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Comment by tom_rath | Hacker News Reader

In artificial worlds and closed environments, the rules are well-defined and success can be planned. There are no 'unknown unknowns' in a gaming environment: Success is granted simply by showing up and hanging around long enough. If you put in n-hours, you'll eventually have a gaming token strong enough to become a leader which newcomers rally around by default.

Conversely, success in "Real Life" requires interacting with and navigating through an unpredictable and capricious environment where success is neither guaranteed nor defined. There is no "Level X" to strive for out here, the beginning steps "A", "B" and "C" are anyone's guess to make, and hanging around for 50 years "grinding" by flipping burgers isn't going to deliver squat.

In "Real Life", you have to design your own quest and choose your own goals.

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There are no 'unknown unknowns' in a gaming environment

Tom, meet Leeroy: http://www.spike.com/video/world-of-warcraft/2671154

You know that's an act right? i.e. that it was pre-planned that way as comedy.

I think the point was that the players are still humans, therefore unknown(even the example was an act). With 40 persons physically in different locations, there can be always some random events, or you don't know everything about the encounter.

I know that's intended as a joke but, for what it's worth, you've given a staged example of a 'known unknown' (that is, a teammate unexpectedly being an idiot).

An 'unknown unknown' is something neither known nor anticipated. For example, if you succeeded in the quest, your real-world bank account would be dinged for $1000, all experience points and loot would be given to a different guild at random and one of the team would be permanently banned from WoW because they were wearing something yellow.

I ponder, you realise that your description of real life vs gaming worlds sounds like a fairly severe indictment of real life?

What I mean by this is that success in real life can often be reduced to a fairly wide array of things that extremely talented and competent people find abhorrent. Networking, soft skills, all these associated asskissing pursuits that fundamentally have little to nothing to do with advancing the state of the art in any sphere beyond carnival barking often enormously influence the degree to which a given endeavour may be successful in reality.

In artificial worlds? Do the math, that's pretty much it, the psychology vs the actual task is massively geared toward filling the tasks rather than stroking egos and convincing everyone to love you or your team. It's a great form of escapism and really a huge bonus over the real world, I think that's why a lot of people who are otherwise extremely talented can be satisfied and indeed thrive in these artificial environments.

Sometimes, the world simply is not good enough, and this is a fairly good illustration of a time when this is the case.

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