A decision about who to marry, which school to study at, which job to accept, whether to have kids, often have effects that last years or decades. In a game, these decisions could be iterated many times. Players of the game of Go need to play about 50 games to get a good feel for how it works. Not so with life. (Also, seems like your poll was kinda pointless if you were just going to ignore the results.)
Or: assume the Buddhists & Hindus are correct. Reincarnation is real. Robin Hanson needs to come back and measure how successful various souls are after their next 30 incarnations.
This rings true. I've often thought, since getting well into middle age, how I well I could play the game of life if only I could start (as a teenager or young adult) or if only I could do 3-4 things differently.
I think hypothesis #6, life has implicit rules [WAS #1, life has complex and /unclear/ rules], may be the best of these answers.
Historically, at least in the West, most thinkers have adopted 1 of 2 great worldviews: the rationalist worldview, which tries to simplify reality to a set of fundamental, eternal, /a priori/ rules; and the empiricist worldview, which tries to understand the world by observing it. In the domains of philosophy, economics, and science, we can see that empiricists like Epicurus, Adam Smith, Hume, and Edison crush rationalists like Plato, Marx, Hegel, or Chomsky at correctly understanding, predicting, and manipulating reality. (Though the very best, like Aristotle, Newton, and Einstein, use both approaches.)
I expect the same thing happens in the domain of life: empiricists are more-likely to use strategies such as "do what successful people do", or "pay attention to what people do more than what they say", and are probably better at adopting successful strategies and avoiding the traps laid by professed-but-not-honored moral codes.
Gaming selects HARD for rationalism. People who like board games are probably people who want life to have a set of specified and unchanging rules which they can then analyze and optimize for. You don't find many popular board games where the rules are generated randomly at the start, and change slightly on every turn. (Just FLUXX.) It might even be that board games are a compensating mechanism for people who wish their rational, rule-based behavior would /win/ sometimes.
I think they are very closely related, however. An implicit rule might be "being willing to talk up your achievements helps", but it is unclear whether it helps linearly or with diminishing returns, when you should do it, how much it helps (should you go all in or be choosy?) Along with the long cycle of seeing how different strategies work out you are left with a situation where you can't predictively figure out the likely best strategy due to unclear and implicit rules (that also might randomly change without notice) and not having a lot of ability to try out a strategy then reset and start again to try another.
"lasts longer" is underrated. Life requires a low discount rate and persistent effort over years, versus a board game that only lasts a couple of hours. Most people have very irrationally high discount rates implicitly.
There are board games that people can play over multiple days. We could see if that greater length makes a difference in the correlation between success there vs in life.
I don't understand people, I don't understand unwritten social rules, and whether or not you people realize it consciously, your world is exploding with unwritten rules.
"Homo Hypocritus" theory well describes the life/game dichotomy. "Gamers" are likely too over-indexed on the "rules"... understanding and maxing within well-defined rules is all of games but only part of life. I used to play professional poker and I identified with Sklansky who wrote (paraphrase) "I got so sick of real life where all these idiots who think the rules don't apply to them got ahead at work. In poker people who think the rules of probability don't apply to them get scalped."
That's what games are... a beautiful cool well-lit world of rules where the rules really do apply. But that's not the real world, and that's not what our brains are there for.
Yeah I think this ties into #7 which Robin undervalues. Games are hard rule based and you don't win if you get caught not following them, to the point your winnings will retroactively be taken and you will be permanently (effectively) ostracized, it's a world where God materially exists (the game designer) and is absolute impartial and fair.
Also he fails to realize games by their very nature are pro-social hence the participants have a good faith incentive to play by the rules whereas in life you don't. "Winning" at life is about things outside your control (you have no control whether a US cop randomly kicks your door down and shoots you for example) coupled with unwritten rules and patronage hence "unfair". You can't map out a strategy that maximizes probability of success when you don't know the rules, the rules you do know are irrelevant, the math is unknowable, and regardless even if you get everything correct, someone more popular than you can simply declare you the loser and take your stuff.
Two reasons: to be very good at a game requires obsession with, uh, game playing in the childish sense, which is not good for achievement in life.
Secondly, life is not a game and cultivating a mindset where you see interactions as zero-sum, are always looking for a win condition, and feeling like you’ve lost when it doesn’t go your way, is an extremely unhealthy and unsuccessful way to approach being a human.
I'm surprised you think that. Games which only one person can win are /required/ by design to be zero-sum. Human life offers many examples of mostly net-gain events.
