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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.
So the payoff of all the waiting around is that you finally get to play the game.
Waiting around to play the game isn't fun. It's barely tolerable with friends, and that's more in the suffering-through-something-someone-else-enjoys sense than the actually-engaging-for-player sense.
The difference between an extraction simulator and similar open world games where there's a similar amount of walking (or waiting) is that, for the latter, playing the game is more of an incidental (as in, there's more to look at/more to gather, because you're building towards something else- there's no building or measure of permanence in any of these other games).
Tarkov is even worse about that, because you spend a limited resource to have a higher chance of surviving/accumulating further resource, and if you die having done that you're now at a further disadvantage when it comes to playing the game. So the chance you'll actually have any fun in a round is now distributed over several rounds/hours, not just one. And that's not counting the cycle resets that do this anyway.
It's not a game; it's boring, tedious, work to have a chance of making it to the fun part.
The waiting part is a different game; a sneaking game with regards to avoiding unecessary fights with NPCs (or players if you're not looking for a fight that day). There's also the hunting game mechanics; if you're looking to kill some players, stopping, listening for distant firefights, doors, exfils, running... so that you can create as accurate a picture of what is happening before you engage is another kind of gameplay that is enjoyable in its own right, for some people at least.
So the best strategy to succeed is to avoid playing the fun part of the game at all costs.
That is certainly a gameplay loop.
You can engage in the NPC fights whenever you want, gear up in consequence with cheap/free gear and go tussle with them. It's fun, and sometimes your goals will align with that. You probably don't want to be doing it with fancy gear because no fancy gear can compensate for the disadvantage of being caught in between the NPCs and the players the noise you've been making fighting the NPCs might have attracted. But anyway, some people, me included, enjoy the sneaking aspect as much as the fights. Sometimes I'm not in the mood to fight at all but I'm in the mood for the survival horror esque aspect of trying to sneak around.
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