Preface

I've played under an hour of tennis in my entire life. Maybe I've hit a tennis ball with a racket 20 times. I don't watch tennis. I don't know anything about tennis.

And yet -- Timothy Gallwey's Inner Game of Tennis was brilliantly valuable to me.

I don't run. I don't like running. I like lifting weights. With my bad knees and mediocre lung capacity, there's very little that appeals to me less than the idea of long-distance running.

And yet -- reading Haruki Murakami's What I Talk About When I Talk About Running gave me an incredibly powerful metaphor for creativity, personal improvement, discipline, and just dealing with reality.

This book is about video games.

Well, sort of.

This book is about video games the way Gallwey's book is about tennis or Murakami's book is about running. Which is to say, despite the fact that we're going to be talking about video games constantly, the book isn't about video games.

***

I should clarify. The vast majority of video games, I think, have very little value in terms of art, in terms of lessons learned, or in terms of a worthwhile leisure activity. 

Just like the rest of society, games have trended in the "everyone gets a trophy" direction. The market has spoken -- they want games that are nearly impossible to fail at, that, if you sit at a console long enough, good things will happen to you.

I have no interest in that.

This book looks at a particular subset of games played only by people who want their leisure to put them on the edge of their mental abilities: roguelikes.

A roguelike is a type of role-playing game that, if you die once, you're dead. The game automatically saves the fact that you're dead, and there's no coming back. You can't save and reload. There's no checkpoints. That's it -- you died -- you lose.

These games don't typically play fast. It might take 20 to 70 hours to beat a roguelike. If you're 15 hours in and on the way to winning, but you slip up and play sloppy for five minutes, that's the end of it. You're dead. Good game. The game has automatically saved that you're dead. You lose. Better luck next time.

***

These very hard games, thus, become interesting laboratories if you reflect on them. To win at one of them, you need to play patiently solid for hours on end. If you find your patience going and sloppiness setting in, you need to set the game down for a while until you're rested.

In the harder roguelikes, not thinking through your advancement and development might make the game unwinnable. 

The games offer a large array of choices for difficult situations, letting you mentally wade through risks, variance, and so on.

There's a lot of quick applied math and decision theory.

You need to have awareness and perception of when things are going wrong.

Interestingly, all these skills -- planning, math, patient execution, emotional management, awareness, perception, self-control -- these are what's needed to do important high-concept work in the modern economy.

***

I'm a natural maximizer, so I want my leisure to do more than just relax me -- I want to get lessons and mental models out of it.

In this book, we take a look at some best practices from winning the hardest type of games -- and apply those lessons to real life situations, whether it be mentally relating to events around you, finding cohesion and gamebreakers in real life, or applying the basics of math honed in games to making high-dollar sales or doing well in finance and investing.

***

I think that's pretty cool -- but shall I address the elephant in the room? I don't dwell on this much in the book, but I'd like to say why I chose to write this now.

Like may kids born in the 1980's, I started playing the original Super Mario Bros on the Nintendo, and gradually graduated to Super Nintendo, Nintendo 64, Playstation, Playstation 2. (Which was the last console I owned.)

I had a nice time playing. I think games made me smarter, sharper, and gave me better reflexes. I think they gave me better mental models of the world.

But they were never "cool." It wasn't something you wanted to bring up. I think, even five years ago, I wouldn't want to say at a party that I wrote a book about mental models and math from video games.

What changed?

Three things. I'll save the biggest one for last.

The least big thing is I started thinking about why Chess is prestigious. Why is Chess prestigious? I think Chess -- with no disrespect to people who love and immerse themselves in the game -- is less of a useful thing to train in for people. There's a huge amount of memorization and static learning you need to do to start to be competitive, and the real beauty of Chess doesn't show up until you've mastered opening play and endgame play, which is a lot of book-learning with minimal improvisation or flexibility.

Eventually, I came to an answer -- Chess is prestigious because smart and influential people played a lot of Chess at one point, and it got a reputation for that. I think that's going to happen to video games; I think it's happening now.

But that's the least important reason.

The second reason is, and perhaps this is cowardly, is I noticed people I respect and admire largely nonchalantly using metaphors for video games. My friend, the mathematician, investor, and entrepreneur Ivan Mazour wrote on his blog about an Actions Per Minute metaphor comparing life to high-level Starcraft play, and wrote nostalgically about his times playing X-Com: UFO Defense.

This was heartening. Gradually, games became conversation that was fun and light, like reflecting on a "cool" activity like listening to music or playing frisbee.

Maybe that's cowardly to some extent, but seeing people I respect and admire writing openly on the topic was heartening.

But you know what the biggest reason was?

I read this article by a woman who went out on a date with a former Magic: The Gathering champion, and because she thought this was uncool, she wrote nasty and publicly about him.

And I thought -- is this who I'm afraid of offending?

This woman is loser.

This guy seems like a good guy.

And then it all started to crystallize in my mind -- we live in a silly showy narcissistic culture, where people do things less for the joy and engagement of their activities, and more so that they can photograph and Instagram or Facebook that they've done the activities.

You see silly people photographing their cake and uploading it to social media, taking photos of themselves in front of landmarks, taking photos of themselves in an expensive car...

... it's like, that is the behavior that people should be embarrassed about.