The Enlightenment (and the earlier Athenian Enlightenment) could be summarized as the realization that even economic and political life needn't be zero-sum, even without a God, with discoveries such as that financial transactions can be win-win, that trade can be more-profitable than war, that an economy can grow, that technology can improve, that free markets are more-beneficial than command economies, and that there exist governments (democracies) which can resolve disagreements non-violently by using /mechanisms/ such that people give their mutual consent only to the mechanism rather than to each particular resolution.
Is the relationship between a parent and their child zero sum? This is a fundamental building block of our world, so if it isn’t that already speaks to a deep flaw in your claim. Is the relationship between a husband and wife zero sum? Only if they’re headed for divorce. Are your friendships zero sum? Then you are doing it wrong.
If you’re bringing zero sum energy to these girls you will not be successful in a way that matters. You’ll be a man in white jeans screaming about his cars at a happy man who loves his family.
I might humbly suggest that if you think that the "games" being described here are exclusively "childish" and "zero-sum", that you should take some time to learn more about the wide range of ones that aren't.
>If board games are well described by game theory, then the key game theory thesis is that life is well described by game theory seems in doubt if those who do well at board games do inexplicably less well at life.
There’s no question to answer here. Game theory is not good at describing life. Who says it is- is this a widely accepted philosophical position? We are a fallen race lol
In board games, there's an entire genre of Euro/German games that are explicitly cooperative. Certainly lots still have "score winners" but they require cooperation between players to achieve the positive sum goal of "having fun." Many others outside that category also have economic style rules or mechanisms that explicitly or implicitly model "positive sum interactions."
In computer games, there's a huge range of cooperative games - often against/with computer generated opponents/allies - where the gameplay is widely outside "chess-style: you and me compete and one of us loses." Heck, there's thousands of games that don't have winners or losers or score or anything like that.
re: childish:
I guess you can call whatever you want childish, as it's subjective. But I think it's fair to say things like: chess, poker, any board/computer game that requires above-child-level strategic thinking or subject matter. Take a look at the highest revenue games of all time. It's billions of hours of playtime - some are childish, but many aren't.
It happens to all of us! On the up side, if the thing preventing you from being a gamer today is time, there's been a revolution in smaller, shorter titles that are very good! Playing them still makes you a gamer. :)
the fact so many hours are being dedicated to entertainment would seem to be the detrimental thing. Also, though non-zero sum games may exist I do not think they are the ones focused on by the most dedicated gamers… and they still teach the mentality of the “Win Condition” and the broader assumption of the existence of predictable rule sets that govern outcomes…
If that's your assessment of "games" then I go back to "perhaps gain a wider understanding of the topic". Your statements are perhaps compatible with a world of Pac-Man at the arcade in 1980, but not today, or even the past 25 years.
I think games have a shared set of skills, each skill is useful for many games but not for life. e.g. combinatorial calculations, playing the artifical environment as is w/o applying normal life heuristic
If there are skills good for games but not the game of life, then life must differ in systematic ways from other games. My question is what are those differences.
Throwing in this alternative hypothesis, for the sake of variety.
Finding ways to win at games with an unchanging finite set of well defined rules and moves is easy enough, that a computer could do it, if you throw enough electricity at it. If you understand the limits and possibilities of the rules, you can do better than average, and if you understand the meta, you can do exceptionally well.
In real life, however, the meta is _nothing_ like the meta in a game. A lot of _situations_ can be reduced to games (i.e. see the broad applicability of Mesquita's models to diplomacy, negotiations, and court-cases -- it is explained, somewhat, in Predicting Politics and The Predictioneer's Game), but the reduction process itself requires acquiring a lot of domain knowledge (you are basically mapping complicated real world possibilities onto a set of numbers and complicated probabilities).
So what is the meta of real life? The meta is: figuring out which games are even worth playing. And this is very difficult to do because most of your credible competitors are doing the same calculus. If you get it wrong, you can win at the game and still lose at life. Also, finding a game that has sufficient material and non-material rewards is very difficult (many high-earners hate their jobs -- did they win or lose at life?). Sometimes it makes more sense to be just good enough at the game, to stay in the game, without over-committing your precious time, and spend the surplus time on things that you enjoy.
Put differently, choosing a game to play is usually a one-way door, and you rarely have enough information to make the optimal decision. If you are lucky enough to make an optimal decision (or at least a better than average decision), you still have to get good at that game, which might be beyond your abilities (for whatever reason), and even if you manage that, you might start to experience some combination of burnout and ennui, that makes you want to either stop playing games altogether, or to find a new one that is electrifying enough to jolt you out of the existential doom spiral.
