I guess I don't have any more profound insight about this, it just tickled something in the pattern recognition parts of my brain and made me wonder if there's a theme to pull on there, either for gameplay ideas, workflow improvements, or creativity generally.

I think a lot of what I love about games like Satisfactory is that it condenses that process down into digestible gameplay loops. Ostensibly the game is about building factories, but mostly it's about REbuilding factories with new tech and knowledge after you hacked the old one together.

What the repetition and experience DOES allow for is recognizing that there is always that choice, which I think is underappreciated in a lot of real world scenarios. People get so hung up on the Way Things Are and defending the status quo that they forget to stop and ask if it's working still.

But I do find it interesting that it comes up again and again. With all that repetition you would think one would improve at making those discernments ahead of time, but I find that at best you just shift the time horizon some for when that inflection point comes.

No matter how precise your planning is, there are ALWAYS details that emerge that change how you had hoped it would play out, unseen contingencies, tech limitations, etc. And I don't have a singular answer to the "keep plowing forward" vs "refactor it all" debate, it's kind of case by case.

It helps them in exactly one way - allows them plausible deniability to never take ownership of or do anything of consequence. "Well, we would love to, but we need 60 votes so our hands are tied 🤷‍♀️"

I assume the actual physical floppy disks would be like cuneiform tablets to them, something they read about but have never seen in person, but I honestly don't know

Wasn't this the plot to The Most Dangerous Game?