I’d suggest looking at Pathologic, which implements a world-saving task with a set time limit. You are free to walk around, talk to people and just try to do your regular side-questing, but you need to learn some things and do somethings before the first day is over, you lose. The gameworld is pretty alive in itself—important characters will move around on their daily business, making you ask people for possible directions.
It creates a lifelike situation, where you can’t really predict the causal links between your actions and possible progress towards your goal.
I noticed that the decribed fallacy can only be applied to cases where you are able to evaluate with some reliability the possible returns. Let’s say you’re trying to learn about druidic herbology. You could spend time t1 to find some books on it and time t2 on reading those books for skillset s. Or you could spend T1 > t1 to find an expert in the field and ask for lessons/best books and then spend T2 on studying towards skillset S. The problem is that you can predict t1 and T1, but until either of them is done, you can’t evaluate the related extra time needed or the value of the skillsets.
Warning: I tried Pathologic. It’s a gem of a game, but a very unpolished one, and the translation is absolutely horrible. It may still be worth trying, if you can look past that; if you know russian, certainly, since you can then get the un-translated version.
I hear there’s a fan-translation project going on, but they haven’t gotten too far. Maybe in a year or two.
I’d suggest looking at Pathologic, which implements a world-saving task with a set time limit. You are free to walk around, talk to people and just try to do your regular side-questing, but you need to learn some things and do somethings before the first day is over, you lose. The gameworld is pretty alive in itself—important characters will move around on their daily business, making you ask people for possible directions.
It creates a lifelike situation, where you can’t really predict the causal links between your actions and possible progress towards your goal.
I noticed that the decribed fallacy can only be applied to cases where you are able to evaluate with some reliability the possible returns. Let’s say you’re trying to learn about druidic herbology. You could spend time t1 to find some books on it and time t2 on reading those books for skillset s. Or you could spend T1 > t1 to find an expert in the field and ask for lessons/best books and then spend T2 on studying towards skillset S. The problem is that you can predict t1 and T1, but until either of them is done, you can’t evaluate the related extra time needed or the value of the skillsets.
Warning: I tried Pathologic. It’s a gem of a game, but a very unpolished one, and the translation is absolutely horrible. It may still be worth trying, if you can look past that; if you know russian, certainly, since you can then get the un-translated version.
I hear there’s a fan-translation project going on, but they haven’t gotten too far. Maybe in a year or two.