Ask HN: Games which will help increase my appetite for risk?

22 points by afrederico 3 years ago | 50 comments

I'm very risk averse IRL and am prone to "turtle" or "hoard" what I have. This mindset does NOT help me with my investments where a certain tolerance for risk is necessary to get reward.

Are there any games (video, not board) that can help me flex my risk tolerance muscle so I'm able to be less "scared" in reality and less risk averse?

Some thoughts on requirements:

- Immediate feedback through a failure state: don't want to spend 90% of the game building and 10% of the time risking what I've built - Less about game proficiency/mechanics and more about provoking an emotional response which I can then confront and work through - Would prefer a controlled, PvE environment so I can remove the variables of exploiters and better players from the equation (though this would be something useful to jolt a plateaued learning curve) - Something that can be done without a sophisticated setup

Here are some games I've thought of and why they won't work (although I may be approaching them wrong):

- Humankind, Civ 6, etc. - Risk occurs late in the game - Feedback isn't immediate and would require analysis - Large amount of build-up - FPS - Requires technical and game proficiency - MMO FPS (Valorant, Overwatch) - Too many uncontrolled variables - Builders, i.e. Rimworld, Factorio, Anno 1800, etc. - More micro-manage-y than risky - Excessive setup before actual risk is faced - Feedback would only occur after analysis

I don't know what I don't know so any ideas/comments are greatly appreciated!

This is an article I found but it's board games: [https://www.creativelive.com/blog/take-more-risks-board-games/](https://www.creativelive.com/blog/take-more-risks-board-games/)

remflight 3 years ago |

Poker with real money. Playing poker with fake money is utterly worthless. There needs to be real money behind your decision making but I promise it is eye opening.

Learning how to play poker is one of the most important skills you can learn in life. It teaches you so many things about life: how to make decisions based on incomplete information and being okay with unfavorable outcomes; knowing how to control your risk and knowing when to push more when the odds are in your favor; learning how to take a bunch of small losses vs less frequent but much larger wins, etc.

Poker really changed my perspective on life and risk management. Being able to fold your hand 80% of the time and seeing those hands going on to win a huge pot, but telling yourself you did the right move because there’s no way you would have known beforehand, is an extremely valuable life skill.

daviross 3 years ago | |

"being okay with unfavorable outcomes; knowing how to control your risk"

Isn't the winning move not playing, then? I've never seen the appeal. If I lose, I feel the loss of money; but if I win, that's not enjoyable in the same way losing that equivalent would be displeasing.

And either I'm playing with friends, in which case there's no joy in depriving someone else (if I win); or I'm playing with strangers, in which case why would I care about what's going on at the table?

muzani 3 years ago | |

I've always paid poker with fake money and it does the trick too. I've had friends cry over losing lots of Zynga poker money. Losing 10 hours worth of gains in one game hurts.

GnomeSaiyan 3 years ago | | |

Sounds like they didn't learn bankroll management.

kregasaurusrex 3 years ago | |

+1 Online poker was very popular in the late 00's/early 10's (Omaha hasn't had AI dominated play - yet.) where people would self-publish and distribute their tips & tricks to new players if you bought their DVD & PDF set. Decisions made at every stage impact how other players interpret and play the game, and forces you to quickly learn situational awareness in order to best adapt in a changing environment. You could start out with memorizing the starting hand probabilities, read what the strongest 5-card combo on the board could be, and then aspire towards playing GTO to maximize the number of hands won. Even though you'd only be playing with a few dollars, the human element of stubbornness kicks in when having to top up your chips after losing a big hand, and that reward mechanism "spins the same gears" in your brain as the endgame in an RTS video game does. Not to mention the boost it gives to real-life skills of dealing with imperfect information events.

Buttons840 3 years ago | |

In a similar vein, I'm scared of losing the game, my rating, and my ego (how could I possibly lose?) every time I queue up a chess game.

r_hoods_ghost 3 years ago |

Racing games like Asseto Corsa or Automobilista paired with a VR headset and a decent wheel and set of pedals. Learning to race in VR will give you very immediate and visceral feedback about what risks are worth taking. Realistically though, if you want to train yourself to be more risk tolerant you need to take some actual risks in the real world. Try bouldering, abseiling, boxing, anything that makes you uncomfortable like talking to strangers, going to social events on your own if you're shy etc.

dusted 3 years ago |

I'm speculating that risk aversion is a pretty basic trait, and linked to your sensitivity to certain brain chemistry.

