Every game is a rationality game if you define rationality as “winning”. We’re not looking for games where it’s important to your victory to be rational, we’re looking for games that teach generalizable rationality skills. Starcraft teaches things like ROI and VOI implicitly, not explicitly, and in ways that aren’t easy to apply to real world situations. Maybe you can make the leap from “I should make a scout because it’s easy and doesn’t take too many of my APM and will seriously help me win” from “I should research different colleges instead of just going to the one in my local town because the potential payoffs are huge and the costs are low.” but I doubt that’s the case for almost anyone who plays starcraft and it’s certainly not optimized for it.
I wouldn’t be surprised if playing these types of games seriously provided some benefit to general rationality, but I agree that for teaching purposes you want to be more explicit.
But are those definitely more generalizable? There’s a lot of talk about ‘akrasia’ here. Openings in RTS games (or non-realtime strategy games like Chess) are very important and significant part of the win is that you must research different opening strategies carefully.
Every game is a rationality game if you define rationality as “winning”. We’re not looking for games where it’s important to your victory to be rational, we’re looking for games that teach generalizable rationality skills. Starcraft teaches things like ROI and VOI implicitly, not explicitly, and in ways that aren’t easy to apply to real world situations. Maybe you can make the leap from “I should make a scout because it’s easy and doesn’t take too many of my APM and will seriously help me win” from “I should research different colleges instead of just going to the one in my local town because the potential payoffs are huge and the costs are low.” but I doubt that’s the case for almost anyone who plays starcraft and it’s certainly not optimized for it.
I wouldn’t be surprised if playing these types of games seriously provided some benefit to general rationality, but I agree that for teaching purposes you want to be more explicit.
But are those definitely more generalizable? There’s a lot of talk about ‘akrasia’ here. Openings in RTS games (or non-realtime strategy games like Chess) are very important and significant part of the win is that you must research different opening strategies carefully.