Ask HN: Teaching life skills through games, am I crazy?

2 points by shivaniShimpi_ 30 days ago | 6 comments

you can't learn to swim without water. most life skills are the same but there's no safe place to practice before you're actually in the situation questly puts you in interactive simulations. say you're learning negotiation. you get a job offer at 95k from your dream company, ready to just say yes. a mentor character stops you and asks you what's your walkaway number? you're like wdym, it's my dream company but that question alone changes how you think. you pick right choice, it tells you why it's right, wrong choice, it tells you what went wrong and you practice that part again through the gameplay. same skill across different situations until it becomes your normal we have 21 active deep research users. a 14 year old with ADHD came back at 3:41 AM for more. a clinical psychologist with 20 years of practice said "this is everybody." a user with OCD said it helped her calm down. but here's where i need more feedback does "games" as framing put adults off even when the experience doesn't feel like one? going to YC startup school tomorrow, what's the obvious thing i'm missing? would love to hear from you guys

pingananth 27 days ago |

I have a product exactly on these lines and infact it was in HN where I got my first customers as well but the current situation looks like the market is not solution aware and hence finding repeated customers and channels gets difficult.

Sharing the link for reference:

https://getsimul.com/

Happy to discuss further if interested

austin-cheney 28 days ago |

You cannot teach life skills using games unless the game is explicitly designed to terminate and delete all play data the moment user persistence degrades, and the game cannot have a pause function.

tmaly 30 days ago |

I think you can teach some skills through games. Coding in a REPL loop is great for learning certain types of problem solving since the feedback loop is so tight.

Chess is another good one, but the feedback loop is not nearly as tight.

shivaniShimpi_ 30 days ago | |

the feedback loop point is exactly it. flight simulators work because every decision gets immediate feedback. most real life skill practice has the worst feedback loop of all, sometimes you don’t find out you negotiated badly until years later. that’s what we’re trying to compress