Plenty of evidence for not as fun. Look at what people who have the highest IQ scores are doing. James Woods was tested 190 IQ, first wanted to be a scientist, decided acting is more fun even though it is not super g-loaded, got successful at it but not because of his IQ (lol just look at Matt Damon), then decided conservative twitting is more fun even if it means he never gets a role again in Hollywood. All his life, he was doing what he considered fun and it is just pure luck he was also talented at it.
I'm surprised more people didn't suggest a mental time horizon limitation.
In a game, you can imagine the consequences of actions easily, and even when you can't, you get a correction right away and can establish causation. It's much easier to carry out a "long term" plan.
But in life, things are drawn out to a much greater degree. It takes higher intelligence, meta-cognition, willpower, and high-level thinking to see the patterns or to actualize on plans without sabotaging yourself with short-term thinking.
I appreciate these comments. Lotsa smart people here. But -- no one has mentioned that a unique aspect of Life (different from Games) is that we humans make important decisions at the start of Life's game as teenagers or young adults. We make choices with lasting impact when our cognition is not fully developed and we have only seen the chessboard from the vantage point of a myopic pawn who can barely see one square ahead. At what age have we finally traversed enough around the board to even see what the options are? At what age have we finally seen thru bad advice or youthful naiveté?
1. Usual success markers might not align to actual desires.
2. Very important: being good at games is effortful and costly. This is true for life generally as well. Gamers who are elite at a few games are often average at others, only rarely is someone so naturally good at lots of them. Even then, they won't be top 1% in many. Life demands lots of small interactions that aren't very interesting, but matter if you want to do well by traditional measures. I suspect that for many, it's simply not worth it for the same reason a top chess player usually won't consider getting good to elite at Halo worth it.
You can infer implicit rules, if you are competent and willing to think about it. This includes social rules. There's a reason pickup artists were called players for a while. They knew the "game".
But no matter what, if it's a crappy game to you or the rewards of mastery aren't worth it, you won't play much, and thus won't do well by its metrics.
IMO "not fun" really is an overwhelming factor in this, even if people won't usually put it that way.
Ah, but you missed a key option: Maybe those gamers *have* won at life. Success in life is not a unidimensional axis. Some people strive to make money, some people strive to discover truth, some people strive to do more spins on a skateboard than anyone else, some people strive to win board games. If you are the kind of person who ranks "board game playing" as the worthiest pursuit – then being an elite board game player *is* success at life.
If we're going to equate "life success" with some economics measure like income, then we have to admit that Albert Einstein and Mother Teresa and Robert Frost and William Shakespeare were abject failures. (The malleability of "success" is I think one of the best features of the human psyche, because it allows far more people to succeed than would be the case if everyone held the same goal function.)
My hypothesis is that board gaming ability at less elite levels probably does correlate with, say, measures of income – but at an elite level it may anticorrelate because the people who succeed at that level are the ones who prioritize board games over other aspects of life. I.e., to them it *is* life.
Not everyone who games is doing it with the same motivations so naturally that is going to vary, but also a lot of people are in it for the games versus using it as a training ground for "real life" skills. It's not especially different from any other hobby in that way, so asking "why don't gamers win at life" makes about as much sense as posing that question to, say, fitness or car enthusiasts--sure those will contain skills that are vaguely transferrable to social status games but that's not strictly the point of the hobby.
life has far more negative consequences for defeat
gamers can rapidly iterate on game strategies to figure out what works and what doesn't over the course of hundreds of matches
in life, one wrong decision could mean the destruction of your career/relationships/health/future prospects......
so it encourages highly risk-averse strategies that look a lot like conventional wisdom of 'go to good college, get white collar job, find a spouse...'
A decision about who to marry, which school to study at, which job to accept, whether to have kids, often have effects that last years or decades. In a game, these decisions could be iterated many times. Players of the game of Go need to play about 50 games to get a good feel for how it works. Not so with life. (Also, seems like your poll was kinda pointless if you were just going to ignore the results.)
Or: assume the Buddhists & Hindus are correct. Reincarnation is real. Robin Hanson needs to come back and measure how successful various souls are after their next 30 incarnations.
This rings true. I've often thought, since getting well into middle age, how I well I could play the game of life if only I could start (as a teenager or young adult) or if only I could do 3-4 things differently.
