Information Costs

Many games assume the players know all the rules and have an equally universal assessment of the value of all resources. In the board game Monopoly the only unknown is the outcome of dice rolls. The cost of improvements, rent, property, and number of properties per set, is all known so one might assess the value of each pair. The game of Clue, however is all about research costs, the winner is whoever has the lowest. The shortest route and the best recall of the information, suspects and potential murder weapons and the rooms, is going to win, with a slight deviation based on statistical outliers in the form of consistently high dice rolls.

In life we could benefit from knowing as much as we can. And we can know almost everything about now and extrapolate a lot about tomorrow. We can be aware of interest rates, average wages per industry and region, property values, stock market trends. We can also know a lot about ourselves. Where are we spending our resources? How much are we putting in to each task and how much are we getting out?