Most of these come from MMOs for me interestingly enough:
Diminishing Returns:
“Hmm, this new piece of gear gives +8 strength, which will increase how hard I hit, whereas my current piece of gear adds 2% chance to crit - given my current build/stats, how can I tell which is better?”
This is a situation that every person who’s ever played an RPG has come across. Given the overlap between “gamers” and “autistics”, it was always inevitable that math would be used to meta-game and theory-craft into oblivion. A fundamental key to theory-crafting is the concept of Diminishing Returns - if you’ve ever studied economics you probably know something about Return on Investment or RoI - diminishing returns governs the rate of return on investment. Basically, as your investment in something increases, the rate of return on each “dollar” invested will initially increase until hitting a plateau and then decreasing. If you pump every stat point you have into Strength, but totally neglect Accuracy, Critical Hit Chance, and Stamina, your character will be weaker than one who split their points up between the different stats, and that character will be weaker than a third character who min-maxed their stat allocations with knowledge of the game’s system of diminishing returns.
The law of diminishing returns is an economic principle stating that as investment in a particular area increases, the rate of profit from that investment, after a certain point, can't continue to increase if other variables remain constant.
I learned this in terms of RPG stat mechanics in WoW. The most valuable stats for a class tended to all have “soft caps”, which effectively translate to a point near the “Point of Maximum Yield” on the graph of yield/investment. But really, this applies to…practically everything, atleast everything that can be modeled economically. A political campaign can pump $10M into a single region and get 60% of the votes there, or they could spread $2.5M between four regions and get 51% of a much larger share of voters.
Really a powerful tool that so many have never had to engage with and thus are totally unaware of the concept and how it plays a role in their lives.
Triage
Or: Geek the Mage
This one is simple enough, it’s about prioritizing what’s actually pressing and needing to be addressed immediately (the smaller enemy casting self-destruct, about to wipe your whole group) and what needs to be addressed consistently over the long term (keeping everyone healed, decursed, and buffed, and the reverse for the enemies)
The third lesson I’m not sure of any academic links or terms that could be applied here, perhaps most fitting are the ideas of “high trust societies” in sociology.
What I’ve basically noticed over the years, as “social” game experiences evolved, the value of any given interaction with other players has been reduced to almost nothing - and it seems largely to be because of a “lack of consequence” - nothing in these social games “matters” any more. Three examples I’ll give: party finding in MMOs (the old fashioned way, posting in town/lfg chat and forming a group, or calling from a list of friends) being replaced by “random group finder” matchmaking systems. This is made even worse by the matchmaking systems often drawing from a far wider pool than just “your server” - you will never see these people again, thus nothing you do (socially) in the group can have any consequences, so why bother! This brings me to the third example, private voice chats. Anyone who played through the early days of Xbox live or PC community servers knows how those places turned into ghost towns (50,000 spastics used to live here) with the advent of “party chats”.
Just to make it explicit, I see point 3 being directly echoed in our modern “matchmade” but ultimately disconnected societies. You can open an app and find 10 horny chicks for a night, but when’s the last time you struck up a conversation with a stranger? Made a new friend? We were “made” to live in communities of ~500-5,000 at the most. We can remember the faces of ~500 people, we can build reciprocal relationships because we know we will see these people again. But when you look at these rats nests called “cities” these days you see the direct effects of “nothing I do will catch up to me, why not be a little evil?”
This is a good one I've not necessarily put together before. For me, my WoW days were the last of my time gaming with any sort of online friends. The social aspect was part of the draw. Yeah, sure, there were a lot of elitists and asshats, but you could avoid them or fight back depending on the situation. You could find your community somewhere. The events I remember in that game were more social, the weekly Karazhan run me (healer) and a warrior friend would run, we were way overpowered for it and could damn near finish it ourselves, but we'd grab basically whoever the hell wanted to go and just go figure it out. Or the top guild that used to run old Naxx and put all the loot up for bid then split it up. Matchmaking took all this stuff away, I mean why should you be having fun, you could be grinding gear with randoms, right?
Even prior to my WoW days, while online was really new to me, there were servers I'd drop in for other games. You'd recognize the players, get used to them, joke around, etc. I usually got my ass stomped honestly, I've never been autist enough for competitive really. It was fun though.
Now, you drop in with some random people, do some boring shit, get some fake currency or unlock some crap you don't want. It's why I don't bother. All the fun has been sucked out into a grind. The real world is the same, and that's why I generally have rejected social media and this is pretty much the only place I post, where, you guessed it, you see the same people.
Your last point is the origin of my username.
Back during my hardcore raiding days this was the funnest shit to me. Just finding struggling raiding guilds filled with bads and spending all night trying to drag them through Normal level bosses.
You'd be treated like a god to these people, and you'd genuinely make their entire month at the cost of just time and repair costs. And most of the time there were a few girls in the guild happy to now throw themselves at the alpha on the block, which meant free titties.
And sometimes, you'd make good friends that would last long beyond that little guild.
WoW is a good case study of this as after introducing LFG in the Wrath expansion it killed off server communities as groups were suddenly made up of randoms from other servers you may never see again. So why would those randoms who then employed the Prisoner's Dilemma ever going to act in a cooperative way when they could just take all the loot possible and then never have to worry about seeing the rest of their group ever again?
Repeat however many number of weeks/months/years it's been since LFG came out and you have the current situation where there is practically zero trust between players, even in guilds, because the systems repeatedly put in place are far too lucrative for selfish plays to just endlessly exploit.