I think hypothesis #6, life has implicit rules [WAS #1, life has complex and /unclear/ rules], may be the best of these answers.
Historically, at least in the West, most thinkers have adopted 1 of 2 great worldviews: the rationalist worldview, which tries to simplify reality to a set of fundamental, eternal, /a priori/ rules; and the empiricist worldview, which tries to understand the world by observing it. In the domains of philosophy, economics, and science, we can see that empiricists like Epicurus, Adam Smith, Hume, and Edison crush rationalists like Plato, Marx, Hegel, or Chomsky at correctly understanding, predicting, and manipulating reality. (Though the very best, like Aristotle, Newton, and Einstein, use both approaches.)
I expect the same thing happens in the domain of life: empiricists are more-likely to use strategies such as "do what successful people do", or "pay attention to what people do more than what they say", and are probably better at adopting successful strategies and avoiding the traps laid by professed-but-not-honored moral codes.
Gaming selects HARD for rationalism. People who like board games are probably people who want life to have a set of specified and unchanging rules which they can then analyze and optimize for. You don't find many popular board games where the rules are generated randomly at the start, and change slightly on every turn. (Just FLUXX.) It might even be that board games are a compensating mechanism for people who wish their rational, rule-based behavior would /win/ sometimes.
"unclear" was intended to differ from "implicit"; seems you are talking here about implicit rules, which was answer #6.
I think they are very closely related, however. An implicit rule might be "being willing to talk up your achievements helps", but it is unclear whether it helps linearly or with diminishing returns, when you should do it, how much it helps (should you go all in or be choosy?) Along with the long cycle of seeing how different strategies work out you are left with a situation where you can't predictively figure out the likely best strategy due to unclear and implicit rules (that also might randomly change without notice) and not having a lot of ability to try out a strategy then reset and start again to try another.
Agreed.
"lasts longer" is underrated. Life requires a low discount rate and persistent effort over years, versus a board game that only lasts a couple of hours. Most people have very irrationally high discount rates implicitly.
There are board games that people can play over multiple days. We could see if that greater length makes a difference in the correlation between success there vs in life.
Yes, I'm skeptical we will see such a difference. Some games are played out over months or years.
I feel like answer 1 applies to me.
I don't understand people, I don't understand unwritten social rules, and whether or not you people realize it consciously, your world is exploding with unwritten rules.
I once read this great post on this topic:
https://www.overcomingbias.com/p/homo-hipocritushtml
"Homo Hypocritus" theory well describes the life/game dichotomy. "Gamers" are likely too over-indexed on the "rules"... understanding and maxing within well-defined rules is all of games but only part of life. I used to play professional poker and I identified with Sklansky who wrote (paraphrase) "I got so sick of real life where all these idiots who think the rules don't apply to them got ahead at work. In poker people who think the rules of probability don't apply to them get scalped."
That's what games are... a beautiful cool well-lit world of rules where the rules really do apply. But that's not the real world, and that's not what our brains are there for.
Yeah I think this ties into #7 which Robin undervalues. Games are hard rule based and you don't win if you get caught not following them, to the point your winnings will retroactively be taken and you will be permanently (effectively) ostracized, it's a world where God materially exists (the game designer) and is absolute impartial and fair.
Also he fails to realize games by their very nature are pro-social hence the participants have a good faith incentive to play by the rules whereas in life you don't. "Winning" at life is about things outside your control (you have no control whether a US cop randomly kicks your door down and shoots you for example) coupled with unwritten rules and patronage hence "unfair". You can't map out a strategy that maximizes probability of success when you don't know the rules, the rules you do know are irrelevant, the math is unknowable, and regardless even if you get everything correct, someone more popular than you can simply declare you the loser and take your stuff.
You can’t save and restart before your last mistake
Few board games allow that either.
Two reasons: to be very good at a game requires obsession with, uh, game playing in the childish sense, which is not good for achievement in life.
Secondly, life is not a game and cultivating a mindset where you see interactions as zero-sum, are always looking for a win condition, and feeling like you’ve lost when it doesn’t go your way, is an extremely unhealthy and unsuccessful way to approach being a human.
Games are not on average more zero sum than is life.
I'm surprised you think that. Games which only one person can win are /required/ by design to be zero-sum. Human life offers many examples of mostly net-gain events.
