maybe you should try introducing it as the Irretrievability Problem rather than “oneshotness”
I’d like to suggest “Ironman Mode” (or whatever its best-known synonym is) as possibly memetically useful here. It refers to a difficulty modifier in certain games that prevents the equivalent of saying “oops” and restoring to 1929. Mistakes become permament, at least for that playthrough. The term isn’t a perfect match, because you can try again, but only by starting from scratch, nethack-style.
(“roguelike” was once a similar concept, but has been badly diluted in recent years)
One reason I think it might be a useful metaphor is that most players fear playing in ironman mode. Yes, it’s “only a game”, but progression takes time and effort, and thus losing it is a cost-in-reality—a cost that is intuitively real, in the sense that System 1 understands it, sees it as a real thing that can really happen, and that there can be no appeal to justice or mercy, and so shies away from it.
Another is that the few players who do play in such modes may be more likely to understand the concept you’re driving at. If you, say, have a Long War policy of treating a 99% hit rate as if it were 100%, you will fail, because sooner or later you will miss that shot in a situation where missing is fatal, and no amount of “but that should have fucking worked!” will save you. That doesn’t mean you never take such risks—but it does mean you develop a habit of explicitly checking that you can survive them first, and you learn a kind of principle: Do not YOLO if YOLO.
I’m not sure why I ran across this now and not when it was posted, but...that’s creepy, and very very good. Reminds me of Altered Carbon. I kept looking for a second layer of hidden meaning in the first poem, like you see in some SCPs, but didn’t find one.
...I don’t have anything actually useful to say, I’m commenting mostly because I know it’s a great dopamine hit to see people still discovering an existing story.