Accoutability

Accountability-wise, these past two days have not been going great. I missed posting yesterday since I got lazy, and work has not been the most productive. Today was similarly wasted, although I am forcing myself to blog right now.

Going off of that, I think I’m going to start forcing myself to include shorter ideas/posts, even if it means that the quality of the post tanks. I’ll have a high quality post once in a while when I have time, but at least this way, I won’t sacrifice the daily aspect of this blog.

Productive Thinking

One of the things about me that surprises my friends the most when they first find out is that I’m a huge NFL fan. The surprise probably stems from the fact that I’m a mega nerd.

To be honest, the reason why I’m initially became an NFL fan is pretty nerdy: I started playing Madden Mobile in 8th grade. I didn’t actually get a smartphone until the 11th grade, so I would grab any chance I could get to play on my dad’s iPhone or the family iPad.

One of the biggest reasons that I enjoyed the game was something called the “auction house.” Essentially, it was a feature within the gaame where you could list your player cards for sale, where other people would either bid on it or buy it now. It was a great way to obtain new cards without having to pay money for packs (there’s actually been some controversy in politics over the legitimacy of kids buying packs based on luck)–if you had enough ingame currency, you would go on the auction house to find and buy the player you wanted.

Now, the interesting part of the auction house was that it was highly subject to traditional laws of economics. Supply and demand would dictate the prices, and certain events/news would cause huge shifts in the prices. Around this time, I happened to be briefly really interested in stocks (I played this online simulator called MarketWatch with my middle school friends), and this happened to be right up the same alley–I didn’t realize this at the time.

So, what other people who were similarly addicted and I would do was monitor the internet for news and use intuition to try to predict market changes. The auction house had transaction fees and took a 10% cut of whatever you sold, so strategies typically had to be strong in order to turn profits.

Eventually, I got so good at flipping players on the auction house that I found myself on a top 30 Madden Mobile team in the world (well, technically only people living in the US would play a football game). This was pretty crazy because 1, I didn’t pay a single penny for that game, and 2, I didn’t even have my own smartphone yet. I was relegated to playing only several times a day for several minutes at a time. That meant that traditional methods of making money through auctions (such as trying to snipe items that are dropped for insanely low prices) was off the day. I’d have to buy and invest in player cards in large quantities and hope the values would trend up.

Just like why people enjoy trading on the stock market, it was quite enjoyable because it was highkey gambling. The only difference was that I was successful at it (much easier compared to the real-world stock market). The moment EA (the company behind the producer) cracked down on the auction house, making it impossible to make currency outside of paying money to buy packs, I lost interest in the game and stopped playing.

The game in itself was fun, but somehow it wasn’t enough to hold my attention. This is something I’ve brought up before and I’m sure I’ll continue bringing it up in the future, but this exemplifies the three things that people enjoy the most: uncertainty, diversity, and success.

Uncertainty stemmed from the random nature of the auction market. I never knew if my investments would render me bankrupt or significantly richer. I’d burn with trepidation every school day, hoping to hop back on my dad’s phone and check my sales. It’s weird to think about now, but I was never able to check the internet at school as I had no smartphone. Huh.

Back to the topic at hand, diversity of experience was what drew me to the game in the first place. Madden Mobile was unlike any other game I’d ever played, period, but the unique factor of the auction house was definitely largely unintended by the game developers and yet kept me hooked for several years. Once that aspect was gone, the game itself lacked any extra pizazz (keep in mind, I’d been playing the same game for years at this point), and I got bored.

Companies invest a ton of money into keeping products fresh and interesting, but it’s remarkably hard to do. At the end of the day, it’s hard to diversify the same thing–eventually, you’re going to run out of angles. For example, Fortnite has already begun to die despite enjoying massive growth last year versus League of Legends, which despite being a much worse company than Epic Games, somehow has stayed at the top of the charts after an entire decade due to the complexity/diversity of their game. People will always seek out diversity of experience–people will not waste their time on the same thing over and over again if they can just switch to something new (well, not happily at least).

Finally, joy because of success is something that’s especially strong for me personally. After taking a brief break from the game, I was no longer among the top players in the league. At that state of the game history, if you didn’t play regularly, you’d most definitely be bad/poor because player values would depreciate rapidly (your currency/cards would very quickly be worth several magnitudes less) due to the power creep that’d occur over the season. For some reason, this made me extremely discouraged, and I began to dislike the game. The constant reminder of how good I used to be in comparison ruined whatever experience was left.

More generally, success is what motivates people–if this were not true, the common motivational saying of “push through failure” would not occur. People hate to fail–failure makes people wanna quit, but success does the opposite. Nobody says to “push through success” because success already would drive anyone.

Anyways, in conclusion, yes, I’m a nerd, and yes, I like a non-stereotypically nerdy activity, and yes, I like it for nerdy reasons.

JK, I’m not a nerd >:(