Magic, The Gathering

Twice I have heard entrepreneurs on podcasts credit the game with teaching them how to evaluate risk, seek alternative strategies depending on one's resources, and most importantly, unsentimentally evaluate what resources you do have. This doesn't tell us about the Magic players who went on to screw up their lives, of course. It's not clean data, but anecdote.

But I wonder if the real problem with the story isn't that it has the arrow of causation reversed. My son used to describe that many of the high schoolers at math meets would play the game at every spare moment around the year 2000. They were already good at objective thinking and therefore liked a game that rewarded it. Or, it may have taught the skills the entrepreneurs claimed, but a dozen other available games or activities might have taught it just as well.  Their minds were going to seek out some such exercise.

On the other, other hand, these two men were ridiculously successful at dealing with risk and tradeoffs, and perhaps they know something about the subject that I don't and I should listen to them.