The Enlightenment (and the earlier Athenian Enlightenment) could be summarized as the realization that even economic and political life needn't be zero-sum, even without a God, with discoveries such as that financial transactions can be win-win, that trade can be more-profitable than war, that an economy can grow, that technology can improve, that free markets are more-beneficial than command economies, and that there exist governments (democracies) which can resolve disagreements non-violently by using /mechanisms/ such that people give their mutual consent only to the mechanism rather than to each particular resolution.
Is the relationship between a parent and their child zero sum? This is a fundamental building block of our world, so if it isn’t that already speaks to a deep flaw in your claim. Is the relationship between a husband and wife zero sum? Only if they’re headed for divorce. Are your friendships zero sum? Then you are doing it wrong.
If you’re bringing zero sum energy to these girls you will not be successful in a way that matters. You’ll be a man in white jeans screaming about his cars at a happy man who loves his family.
*areas, not “girls”
Uh, I’m not surprised to hear you say this, but I really think that you are totally wrong.
I might humbly suggest that if you think that the "games" being described here are exclusively "childish" and "zero-sum", that you should take some time to learn more about the wide range of ones that aren't.
>If board games are well described by game theory, then the key game theory thesis is that life is well described by game theory seems in doubt if those who do well at board games do inexplicably less well at life.
There’s no question to answer here. Game theory is not good at describing life. Who says it is- is this a widely accepted philosophical position? We are a fallen race lol
Name some.
Gladly!
Re: "zero-sum"
In board games, there's an entire genre of Euro/German games that are explicitly cooperative. Certainly lots still have "score winners" but they require cooperation between players to achieve the positive sum goal of "having fun." Many others outside that category also have economic style rules or mechanisms that explicitly or implicitly model "positive sum interactions."
In computer games, there's a huge range of cooperative games - often against/with computer generated opponents/allies - where the gameplay is widely outside "chess-style: you and me compete and one of us loses." Heck, there's thousands of games that don't have winners or losers or score or anything like that.
re: childish:
I guess you can call whatever you want childish, as it's subjective. But I think it's fair to say things like: chess, poker, any board/computer game that requires above-child-level strategic thinking or subject matter. Take a look at the highest revenue games of all time. It's billions of hours of playtime - some are childish, but many aren't.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_video_games
Wow. I used to think of myself as a gamer, but the only games on that list that I've played are Tetris and Pac-Man.
It happens to all of us! On the up side, if the thing preventing you from being a gamer today is time, there's been a revolution in smaller, shorter titles that are very good! Playing them still makes you a gamer. :)
the fact so many hours are being dedicated to entertainment would seem to be the detrimental thing. Also, though non-zero sum games may exist I do not think they are the ones focused on by the most dedicated gamers… and they still teach the mentality of the “Win Condition” and the broader assumption of the existence of predictable rule sets that govern outcomes…
If that's your assessment of "games" then I go back to "perhaps gain a wider understanding of the topic". Your statements are perhaps compatible with a world of Pac-Man at the arcade in 1980, but not today, or even the past 25 years.
Since I got my Nintendo 64 for Christmas 1997, I have spent probably tens of thousands of hours gaming.
I do not need to delude myself that this was a smart thing to do, however.
I would think much of being good at games is game specific elements that are often shared but are not in real life. games are weird
I'm talking people who are generally good at games, not who specialize in learning particular games.
I think games have a shared set of skills, each skill is useful for many games but not for life. e.g. combinatorial calculations, playing the artifical environment as is w/o applying normal life heuristic
If there are skills good for games but not the game of life, then life must differ in systematic ways from other games. My question is what are those differences.
Throwing in this alternative hypothesis, for the sake of variety.
Finding ways to win at games with an unchanging finite set of well defined rules and moves is easy enough, that a computer could do it, if you throw enough electricity at it. If you understand the limits and possibilities of the rules, you can do better than average, and if you understand the meta, you can do exceptionally well.
In real life, however, the meta is _nothing_ like the meta in a game. A lot of _situations_ can be reduced to games (i.e. see the broad applicability of Mesquita's models to diplomacy, negotiations, and court-cases -- it is explained, somewhat, in Predicting Politics and The Predictioneer's Game), but the reduction process itself requires acquiring a lot of domain knowledge (you are basically mapping complicated real world possibilities onto a set of numbers and complicated probabilities).
So what is the meta of real life? The meta is: figuring out which games are even worth playing. And this is very difficult to do because most of your credible competitors are doing the same calculus. If you get it wrong, you can win at the game and still lose at life. Also, finding a game that has sufficient material and non-material rewards is very difficult (many high-earners hate their jobs -- did they win or lose at life?). Sometimes it makes more sense to be just good enough at the game, to stay in the game, without over-committing your precious time, and spend the surplus time on things that you enjoy.
