprise you.

Hand this to any smarty pants teen, and if they engage with it, they will come out humbled, more independent, and more humanist. And possibly a few IQ points higher.

I think Stellaris can be a somewhat mind expanding game. There are others like it with better or more developed mechanics but it's a good introduction.

There is this other game I never see mentioned. It's kind of annoying, the latest release is not on steam. It's called capitalism lab. Pretty fun economy simulation game. The thing that sets it apart is they try to go for some amount of realism. I suspect a few months playing this game would amount to a better understanding of how businesses work than an MBA.

First, it sounds like you're trying to connect with your kids and build relationship where you are all closer to peers and I want to commend you on that.

You should also know what you're signing yourself up for. Video games (especially if you haven't played many before) demand more of you in a way that a movie does not, and simply cannot. A movie will continue at 1 second per second whether you are distracted, confused about the plot, or completely engrossed.

A video game does not. Until you can do the action required of you to progress, you are not progressing. Period.

Can't figure out this puzzle? Try harder or look online. Can't hit those jumps? Tough. Your aim is bad? Practice.

I think that's the biggest takeway from video games, they set a standard for you to meet and they will not give you an inch until you meet them. Much harder to fool yourself into thinking that you can do something when the game keeps telling you otherwise.

> 1. best video games to expand teenage minds Expand them how. Through the actions of playing the game (e.g. Baba Is You), or by discussing the context of the game (Fortnite/Candy Crush/Farmville). Baba Is You is a great example of the kind of game that will challange you to think in new ways. Fortnite/Candy Crush/Farmville are a great opportunity to discuss manipulation, addiction, and preying on the most vulnerable.

And, where are they starting from? What do they currently play? What skills do they currently have? Whatever they're playing, get them to play something different. Have they try the FPS game, see what it's like to have to play aggressively and at 100 miles an hour (Doom, either the original or the 2016 version for this). Play an RTS game and learn to act now, not when you have the perfect setup (StarCraft II).

> 2. What does the "best 100 video games" look like Some parts of that list looks similar to the top 100 movies of all time lists. Genre defining movies and movies incredibly important for their time, but kinda boring now. Others hold up remarkably well and are much better as emulated.

> 3. "And what does scene construction, story arc and so on mean when you can do anything?" For starters, you cannot do anything in video game. You are actually restricted to doing only those things which the designers allow you to do, intentionally or otherwise. This is a virtual world that they have built from the ground up themselves. Games can and do have story arcs, many AAA titles have a story in them or have the story as the focal point of the game. The developers built this world, if they want you to experience an arc they can force you to. They can make you enter cutscenes, or force you to talk to certain characters and make certain choices before the plot can progress.

I personally dislike story and skip past the story as much as possible. If I wanted a story with moving images I would have watched a movie. *The* defining characteristic of the medium is its interactivivity, its ability to let you do anything within the reals of possiblity of the game world. Why should I squander that ability in order to read lines of dialogue.

So back to your question, what do they mean? They mean essentially the same thing as in movies if the game shows you a story. We've all heard "show don't tell" as advice for movies/show. Well someone will come up with a similar phrase, and I'm betting on it having the form "__ don't show".

Finally, I'll give you some of my own recommendations. Take a look at those tentpole games, they're the blockbusters and Marvel of the video game world. Then try some of these:

- The Witness (don't look up anything and if your using trial and error you're doing it wrong)

- Passage (by Jason Rohrer)

- Democracy (really internalize the idea of token gestures)

- Phasmaphobia (play it together)

- Doom (both the original and the 2016 version)

- Patapon (rhytm game, psp emulator needed)

- Monster Hunters Freedom Unite 2 (plan, adapt, grind, coordinate, psp emulator needed)

None of these need expensive hardware (except maybe doom 2016), and monster hunters has a newer version that's made for PC, but it'd reccomend the older one with emulation

doom

Reply on news.ycombinator.com