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”.
Eve online taught me that the enemy isn't on the screen, it's behind it.
I don't think even that matches the sheer level of nastiness of EVE. That game's biggest stories are all out of game activity, actual social engineering, doxxing and fraud type shit. And it's all driven in a game that codified pay to win shit - you could trade subscription fees as currency, IIRC. So they just cut out the gold selling middleman and did it themselves.
Damages from fuckery in EVE have actually been measured in dollars because that mechanic allows a direct conversion.
I've personally destroyed more than ten thousand dollars worth of ingame items in Eve. Not counting normal things like regular ships, but irreplaceable BPOs and POSes and such.
Never got on a Chribba killmail and that's about my biggest regret for the game.
This. It also taught me VBA and how to use PivotTables.
Interesting, do you mean something about how the free-form nature of the game and player interactions meant that understanding the psychology of the other players was way more important to success (like poker? I never played Eve, just heard some of the stories) than most other games?
Yes, but also the other less savory implications as well.
Psychology is important to win, sure. If you surprise most people, the caveman part of their brain will lock up and you can get a few good hits in before they can make themselves react. It also includes understanding tactics like attacking during the opponent's sleep schedule.
But also that attacking the other person behind the character is effective as well. Eve is filled with doxxing, hacking, even outright espionage. If the other guy stops playing then you've won.
And beyond that, it's the understanding that it's real people spouting the vile things leftoids believe online. Those are people, and those people are enemies.
This is why I never liked the "it's just the internet, it's not real" statement. Whatever there is to say about bots posting these days, it was firmly real people for many, many years before, and no one can pretend that the celebrities or politicians openly posting are bots. It feels like a psyop to not react or respond to open hostility and let them gain territory.