I have a low sensitivity to adrenaline, I need extreme stimuli to feel a "rush" in my stomach.. But like anyone, a good adrenaline rush once in a while is great.. Someone might get that from playing a computer game or watching a horror movie.. or trading stock.. I need to drive a race bike around a track at high speed, or downhill mountainbike or bungee jump or parachute.. When I get back from such a thing, I'm so happy, because I felt "that thing", and then I start reflecting on the risk.. "I'm not doing that again, it went ok this time but what about the next.." months later, I'm planning to do it again, because I do need to feel sometimes sometime.

I'm jealous of people who can get this from watching a horror movie, luxury to have it available, safe in your living room, as much as you want..

You might engage in some risk taking more often to desensitize yourself, even if low risk, but real risk, and it should be risk you actually take, not just simulate.. Just be aware that it's not damaging you too much. I'd not recommend gambling (or stock), because it could devastate you financially.

The real risk of computer games (which I do love) is bad health and obesity.. I don't believe you can become less risk-averse by doing entirely risk-free activities.

Try something like skiing/snowboarding/mountainbiking. These are still relatively safe activities, you have good control over the amount of risk on a per-second basis. Do it often, push your limits.

aplummer 3 years ago |

Try Starcraft 2. Games are under 20 minutes and you need to fully commit aggressively to win a lot. Constant attack / harassment / probing or risky expansions(or both).

As well, you can watch the replay to see all the times attacking sooner would have won it.

gaetgu 3 years ago | |

Another +1 for SC2. This game is great in and of itself, but it also punishes camping. If you camp you will be destroyed, so you have to build an army and fight. Games are pretty short (~20min) so there is a pretty quick feedback loop as well

synicalx 3 years ago | |

+1 for SC2, this game really punishes turtling especially when played online. Brood War is great as well but the dated visuals and difficulty involved in managing large numbers of units makes it a bit less friendly.

dcx 3 years ago |

This isn't a video game but it absolutely did the trick for me. Find a theme park with a lot of particularly scary rides, or a holiday town with a lot of "extreme" activities (bungee jumping, etc.). Precommit to doing every single one of them, ideally with a bunch of friends to hold you to your word. And then do them. Don't allow yourself any excuses, especially for the scariest ones.

These kinds of activities are designed to be scary to your monkey / lizard brain, but also to give a consistent payoff in fun and social bonding. I did this for about a week for a buck's trip, and something clicked in my brain associating fear and reward. It lasted for years afterwards; it's been over a decade and I can still feel a shadow of it now. And as you're hoping, the benefits carried over into my professional life.

It makes me think that painful, risky male bonding rituals are almost definitely a feature, not a bug. They turn up in almost all cultures afaik (bullet ant gloves, anyone?). And being able to overcome irrational primate fear is good for everyone including you.

thesuperbigfrog 3 years ago |

XCOM and XCOM2 in Ironman mode (only one autosaved game--all choices are permanent) are excellent choices to learn how to deal with risk.

Gameplay is turn-based so you can plan what you want to do calmly, but results are fairly immediate--if you miscalculate a move your soldiers get hurt or die.

You have to take risks: you must move your team of soldiers ahead into the darkness to accomplish a mission, but there could be aliens around the corner waiting to ambush them.

You can take a risk and have a soldier move ahead to grab some loot (meld) which can grant huge bonuses, but it could expose them to danger. You must decide what they will do.

muzani 3 years ago | |

Both are vastly different games though. XCOM allows you to completely turtle though EW expansion countered that. XCOM 2 seems to overly punish safe play and reward aggression.

The downside of the XCOM games is you can lose a whole game on a 80% roll, so it might not condition you properly. The game snowballs, so if you get far enough without losing someone, or lose someone too early, you've basically lost Ironman but it doesn't inform you when.

Battle Brothers is of the genre, with similar flaws. Basically the whole "you lose on day 110 because you didn't knife enough mercenaries on day 31".

Xenonauts I think strikes a good balance. You can lose almost everyone and still continue the game. It's more strategic and less tactical, meaning that if you write the correct SOPs and use sufficient explosives, you should win.

XCOM feels a bit like chess sometimes, in that you lose because you didn't examine the map properly or positioned your sniper too far back.

ed_voc 3 years ago | |

If you want to learn about risk, modern XCOM is a bad choice. Modern XCOM lies to the player in order to make the player feel better

It gives a distorted view on how likely 60% really is since the percentage shown is not the same as the one used to calculate the hit or miss.

