Is this a late-playthrough phenomenon, or did you think that the game told you all you needed to know for this the first time through?
From my third/fourth playthrough on yes.
First playthrough was the purest like that because it was all new. I was a Breton Conjurer/scholar who liked Dwarven Ruins, so I actively seeked them out and did the whole Winterhold Quest, for example.
Second playthrough was a Argonian Archer who was more or less shunned all the time. So he turned to crime, went to Riften to make a name for himself.
After I did a few go's and went through the main storyline, it was pretty much the challenge of keeping me engaged. Dragon Age I have that same mentality; thankfully there are more tangible differences through story decisions to help with that process.
The point of formalizing the logic is that we can go back through it and verify that we didn't make any mistakes. It turns reasoning into math, and no one claims that people can't separate themselves from math problems (though I have met people like that).
Yes, my character designs are often based on metagame knowledge, but the in-game decisions must follow logically (by which I mean logical deduction) from the character's personality.
My first Warden refused to accept his own mortality. He didn't see why his death shouldbe inevitable, so his primary objective throughout the game was to achieve immortality.
Meeting Avernus - a mage who'd lived for centuries - was particularly heartening.
What that meant was, from the moment of the Joining, his primary objective was that of cleansing the taint. Defeating the Archdemon was a necessary, but incidental step.
You're still talking about a specific adventure or campaign, not the game itself. The game itself is the set of rules in the book. There's nothing there about what the objective is. The rules tell us only how the stats work.
Two things.
Formalizing in-character logic to math doesn't really make sense for characterization. It turns them into puppets with a master more than an actual in-game character for one, and also makes them arguably infallible in their decisions. Making mistakes should be part of that process if you ask me, and I don't mean character mistakes through role-play or our own metagame knowledge, or simply dying and getting a game over, I mean actual moments of weakness.
Not to mention even in-game decisions will be colored by metagame knowledge. Logical deduction can only work if you don't know what is coming next. Yes, your character may not know, but the person pulling the strings does.
Second, the game itself is the adventure or campaign that is put forth to you. Most don't play tabletop games unless the books tell them about whats in the world for one; I know friends of mine who refuse to do anything outside of the Shadowrun universe, or Forgotten Realms, for example, because the setting is presented to them in these rulebooks.
I guess we can argue, do we really need a set of books to play a game of make believe? Outside of rules, stats, and even setting, we also get adventures and lists and appendix rules. Yet all of that facilitates goals; character creation is an objective in these books, setting up encounters and worlds is an objective, using the math to create adversaries or items is an objective.
In that way, it's still a game id say as well, as we go through the physical process of the creation. The GM in me sees it as such at least.
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