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Software Friction

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WJW ◴[] No.40716351[source]
> What about event planners, nurses, military officers?

As a Dutch ex-Navy officer, we just called this "friction" as everyone had read Von Clausewitz during officer training and was familiar with the nuances of the term. Militaries overwhelmingly address this problem by increasing redundancy, so that there are as few single points of failures as possible. It is very rare to encounter a role that can only be filled by a single person, a well designed military organization will always have a plan for replacing any single individual should they accidentally die.

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pjc50 ◴[] No.40716962[source]
"The graveyards are full of indispensable men" -- attr. Napoleon

"I can make a brigadier general in five minutes, but it is not easy to replace a hundred and ten horses" -- attr. Lincoln (exact words vary by source)

It's noticeable how few computer wargames simulate any of this, instead allowing for frictionless high speed micromanagement.

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1. sfRattan ◴[] No.40721062[source]
There are tabletop wargames for the consumer/hobby market that do try to include various kinds of friction in the gameplay. Both the classic Memoir 44 [1] and the Undaunted series [2] have you issue orders from a hand of cards drawn from a deck.

Memoir 44 divides the board into three segments (a center and two flanks) and your cards to issue orders always apply to a specific segment (e.g. right flank). Lacking the cards in your hand to issue the orders you might want simulates those orders not making to the front lines.

Undaunted explicitly has Fog of War cards which you can't do anything with. They gum up your deck and simulate that same friction of imperfect comms.

Atlantic Chase [3], a more complex game, uses a system of trajectories to obscure the exact position of ships and force you to reason about where they might be on any given turn. The Hunt [4] is a more accessible take on the same scenario (the Hunt for the Graf Spee) that uses hidden movement for its friction.

I don't know how many of these ideas leap across to computer games, but designing friction into the experience has been a part of tabletop wargames for a long time.

[1]: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/10630/memoir-44

[2]: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/268864/undaunted-normand...

[3]: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/251747/atlantic-chase-th...

[4]: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/376223/the-hunt