Perfect knowledge ruins fun and creativity

In my earlier post, Shakespeare and Dataism, I argued that incomplete information creates drama, surprise, and joy. Perfect information flattens experience.

Card games: solved metas

With ubiquitous deck trackers and shared analytics, card game communities quickly converge on optimal lists and lines. Like an optimisation problem, the search space collapses to a few dominant solutions. Experimentation becomes a tax: novelty is punished because you already know it underperforms. You can hear streamers say they “can’t do anything fun” without tanking their win rate, even when entertainment is the goal.

Music: data‑driven sameness

Streaming dashboards reveal what “works,” and modern tools make it trivial to replicate those sounds. Intros get shorter, hooks arrive earlier, and timbres cluster around proven palettes. When everyone optimises for the same metrics, we rush toward homogeneity.

If ignorance is the fuel of play, then a little fog of war is a design feature, not a bug. Keep some hidden information, time‑delayed feedback, or friction in the loop, and the space for creativity reopens.