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”.
Swtor came up with a good way to get around weekly lockouts and dry loot runs. All gear, all of it, weapons included were shells which contained 2-4 components that have an item its stats. Wrists and waist only had 2 components IIRC while most armour had 3 and weapons had 4 where the 4th would also alter the colour of weapon fire and lightsaber blades.
Eventually BoA shells were added so that you could freely move things between alts, the only things that remained character bound were non BoA shells that came from content of which there were still many. These actual content shells also didn't usually have their appearances added to a collections tab like WoW does with transmog. While there is a similar system it's mostly limited to unlocks done with MTX currency, so raid appearances would only be something for the character present for the kill and lot.
However what the system did mean was that if you had more than one class, be it a dupe on the same faction or mirror class on the other faction, you could then gear them with BoA shells fitted with components sourced from alts, who could in turn continue gearing those shells to send back again later. This would include Tier components.
The only limits to this were the differences in primary stat some components would have so Str gear would be fine for JKG to JKS, or even SWJ and SWM, but any other class and subclasses would be using something other that Str.
Additionally the Swtor equivalent to rings and trinkets weren't BoA so those you would still need to source but in general it meant you could use alts to take care of sourcing and improving something like 10 of your 14 or so gear slots.
This is why I disliked Locks and Hunters from TBC onwards while maining a mage :p both ended up as literal 1 button spammer classes and with Sunwell offering a zone wide Int buff that made ArcInt redundant mages found themselves benched for what was often dogshit players but playing braindead and OP specs.
Most non-mainstream MMOs did something similar. I know Guild Wars 2 did the thing where all bosses just drop "tokens" of some sort that you'd just exchange for the gear you wanted. And some of the fanservice Korean ones did the same.
While is forces a grind I think that is overall a better option instead of a consistent dropping of garbage people don't need, or Blizzards hidden system of personal loot which just feels like its always working against you.
And seems like WoW is moving towards the alt-outsourcing system currently, with the Warband system. Which seems like a smart move currently in making alts not require a massive grind just to be worth playing, but I know that it will soon enough just make it to where you need 3-4 alts grinding concurrently to feed your Warband to keep up.