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sixes_and_sevens comments on Memetic Hazards in Videogames - Less Wrong
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As I was reading this, I realized that many of the points here apply heartily to single-player games, but the reverse is often true of MMOs.
A while back I spent a few years playing World of Warcraft, and ended up doing mid to high level raids.
When leveling, or completing a raid, you do know your purpose, and it is handed down from on high. This is unrealistic, but possibly one of the most relaxing aspects of escapism.
You DO NOT delay or take forever! While leveling or raiding, it is important to do things efficiently to meet your goals quickly. You want to hit max level ASAP, not see the whole low-level world; you want to see the whole high-level world.
When leveling or raiding, there is usually a specific build that is more powerful than the others. You have choices between various builds, but never more than 3 per character class, and usually the 3 are vastly different and you must choose one of them. For example, every rogue ever would take a talent that gives them +5 attack speed, but taking a bonus to speed while in stealth would get you kicked out of a hardcore guild.
In raiding, the difficulty isn't (strictly) progressive. Some fights are easier, some are harder. Some are more gear-dependent (i.e. harder until later in the game) but some of the fights in the highest-level raids were easier than some in the lowest level raids. It's also true that the difficulty mostly comes in learning how to do things the first time; after that it's easy to breeze through the content and most of the difficulty is in managing the guild.
Guides and patch notes are REQUIRED reading in most multiplayer games, because you have an obligation to support your team and defeat your opponents.
In terms of modeling the real world, MMOs are much better. On the other hand, they can be less fun. I've also experienced the multiplayer attitude leaking into other games (specifically D&D) and ruining the setup. I guess the lesson here may be that people are bad at changing heuristics when they change settings, in total agreement with the OP.
I don't play a lot of video games, but I'm quite fond of strategy, and have recently become besotted with Starcraft 2. Something that struck me while looking through the online strategy community was how ruthlessly empirical that community was.
It shouldn't be too surprising. Players are provided with an environment governed by the immutable laws of the game engine, and the only objective is to win. You can accomplish this however you like: efficient micromanagement, complementary unit selection, economic superiority, stealth tactics, mind games, aggressive map dominance, off-the-wall strategy your opponent can't plan for...however you manage it, provided you're the one left standing at the end, you win.
As a result, players continually test the behaviour of the environment, see what works and throw away what doesn't. This often involves setting up contrived scenarios to explicitly test certain theories. The result is a massive body of knowledge on how to effectively win the game.
I would say that it's kind of heartening to find that when given proper incentive, even people with (presumably) no formal scientific training can apply systematic methods for testing the behaviour of their environment, but I don't know what kind of crossover exists between the SC/scientific community.
Here's a full research paper on the subject.
It very thoroughly data-mines a strategy WoW forum and observes how their discussion about the hidden variables of the game world mirrors quite clearly the scientific study of the natural world.
A: "I suggest that the Octopus Lord is vulnerable to fire." B: "Good idea! I have a fire sword and an identical ice sword, I'm off to try." C: "Wait! Maybe he's just resistant to ice! We need to design a better test."
It's actually a lot more complex than that (there's a HUGE spreadsheet quoted in the paper), but you get the idea.
Reverse engineering isn't quite the same as science (because you know from the start that all natural laws must be traceable back to a short piece of human-written code), but they are definitely kin.