Hey! You got relative vision in my transaction costs!

Hey, you got transaction costs in my relative vision! Hmmm... tastes good!

I've been mumbling about both transaction costs and relative vision. To summarize: relative vision is how much time the player has to take effective action before being affected. Transaction costs are how much it 'costs' to take an action, including emotional weights and predictions about failure/success chances.

I've been trying to think of how the two relate, trying to create a kind of unified theory. It's a hobby.

It's clear to me that relative vision IS related to the intangible side of transaction costs. There's the actual cost - "It costs ten energy units to fire this gun" - and then there's the intangible, unreliable elements - "I'm not very likely to hit him", or "I don't like this gun."

The actual cost is real easy to compute. It's not really perceived - or if it is perceived, it's almost always entirely accurate. The difficulty is in the intangible half. Deciding how likely you are to succeed is not as easy as it sounds, if you want your decider to act like a human instead of a statistician.

That's where relative vision comes in. Relative vision is the term relating what you see, the potential for effect, the time until effect, what you can do, and the time it takes you to perform viable actions. When you think about it, this mush is precisely what the intangible elements are: urgency, chance, weight, response urgency...

I think I smell a unified formula. I want one I can apply to a social relationship AND to a space fighting game.