Games with A High Skill-Ceiling

This is our list of video games where you can continue improving for many years of play. We don't think of excelling in a video-games in the same category as learning a new language, singing or becoming a doctor. It's no surprise, there are a lot of reasons that these are very different pursuits. However, we generally misunderstand how much skill, knowledge, intuition, theory and expertise (amongst other things) is required to get be the best at a specific game. Video games have a far high skill ceiling than it seems.

Video games appear to be mechanical challenges like mowing the lawn. You can get good at mowing the lawn, but after a few weeks of practice, there's not much room for further improvement. However, even a simple mechanical game like Tetris offers almost unending opportunities to improve for years and years. Even mechanically basic video games offer space for the player to improve not only their button pressing speed and accuracy but deftness, strategy, prioritisation and systems thinking.

There are some games that lean into this ability to offer this almost unending opportunity for improvement. They offer more space for the player to find new ways to achieve their goals and offer environments with the flexibility to encourage players to incrementally improve these strategies.

This list includes 22 games from the last 33 years, with 859 likes. They come from a range of different genres and play-styles and are all good games if you want to be world champion. We break them down into the following areas:

• Multi-Player
• Single Player