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”.
WoW Raiding taught me a long time ago about the importance of someone willing to "step up" and be the bitch that deals with problems, because sitting around saying "not my job" just ends up in wasting everyone's time including yours. So while you might be lower on the chart and looking worse, the job is dead and the spoils remain the same. A lesson just as relevant when it comes to soaking an orb to not wipe on a boss as it does with putting in an extra chunk of work at work before it explodes into a bigger issue that you need to clean up anyway.
Before the simplification of stats because retards couldn't handle it, they used to also had hardcaps for them too. They still do, but you'll never hit 28000 crit rating for it to matter.
Having to deal with the idea of needing to get to an exact number of Armor Penetration to hit a perfect breakpoint to watch your damage soar, which then meant needing a very diverse set of gear that meant using weaker pieces than available to properly add up your stacking rating. It was a huge process that required actual effort and planning to your gear rather than "pick one of the 2-3 items from current tier" as it is now. There was also the period of time where you'd have to make the choice between staying at the "soft cap" or reaching for the hard cap, because if you couldn't get within something like 100 points (been a while, can't recall the exact number but it was small) then you were better off taking the raw value on other gear instead of reaching for it.
Which has a lot of useful lessons behind it. Planning, efficiently enacting a long term plan, keeping otherwise useless pieces because a later change to a different gear piece will make it useful again, consideration about lump greater values versus more effective gains from smaller ones and a lot of math.
Something I find still valid today because those ideas are just as applicable in terms of home projects and other monetary planning I have to undertake.
There is also the fact that raid leading in an MMO is basically the best training you could ever have for a career in management. Literally every task you are forced to deal with will be just as prevalent in the real world as it is there.
The most important, and easily forgotten among most real life managers, is the "expectance of arrival." As in, there is only so much you can expect every raider/worker to just arrive on their own to put in their effort, both being there period and putting forth an acceptable level of effort.
If you don't manage burnout and overall low morale? People stop showing up or putting in the effort. They don't give a shit how it looks when they call out sick 6 days a month, they are just uncaring. They might be looking to jump ship elsewhere or simply dropping out entirely. You have to always have the carrot ready to keep them interested beyond their own "integrity and shame" levels, and a lot of time that means putting in that aforementioned "bitch work."
Amen to this. Leading large EverQuest and then WoW raids prepared me to step into management better than any other thing in my life. The overlaps were, frankly, shocking.
Management is deeply unpleasant though so I was glad to step out of that and back into a technical role at another company.
Thanks to Psych majors historically having zero ability to get jobs after graduation, my college put in an entire required class on resume building and interviewing.
I literally put my GDKP and CM leadership on my resume and after my professor got over his initial shock and listened to my explanation helped me build a fantastic resume out of it.
I also did the same trajectory as you, used it to step into management, did my time, realized I fucking hated it, and am now doing labor work (where I belong).