Put differently, choosing a game to play is usually a one-way door, and you rarely have enough information to make the optimal decision. If you are lucky enough to make an optimal decision (or at least a better than average decision), you still have to get good at that game, which might be beyond your abilities (for whatever reason), and even if you manage that, you might start to experience some combination of burnout and ennui, that makes you want to either stop playing games altogether, or to find a new one that is electrifying enough to jolt you out of the existential doom spiral.
Plenty of evidence for not as fun. Look at what people who have the highest IQ scores are doing. James Woods was tested 190 IQ, first wanted to be a scientist, decided acting is more fun even though it is not super g-loaded, got successful at it but not because of his IQ (lol just look at Matt Damon), then decided conservative twitting is more fun even if it means he never gets a role again in Hollywood. All his life, he was doing what he considered fun and it is just pure luck he was also talented at it.
I'm surprised more people didn't suggest a mental time horizon limitation.
In a game, you can imagine the consequences of actions easily, and even when you can't, you get a correction right away and can establish causation. It's much easier to carry out a "long term" plan.
But in life, things are drawn out to a much greater degree. It takes higher intelligence, meta-cognition, willpower, and high-level thinking to see the patterns or to actualize on plans without sabotaging yourself with short-term thinking.
I appreciate these comments. Lotsa smart people here. But -- no one has mentioned that a unique aspect of Life (different from Games) is that we humans make important decisions at the start of Life's game as teenagers or young adults. We make choices with lasting impact when our cognition is not fully developed and we have only seen the chessboard from the vantage point of a myopic pawn who can barely see one square ahead. At what age have we finally traversed enough around the board to even see what the options are? At what age have we finally seen thru bad advice or youthful naiveté?
Some thoughts:
1. Usual success markers might not align to actual desires.
2. Very important: being good at games is effortful and costly. This is true for life generally as well. Gamers who are elite at a few games are often average at others, only rarely is someone so naturally good at lots of them. Even then, they won't be top 1% in many. Life demands lots of small interactions that aren't very interesting, but matter if you want to do well by traditional measures. I suspect that for many, it's simply not worth it for the same reason a top chess player usually won't consider getting good to elite at Halo worth it.
You can infer implicit rules, if you are competent and willing to think about it. This includes social rules. There's a reason pickup artists were called players for a while. They knew the "game".
But no matter what, if it's a crappy game to you or the rewards of mastery aren't worth it, you won't play much, and thus won't do well by its metrics.
IMO "not fun" really is an overwhelming factor in this, even if people won't usually put it that way.
Ah, but you missed a key option: Maybe those gamers *have* won at life. Success in life is not a unidimensional axis. Some people strive to make money, some people strive to discover truth, some people strive to do more spins on a skateboard than anyone else, some people strive to win board games. If you are the kind of person who ranks "board game playing" as the worthiest pursuit – then being an elite board game player *is* success at life.
If we're going to equate "life success" with some economics measure like income, then we have to admit that Albert Einstein and Mother Teresa and Robert Frost and William Shakespeare were abject failures. (The malleability of "success" is I think one of the best features of the human psyche, because it allows far more people to succeed than would be the case if everyone held the same goal function.)
My hypothesis is that board gaming ability at less elite levels probably does correlate with, say, measures of income – but at an elite level it may anticorrelate because the people who succeed at that level are the ones who prioritize board games over other aspects of life. I.e., to them it *is* life.
Not everyone who games is doing it with the same motivations so naturally that is going to vary, but also a lot of people are in it for the games versus using it as a training ground for "real life" skills. It's not especially different from any other hobby in that way, so asking "why don't gamers win at life" makes about as much sense as posing that question to, say, fitness or car enthusiasts--sure those will contain skills that are vaguely transferrable to social status games but that's not strictly the point of the hobby.
Had some recent thoughts on the relationship between skills & passions and societal expectations in the latter parts of: https://scpantera.substack.com/p/the-skill-issue-issue
life has far more negative consequences for defeat
gamers can rapidly iterate on game strategies to figure out what works and what doesn't over the course of hundreds of matches
in life, one wrong decision could mean the destruction of your career/relationships/health/future prospects......
so it encourages highly risk-averse strategies that look a lot like conventional wisdom of 'go to good college, get white collar job, find a spouse...'
gamers seem to do alright at that