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”.
Measured play, or personal handicap for public gain. If you are the best (gear, levels, skill, group organization, etc.) and consistently crush new/casual players, your game will die off much faster because very few people are willing to put up with a constant shit stomping.
If you hold back (use less impressive gear, do not stack your team with your buddies, choose sub optimal but still functional strats), you are still able to win, but it makes the game less lopsided which then encourages less good players to continue playing.
That’s a bit why I’ve never really gotten into online RTS games. I’d get to a level where the AI was easy, try online. Get into a match, okay let’s build this to harvest resources, this to build units, holy fuck there’s 500 blimps attacking already. I’m not offered an avenue to learn and try things, there’s no time. At best it’s go find some autists plan online, copy-paste it, and pray I don’t miss a single click. How is that any fun? I didn’t learn shit either, I just plagiarized.
Kirov airship reporting.
Hide your power level.
Around zombies never relax
Don't be a sealclubber.
Good one, a lesson often learned by playing console party games like Goldeneye or Smash Bros or Mario Kart with siblings or close friends you see all the time. I dealt it out with smash and was often humbled in other games. I think your point and petey’s points are connected for sure. Maybe in a word, “Sportsmanship”?
Helps also if you play games where both teams dont have the same size for balance reasons than you can fight twice your numbers with a good grp. But sadly there arent many pvp games which have that mostly ESO and Dark Age of Camelot come to my mind there. And even then you often have the bad players just running in a zerg since even twice the numbers arent enough for them to feel save and get easy progression without much risk.
You can make situations like this fun for yourself too if you lean into the personal challenge aspect of the handicap. Can I still win using only a pistol? Can I still win using a lower tier vehicle? The newer players get a chance to learn, and you get a chance to practice more obscure skills that you usually wouldn't.