We all like to play games from time to time. Playing games is not only a way to spend time, but often is a good source of concepts related to various parts of life and science. Examples: importance of good resource management and parallel execution early in the game in resource-constrained RTS's (e.g. Warcraft); importance of good risk/reward weighting function in most card games.
What such concepts do you find the most valuable for your profession what games have taught you that?
I like the concept of making simple moves instead of overextending that you learn in the eastern game Go.
I've found the syntactic rigour and step-by-step problem-solving skills taught by text-only games like adventure or many MUDs teaches the value of breaking a big problem down into small precise steps.
Braid. By the time you have finished Braid you will fully understand distributed version control systems.
Harvest Moon: if everything is properly planed in the beginning, then you will not run like crazy later.
Incredible Machine: one misplaced element has the power of destroying all your work.
I'd say that the old text-based games got me interested in NLP. The more I learned, the more I realized how tricky it is to write a really good system.
Also, as an anecdote, back in the late 80s when I was still in grade school, I couldn't figure out how certain platformers like Super Mario Brothers were able to do those huge levels that go beyond a single screen.At the time, since I only knew Basic and a little Assembly, I thought that they were somehow managing to hold all the tiles for the level in a single array (which didn't make sense). Only later when I learned "real" language I understood how resource management and allocation works.
Mechwarrior II, which requires the use of nearly every key on the keyboard, prepared me for learning Vim when I started programming.