Quote:
Originally Posted by safisher
Heh. The modern mind is trained to think in terms of neat rows of data leading to clear concise analysis. This is actually not how most processes work today, even in the sciences. In fact, most people do not approach anything in their lives the way gamers insist "reality" works.
|
Agreed.
I was just thinking about a friend who did this with apartment rent back when I was in grad school. He was super-geeky and super-mathematical. He did an analysis – considering rent, heating of the units found in various areas, prices at local shops (shops here vary their prices considerably by neighborhood), cost to travel to/from, and so on – that yielded the neighborhood where he would pay the least rent per square metre. He got a decent-sized apartment for a modest monthly rate. Except that it happened to be in an area where he was
culturally a terrible fit . . . there was nothing that catered to students nearby, no friends lived close by, and all his neighbors were older, less educated, and spoke a different language.
Meanwhile, another friend from the same period in my life just plonked himself down in a student-friendly area near his friends and favorite pubs. Everyone around him was of the same "culture": proximate in age, going to school, from out of town, mostly speaking English. He paid a lot more to live in less space. He did zero analysis but he was overall happier than the first friend.
The first guy definitely had the more efficient life. If he were a character in an RPG, he'd have more money to spend on gear, a bigger space in which to work on projects (like skill development and invention),
and greater security (student ghettoes filled with pubs aren't known for that, while graying working-class areas are). However, I knew far, far,
far more people like the second guy, because most people make their decisions based on peer pressure, what's easiest, and what amounts to the real-life version of the Rule of Cool.
I suspect this kind of thinking applies to just about anything that costs money, which is why games that use real-life costs, weights, and other stats might offer things that are clearly bad deals in the mathematical sense. In essence, these items are for people who put either roleplaying or realism ahead of efficiency – which is pretty much everybody in real life.