The game secretly changes the odds for sequential misses making hits more likely after misses. This teaches the player that the gambler's fallacy is not a fallacy at all.

tomjakubowski 3 years ago | |

XCOM more than any other game taught me to weigh much more heavily the consequences of the downside, even when it's unlikely to happen. Be in a position to maximize the probability of success, take the shot, and have a backup ready for when it all goes wrong.

VoodooJuJu 3 years ago |

I don't have a game to answer with, but want to share some related sentiments.

"Risk tolerance" is a trait you acquire only when you've never known hunger. Only when you've never been faced with homelessness. Only when you've never been so poor that you can't afford to throw something away, less you may one day need it.

When the worst thing that can come of your failure is going home to a supportive and connected family, a hot meal, and a feather pillow to rest your head, of course you'll be "risk tolerant".

I don't think any game can give you this trait. The only way to acquire it is to be born and raised in a house of abundance.

...though at the same time, the threat of destitution could be a great way to really push one to succeed. "Burn the ships", "necessity is the mother of invention", and all that.

BizarroLand 3 years ago | |

I disagree.

I've been hungry. I've been homeless for over a year, both as a child and as an adult. I've been so poor that I can't afford to throw away broken shoes because I couldn't afford to replace them.

But, that was temporary. I'm doing better now, and I have some risk tolerance.

Maybe not as much as someone who didn't experience what I experienced, but still. Tolerance for risk comes from an acceptance of possible outcomes. You can accept an outcome regardless of your personal circumstances, after all, people with lung cancer sneak out of chemotherapy to smoke cigarettes, and people who are about to have their lights turned off still gamble their paychecks away.

trinovantes 3 years ago |

You can try rogue-like games like Hades where you are expected to fail/die. Your future attempts are improved by what you've accomplished/collected in previous attempts.

Lammy 3 years ago |

The Binding of Isaac has a lot of this. It's a Rogue-lite where a single run is a descent through a series of dungeons, each dungeon composed like Zelda 1 as a series of rooms interconnected by doors, and each type of room pulls from its own pool of human-designed layouts when that level is generated. Each moment of gameplay is a risk calculation on every granularity of your run simultaneously: for the run as a whole (e.g. dungeon branch points based on reaching a given point within <xx> minutes), for each dungeon level (e.g. different after-boss reward possibility for no damage taken during that level), for the current room (e.g. choosing when to activate charged items), and for any given mob based on how well you've learned their movement and attack patterns. Plays best with a controller, imo, like a twin-stick shooter: https://store.steampowered.com/bundle/2405/The_Binding_of_Is...

mattwilsonn888 3 years ago |

Try CS:GO. A useful and very often under-provisioned role in public games is that of the 'entry man.' Basically your job is to get out as far as you can, spot the enemy positions, and do as much damage as you can. Its your team behind you's job to tack on kills based on the space you made.

No one really wants to go out first because you usually die first, and have the least opportunity to get kills if evenly matched skill-wise with the opponents. It also takes the ability to 'just go' when the time is right (when the smokes are set or when everyone is close enough to go together or when a distraction happens elsewhere) even if you don't feel fully ready - waiting too long means the enemies prepare better.

All of that will put you in situations where you have the obvious choice of waiting around, or leading the way, and though they rarely do it, its usually better for worse players to go out first so its no problem being new to the game and trying that play-style.

sexy_panda 3 years ago | |

I came here to say this.

CSGO is also a lot about communication, economy management and decision making.

Surviving a round by backing off and saving a gun can win you the next round.

Mindlessly playing will on the other hand guarantee a loss.

It's also about trust and respect. If your team mate doesn't have your back while defusing the bomb, the enemy will kill you both and you lose the round.

There's just so many things to learn from this game.

The community is mostly neutral quality wise. Some people are toxic, but there are also a lot of great players, that behave empowering.

I love CSGO.

springogeek 3 years ago |

If you don't mind taking a risk on a physical card game (and you have an extra player), you could try out Netrunner (you can print-and-play the excellent starter set from here: https://nisei.net/products/system-gateway/#bundle).

Pitch: You play as either: an elite hacker trying to break into the servers of megacorporations for fun and profit, or the inner workings of said megacorporation, trying to defend against the hacker.

The game requires you to take risks because it's a game about information control. You don't know what the corp will do to defend itself until you make a run at their servers, and corps don't know exactly how the runner plans to get in, or what they'll find when they do.

pkhamre 3 years ago |

Rocket League.

It is free and runs on most platforms.

It will take a lot of time to understand and learn how to control the car and the ball, but once you know that, you can go into ranked or casual 1v1-matches. These are the most nerve-wracking matches to play for most people, since your own mistakes often immediately gives your opponent and opportunity to net a goal. The reason I personally think this game is so awesome and satisfying to play, is how you need to learn and develop yourself in both game sense and game mechanics.

