Kevin Kelly Quote on Exploration and Exploitation

Cooperation without friendship or foresight
"Every complex adaptive organization faces a fundamental tradeoff. A creature must balance perfecting a skill or trait (building up legs to run faster) against experimenting with new traits (wings). It can never do all things at once. This daily dilemma is labeled the tradeoff between exploration and exploitation. Axelrod makes an analogy with a hospital: "On average you can expect a new medical drug to have a lower payoff than exploiting an established medication to its limits. But if you gave every patient the current best drug, you'd never get proven new drugs. From an individual's point of view you should never do the exploration. But from the society of individuals' point of view, you ought to try some experiments." How much to explore (gain for the future) versus how much to exploit (sure bet now) is the game a hospital has to play. Living organisms have a similar tradeoff in deciding how much mutation and innovation is needed to keep up with a changing environment. When they play the tradeoff against a sea of other creatures making similar tradeoffs, it becomes a coevolutionary game."

This is the tension between diversity and conformity. Also, exploration and exploitation are the two key words I came up with for adventure and strategy games.