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”.
The maths factor in gaming becomes even more important when you examine the ROI on these neverending F2P clones that keep coming out. I remember in Battlefront 2 for example when the loot boxes first hit on that game someone did the maths on that when they tried ripping everybody off by making you pay to be able to play Darth Vader. Turns out you had to play several hundred hours to be able to unlock it versus pay the extortionate amount of money to unlock it instantly.
One of the reasons multiplayer gaming has become so unfun is rather than the devs using maths for a good cause of making games entertaining they come up with all sorts of stats calculations to keep player engagement high which doesn't necessarily equate to a fun experience and in most cases flies in the face of that. This is also why they constantly insist on trying to spy on us for 'our sakes' because these creepy fucks are always monitoring the actions of gamers and trying to work out not only what makes the most money but also how to keep gamers in the game at all times.
It becomes obvious especially as you play older games and compare them to modern titles that the modern titles more often than not use the maths as total time sinks.
Edit TLDR: Game developers use maths to manipulate gamers into engagement rather than provide a fun experience which the industry was originally meant for
Great point, the companies saw us using math to meta-game them, so they did the reverse. The fucked up part though is we were meta-gaming “fun” and they are meta-gaming “raping our wallets”/ “wasting our time” (synonymous these days as you point out)