Hello, player character, and welcome to the Mazes of Menace!
I’m surprised that you didn’t mention NetHack, and that nobody else has either, given that it contains the Mazes of Menace and provides counterexamples to many of your points.
Because your goal is not to reach the end quickly
In NetHack, the goal of beginners is to ascend, i.e. win, and it is very difficult. (I have not yet ascended; the furthest I’ve gotten is level 27, with 422434 points.) The goal of intermediate players is to ascend quickly. And the goal of advanced players is to ascend under the most ridiculously severe restrictions possible, called conducts. For example, not engaging in genocide is a conduct, and it makes the game harder (because now you can’t genocide those nasty electric eels or master mind flayers).
Beginners may go slowly in order to methodically clean out the higher dungeon levels before heading into the lower ones (higher = nearer to your starting point at the surface = easier), but that’s because they’re trying to not die, and in NetHack character death is permanent.
For most games, there’s a guide that explains exactly how to complete your objective perfectly, but to read it would be cheating.
In NetHack, reading spoilers is almost mandatory—in fact, unspoiled ascension is the rarest possible kind. NetHack’s universe contains many systems that can be taken advantage of, but only if you know how—using pets to steal from shops being one example. (Shopkeepers hate direct theft and are ridiculously powerful, but pets can pick up and drop items, and shopkeepers don’t mind that. By feeding your pets, you can induce them to drop items near you. This leads to the ability to convert tripe rations—which pets eat—into shop theft, giving you access to lots of items for free.)
This is because in games, the classes, skills, races and alignments are meant to be balanced, so they’re all close to equally good.
NetHack’s roles, races, and alignments have unbalanced advantages and disadvantages. For example, the Valkyrie is much, much easier to play than the Tourist. Only gender is balanced, as it has very few effects on the game.
Reality is the opposite; most of the difficulty comes up front, and it gets easier as you learn.
NetHack appears to follow reality here. Learning how to avoid death is front-loaded—see Yet Another Stupid Death, e.g. “genociding oneself”, and Lessons Learned The Hard Way, e.g. “Don’t stand on ice when there are foes with fire attack around.”
I started writing a reply about how different aspects of NetHack are repeated in other games, which lets those games avoid these hazards too...
...But then I realized that there was a common factor in everything I was writing, which is that as games become harder / more complicated to play, playing them becomes more and more similar to how we act in reality. NetHack is a very complicated game, and it is also very hard (for one thing, due to permanent death). So we use our full “reality skills” when playing it.
I’m surprised that you didn’t mention NetHack, and that nobody else has either, given that it contains the Mazes of Menace and provides counterexamples to many of your points.
In NetHack, the goal of beginners is to ascend, i.e. win, and it is very difficult. (I have not yet ascended; the furthest I’ve gotten is level 27, with 422434 points.) The goal of intermediate players is to ascend quickly. And the goal of advanced players is to ascend under the most ridiculously severe restrictions possible, called conducts. For example, not engaging in genocide is a conduct, and it makes the game harder (because now you can’t genocide those nasty electric eels or master mind flayers).
Beginners may go slowly in order to methodically clean out the higher dungeon levels before heading into the lower ones (higher = nearer to your starting point at the surface = easier), but that’s because they’re trying to not die, and in NetHack character death is permanent.
In NetHack, reading spoilers is almost mandatory—in fact, unspoiled ascension is the rarest possible kind. NetHack’s universe contains many systems that can be taken advantage of, but only if you know how—using pets to steal from shops being one example. (Shopkeepers hate direct theft and are ridiculously powerful, but pets can pick up and drop items, and shopkeepers don’t mind that. By feeding your pets, you can induce them to drop items near you. This leads to the ability to convert tripe rations—which pets eat—into shop theft, giving you access to lots of items for free.)
NetHack’s roles, races, and alignments have unbalanced advantages and disadvantages. For example, the Valkyrie is much, much easier to play than the Tourist. Only gender is balanced, as it has very few effects on the game.
NetHack appears to follow reality here. Learning how to avoid death is front-loaded—see Yet Another Stupid Death, e.g. “genociding oneself”, and Lessons Learned The Hard Way, e.g. “Don’t stand on ice when there are foes with fire attack around.”
I started writing a reply about how different aspects of NetHack are repeated in other games, which lets those games avoid these hazards too...
...But then I realized that there was a common factor in everything I was writing, which is that as games become harder / more complicated to play, playing them becomes more and more similar to how we act in reality. NetHack is a very complicated game, and it is also very hard (for one thing, due to permanent death). So we use our full “reality skills” when playing it.