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DaFranker comments on Digging the Bull's Horn - Less Wrong Discussion
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Hmm. I'm not sure whether I'm confused about this, or whether I didn't adequately express the theoretical value unit I was picturing.
If I naively picture the cost as a flat "number of rules or tactics learned", and the returns as an ideal "fun-value per hand played", then for most people there's going to be a "spike" at some point where the fun-value-per-tactic goes up much faster than it should at that point in the graph, almost as fast (if not faster) as the first few increments at the very beginning.
Depending on how saturated the new player is with low-complexity gameplay value (and the diminishing returns thereof), it might even be that the curve actually accelerates up to that spike, and after the spike finally starts looking more like a diminishing returns graph.
I suppose there could be spikes like that - if one knows n-1 rules of chess, it's not fun at all, while at n rules one can actually start playing. But I don't know of any games where this spike would come after, say, months or years of practice.
Any game where increased playskill changes the shape of the tactical space, I'd think. For example, Street Fighter 2. Yeah, the arcade game.
It's easier to show than tell, but basically there's a strategy, made up of grabs and weak attacks, that's easy to execute but hard-ish to defend against. Two players who are skilled enough to use that strategy but not skilled enough to defeat it will find the game degenerate and boring, but once they're skilled enough to get past that gate they'll find a space of viable tactics that's a lot broader and more engaging.
Yes, this is a very good example. The street fighter games change completely in landscape once you get past several key difficulty walls, each of which can require months of training or more for people not already adept at the genre.
Thanks for the good example.
fezziwig gives a pretty good example; the Street Fighter series in general can be considered to have an uncommonly high number of instances like this.
However, with that said, I agree with your earlier statement that the question is whether there really are any fields of knowledge that behave like this (and would be useful to us), or if it's dependent upon key patterns of game logic and none of those patterns are present in nature, or some other explanation that makes these cases too limited in scope to be worth exploring the way I thought the OP was suggesting.