The grind of getting the mechanics is worth it in my opinion, but all in all you also have you enjoy the game.

The 5-minute gameplay in a match of Rocket League, especially in 1v1s, will introduce intense and stressful moments for many players. So observing yourself through both how you react and how you play will learn you a lot. Because everything happens immediately, you need to be aware of how you emotionally react to your own failure in order to play your best game. If you learn wisely from your mistakes, it doesn't matter if you win or loose, because you have a better fundamental understanding for future games. Rinse and repeat! Then understand how the same risk and reward principles that applies in Rocket League can be applied to your own personal risk management.

In general, I learned more about learning, and emotional reactions than I ever imagined I would from a game. And especially a game where the objective is to use your rocket-boost powered car to smash an oversized ball into the goal.

astonex 3 years ago |

Escape from Tarkov

It's Battle Royale esque. All the gear and items you take into a round will be lost if you die. But the only way to acquire more gear is to go into the rounds, loot, kill others for their loot and survive. If you just go into rounds and hide and turtle, you wont find any good gear. You have to be proactive and take risks to loot gear before other players in the round. In EFT, many players have "Gear Fear" where people don't like playing because they can't handle the risk of losing all their gear if they die.

LilBytes 3 years ago |

RimWorld, in spite of what you said, I think hardcode mode where you only have one save can increase your appetite for risk.

The absolutely random events that occur in Randy Random, seeing your city or town get destroyed by a nuclear fall out while being invaded by a huge gang of raiding mechanics can be soul destroying. Learning your appetite for growth and 'fixing' problems while balancing your ability to survive assaults, famine, blights and democratic fall outs can be very humbling.

Kenneth39 3 years ago |

Greetings! A very controversial, but damn interesting topic.

Maybe you should try the classic of the horror genre, Dead Space. Or perhaps Doom, which doesn't require much skill, but gives you an adrenaline boost.

I'd also recommend Hotline Miami, but it might be a bit too challenging.

I would like to recommend RPGs or platformers, but they have too many uncertain variables.

omega3 3 years ago |

Learning to playing poker analytically based on EV is a good general life skill to have that is applicable to a wide range of scenarios. This is a good free course: https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/15-s50-poker-theory-and-analytic...

For board games I particularly like Diplomacy but it's intensive if played correctly and I've found not everyone is suited to play it.

notjustanymike 3 years ago |

F1 Manager 2022. Take a gamble on safety car for a single stop strategy with your rookie driver, or play it safe and do a 2-stopper. Rinse, repeat, and also get into F1.

omega3 3 years ago | |

I think this game is not yet released?

notjustanymike 3 years ago | | |

Right you are - August 30th.

EddieDante 3 years ago |

Play Dark Souls. There's cooperative play if you want it, and it's easy to opt out of PVP; just stay hollow unless you need to upgrade a bonfire.

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

randomcarbloke 3 years ago |

Eve Online, and Barotrauma, both require you to risk costly failure in Eve this could be the expensive ship, mods, and cargo that you have accrued to do the task you are risking it on, Barotrauma, risking failure for your team by trying to improve your team's "lot".

Buttons840 3 years ago |

Eve Online is famous for having large battles that "destroy" thousands of dollars worth of in-game ships. Meaning replacing all those ships would cost thousands of real world dollars.

I can't personally recommend anyone sink that much time into the game though.

dalmo3 3 years ago |

> Immediate feedback through a failure state

https://www.devolverdigital.com/games/disc-room

willmorrison 3 years ago |

Escape From Tarkov or The Cycle: Frontier. Most of the game is managing what resources you have and taking risks to attain more.

jsiaajdsdaa 3 years ago |

Just make more money. That's what cured my desire to hoard every penny.

k0k0r0 3 years ago |

Bullet chess, e.g. each player gets a minute for the whole game.

k0k0r0 3 years ago |

Bullet Chess, e.g. both players get a minute for the whole game.

steveklabnik 3 years ago |

Rust, Escape from Tarkov, The Cycle: Frontier

lifeplusplus 3 years ago |

Mirror edge and call of duty

baremetal 3 years ago |

you arent going to overcome IRL risk aversion by not taking IRL risks.

yowmamasita 3 years ago |

Slay the Spire

speedgoose 3 years ago |

Minecraft?

shaunxcode 3 years ago |

Rust

tehwhale810 3 years ago | |

This is actually hilarious and unironically a very fun game with high risk/reward.

donkarma 3 years ago |

ss13