I’d suggest looking at Pathologic, which implements a world-saving task with a set time limit. You are free to walk around, talk to people and just try to do your regular side-questing, but you need to learn some things and do somethings before the first day is over, you lose. The gameworld is pretty alive in itself—important characters will move around on their daily business, making you ask people for possible directions.
It creates a lifelike situation, where you can’t really predict the causal links between your actions and possible progress towards your goal.
I noticed that the decribed fallacy can only be applied to cases where you are able to evaluate with some reliability the possible returns. Let’s say you’re trying to learn about druidic herbology. You could spend time t1 to find some books on it and time t2 on reading those books for skillset s. Or you could spend T1 > t1 to find an expert in the field and ask for lessons/best books and then spend T2 on studying towards skillset S. The problem is that you can predict t1 and T1, but until either of them is done, you can’t evaluate the related extra time needed or the value of the skillsets.
Not directly related to MoR, but whatever. I recently joined a massive HP roleplay forum and what i noticed among the players was a huge deal of optimisation by proxy. Basically the general sentiment is that being sorted into one house means that you have no traits from the others. This makes some sense, because a wizard employer will probably look at the candidates’ house affiliation first. I’ll need to reread some of the books, to check if it’s canon, but in the fans’ minds at least, all of Magical Britain is aligning itself to an arbitrary division. It’s a bit disturbing, really.