Matthew Mandel

After seeing a bunch of people on fintwit talk about it, I’ve recently gotten into playing Tradle. Like Wordle, Tradle is a daily guessing game. Instead of guessing words, however, you have to guess countries based on their exports with warm/cold feedback based on their location. I’m by no means an expert on global trade and don’t always get the correct country, but the game makes for a fun creative challenge where you have to wield whatever intuitions you can muster about global industries while exercising your critical thinking and sense of geography to win.

That coincidence of desire to win and having to learn and think reminds me of Europa Universalis 4, a real time strategy game. In the game, you control a country starting in the 15th century and try to expand it through economic growth, military conquest, diplomacy, and technological progress. While I don’t think the game is especially good preparation for governing a real country, it is so loaded with historical detail (from maps to comparative advantages of countries to one-off events that influence the trajectory of history) that I’ve found myself learning quite a bit about the period from 1444-1821 just by immersing myself in the game. And perhaps even more potently, both Tradle and EU4 have made me more curious about their respective subjects and pushed me to learn more.

We play sports as a way to make the physical activity our bodies require more enjoyable. And despite hugely successful examples of gamifying education like Duolingo, the potential for using our baser desires for novelty and accomplishment to foster self-improvement still seems underrated.