Most of them don't have the depth of chess, though. It's more like working in McDonalds.

Once you get to a high enough level in chess it's a ton of memorization. It's not that deep.

Some games are shallow but lots of games have far more depth than chess.

Isn't the memorization just a required to play competetively at all? At highest level of chess, memoryzation is a given and it's about brain power and creativity.

> it's about brain power and creativity

Part of the whole Hans Neimann cheating scandal is that he played too close to optimal as measures by his correlation to a computer. So no, it seems mostly to be about drilling positions with solvers and playing faithfully to that.

I played chess competitively as a kid, before chess programs were very strong or widely available. We memorized maybe 4 moves in and that's it. After that it was all strategy, creativity, etc... Nowadays they're doing far more work with solvers and it's pretty much taken the strategy out of it. Which is why Go is increasing in popularity. Competitive gaming probably as well.

I believe you are overestimating chess.

Tic-tac-toe on dopamine, more likely.