Software Friction

> 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.

"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.

In the novel Ender's Game, the Command School training takes an interesting approach.

Ender is able to see the full battlefield (modulo fog of war) because of ubiquitous faster-than-light sensor technology. But he doesn't control any ships directly. Instead, he issues orders to his subordinates who "directly" control squads of ships.

I've always wondered if anyone's ever made something like this. A co-op war simulation game with instant visibility but divided, frictioned actions. Nothing about it would be technically difficult. It would probably be socially difficult to find enough players.

This is how a lot of MMOs like Eve Online worked. You'd have a person or group of people leading the fight and they could see what was happening and would issue orders. But then it would trickle down to different groups and that friction made combat really interesting. Plus there was always latency between issuing a command and the ship acting on the command that was proportional to how massive the ship was. So you could find yourself out of position and unsupported if you moved out of step, and you always had to rely on someone else for the overarching strategy and target priorities.