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Can MMORPG design principles be applied to real life in order to promote theoretically-ideal outcomes?
People like Nerd Fitness regularly try. The problem with gameification is that games themselves have to be at least a little bit fun, especially if you want people to play them long-term. This is much harder to do for things that are (broadly) inherently dull and painful such as tax returns* or learning theoretical physics than for things like shooting monsters or looting dungeons. See for instance the game made by the guy who just tried to kill Trump - to the extent that it accurately represents and tries to teach particle physics, it's much less fun than another game would be using similar mechanics without the baggage.
There are other issues - gamified approaches have to put aside lots of extra time for the 'game' part so they aren't very efficient. If you have to play a periodic table board game for a week's worth of evenings where you could get the most important bits of info from a slide, a 30 minute lecture and a test, that's not necessarily an improvement.
*yes, I know about the XKCD.
This is why I play very few multiplayer games these days. Battle Royale and MOBA games (including Overwatch), or camping simulators like R6S or Counter-Strike, are just straight up not designed to be fun.
At least Fallout, though it's just as much a walking and lootbox simulator as the typical BR game, has a few other things going on with it and encounters that are at least winnable. The MP versions of that idea inherently aren't that way.
If I'm going to be forced to wait around there needs to be a payoff, which incidentally is why the pace of building software or hardware prototypes slows down exponentially the longer the effective iteration/build time is.
How do you mean?
Tactical shooters are built around a tension/release loop between the positioning and the shooting. You are running your own strategy with imperfect information about how to preempt the enemy. Collecting more information narrows the possibility space, until one of you gets the payoff in the form of a head appearing under your crosshair.
One extreme form is the extraction shooter, where 95% of the gameplay is routine. Covert maneuvering, inventory management, situational awareness. The whole time, though, you're supposed to be predicting what the other players are up to while you're preoccupied. Then you get a payoff in the form of climactic fights or narrow escapes. I'm sure @self_made_human has said more on the subject.
MOBAs occupy a different space, but they've still got tension/release. The routine activity (farming) gives way to deliberate maneuvers (ganks, pushes) give way to a big payoff (teamfights). You get some control over the transitions between steps if you correctly assess relative strengths, player intents, and so on.
All this without mentioning the social aspect. Monkey brain shows dominance. Monkey brain impress friends. Graah.
Searching my username alongside "Tarkov" will turn up a fairly unflattering paper trail re: my relationship with the genre. Reading it in chronological order resembles the journal of somebody trying to quit caffeine while living above a coffee shop. I'm not quite sure how I managed it, in the end.
This gets at something hard to convey to people who haven't logged the hours. Hardcore extraction shooters share a structural feature with actual combat, or at least with everything I've read about actual combat: long flat plateaus of tedium, occasionally interrupted by short bursts of unfiltered terror. Your life isn't, strictly speaking, at risk, although I suspect if somebody pulled the actuarial tables on long-term Tarkov players we'd find some interesting blood pressure data. But the stakes are higher than in any comparable genre. A single death can wipe out days of progress. Every kill you score has cost somebody, somewhere, an evening they aren't getting back.
The thing that makes this fun (where "fun" is being used in roughly the same sense that ultramarathons are fun, or possibly in the sense that some hobbies are genuinely satisfying to participants and indistinguishable from torture to onlookers, Type 3 fun to be specific) is that death turns out to be effective pedagogy. And not only for the people writing the obituary. You absorb caution and prudence almost involuntarily, and your gut, given enough thousands of hours, becomes something pretty close to a calibrated instrument. You look at a dozen doors, a hundred bushes, and a few broken windows, and you just know that something ain't quite right.
There's also a gameplay premium on what military types call violence-of-action. Once the rounds are close enough to part your hair, you discover that holding still is functionally identical to dying. The best fights play out like choreography: two people of roughly comparable skill trying to outshoot and outguess each other in the span of about eight seconds.
And the decision tree branches forever. Is your magazine still good for another burst, or did you spend most of it on the last guy? Do you loot the body now, or wait in case his teammates are about to round the corner? Do you chuck a grenade into the room where you're pretty sure somebody is camping? Do you, in the immortal words, feel lucky, punk?
Then there's the social layer, and like most things, the game is better with friends, or with acquaintances who rapidly end up becoming your friend. Do you trust the new player you've been mentoring to actually watch your six? Do you accept, in advance, that he probably won't, and forgive him in advance because you remember being him? Do you risk your own kit recovering your dead teammate's gear so the insurance payout works out in his favor? There is no single right answer to any of these. The game just keeps teaching you that some answers are better than others, and you'd better figure out which is which, fast.
And then sometimes you do everything correctly and you still get domed by some guy in a bush three hundred meters away. War is, as the saying goes, heck. I don't play Tarkov anymore, although the reason has more to do with BSG's ongoing mismanagement of the property than with the underlying design, which is still genuinely unlike anything else on the market (except maybe Gray Zone Warfare, which I'm trying to get into). Whatever else you can say about it, nobody else is making this game. It's a shame BSG is unmaking their game. One step forward, two steps back, toes inside their own ass. I'm too old to deal with that nonsense.
Well, not fast. The game is way too slow for any such learning to reasonably occur; it's not going to be immediately obvious if you lost on turn 1, and if I have to wait for several hours to get back to turn 1, then I'm going to shut the game off and return to browsing YouTube (which, ironically, is full of just the high points of many, many games).
Apex Legends, for a while, had a "problem" with a certain type of player whose strategy would be- and quite reasonably, I might add- "drop, play, die, instantly disconnect". There's zero chance you'll discover any of the winning strategies organically, especially because menuing (which you have to do in fights to win them) is so inherently clunky that doing it quickly is itself its own skill.
They never fixed that, of course, because having a bunch of people who do this is actually good for the game simply because it ensures action happens early.
The games I have the most life time spent in are Call of Duty 4 (with 32 or 64 player servers)/Titanfall and Payday 2 for this reason; there's so much of this, or the potential for so much of this, that you actually can reasonably learn by dying a bunch of times to figure out what works and what doesn't, or actually have fun by using meme strategies.
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