A great solo game, like a roguelike, is not showy at all. It's a personal experience, immersing your mind in the mechanics and gameplay in an intellectual activity.

A team game, like a tactical shooter, lets you hone cooperation and coordination among other people.

And a competitive game lets you test your wits against another person in an environment where you characters can go battle royal with no hard feelings in real life.  

The more I thought about it, the more I realized just what a useful and praiseworthy activity that playing games can be, sharpening our minds, sharpening our work ethic, making us smarter and more effective.

And I don't mean the "everyone gets a trophy" games -- yawn. I mean, difficult games that force us to play smart, plan ahead, learn and do math, spot patterns, and really stay calm and mentally sharp in order to progress and win.

Does this transfer to real life? It has for me. Many of the most effective, smartest, wealthiest young people I know play games as one of their leisure activities. And the kind of people who judge and get arrogant about it seem like some of the dumbest and shallowest people around.

So maybe that's a petty reason to do it -- but I figure, if the opposition is so aggressively overbearingly stupid, this must be the right side to join.

Section I. A Brief Look Backwards

1. Morphine, or the Lack Thereof

“Are you sure you don’t want morphine?”

 I don’t want morphine.

“Most people take it?” 

“Yeah, they do.”

“Ehh, I’m pretty tough. I meditate, and I, uhh, try to use these things as a training opportunity.”

 (I feel silly right after saying that.)

She blinks and doesn’t seem to process that. 

“What’s your pain at on a scale of 1 to 10?”

“I don’t know… somewhere between 4 and 6?”

“Six! That’s pretty high! You sure you don’t want something?”

“You mean… morphine?”

“Yes.”

“No, really, I’m good. Thanks.”

“Okay! Well, if you need some…”

The nurse smiles cheerfully and exits to my right. 

--

inspect room

It is dark with dim lighting. As your eyes adjust, you note you're laying on a flat hard surface in a hospital recovery room post-surgery. The room is spacious and your bed is precisely in the middle of it; the headboard touches a wall but the rest of the walls are too far away to interact with. It gives a certain "floating" feeling.

There is a desk here to your left, built into the wall.

There are windows, but it is too dark to see outside.

An IV is in your right arm.

There is one exit here: east, to the main hospital corridor.

--

No book to read, no work to do, no laptop to use. Just... alone here in the darkness, the anesthesia wearing off. A training opportunity: indeed. The pain isn't so bad. My thoughts are clear and lucid.

I can't remember the last time I had nothing scheduled and nothing to do.

I have a long list of things I do each day. Seven days a week, I wake up with at least a couple hours of things to do: walking, fitness, meditation (two sessions), standard bed-making and tooth-brushing, writing, a whole host of other stuff.

Of course, there's whatever I'd planned to do the night before -- advancing projects and what not -- and "30+ Minutes of Misc Task Clearing"... my concession to the fact that I previously would let details pile up. So I spend 30 minutes a day doing whatever really ought to be done: cleaning, paperwork, details type stuff. I used to get way behind on the details, but now with my concessionary 15 hours per month, my taxes get done on time, my laundry is usually clean, my flights are booked more than three days before I'm scheduled to go on a trip. It wasn't always this way.

Of course, I can't book flights or do my taxes or do my laundry right now. I'm not sure I can even move: I try, and it's confirmed -- the pain in my abdomen shoots up to 9+ out of 10 at my attempt to shift around. The nurse, with her morphine, is long gone. I'll just... stay still.

--

Time passes, as it's prone to do.

The night waxes and then wanes; I drift in and out of sleep; eventually it is the next day and the surgeon has come to visit.

The basic details are clear enough: the appendix hadn't burst. The surgery went smooth. I'm lucky I came in when I did. Etc.

After surgeon-talk, the surgeon shifts to doctor-talk. "Now, don't you go doing anything for a few weeks."

He doesn't say it like that; he says it more precise and doctorly. You know the tone.

He admonishes: no work at all for one week; no fitness for three weeks.

Okay, doc, thanks.

--

I'm flying through my work. I haven't been this productive in ages!

Memento mori: remember you are mortal. I've got those "brush with death" superpowers right now. I'm focused; I'm killing it.

I haven't done fitness in almost a week now; I'm going crazy.

Pushups. I do pushups.

Who listens to doctor anyways? 

Wait, that kind of hurts.

--

It's the next day.

I've regressed.

I'm exhausted and in a lot of pain.

Damn it, why didn't I listen to the doctor?

--

Okay, I'm going to take a few days off. Explicitly. No "30+ Minutes of Misc Task Clearing"; no fitness; nothing. 

I do some quick research, and download Tales of Maj'eyal.

2. The Difficulty Level Is Too Low

Most games were never able to hold my attention for long. Before I more-or-less entirely quit video games a few years ago, I would have to search out for games that were either incredibly difficult and nuanced -- or I'd have to make a non-nuanced game more difficult.

Apparently, I'm not the only person that does this. Sometimes at Gamefaqs.com, there are listed "Challenge Guides" for how to play a game more difficult.

For instance, Final Fantasy VIII -- a pleasant game that I played as a pre-teen a couple decades ago -- is really rather easy once you get the hang of the slightly unusual character development mechanics.

The ease of the game made it nigh unplayable for me after beating it once, but I liked it. It was pleasant to play, sort of like running into an old friend and reminiscing. I'm not sure it was a very good game; I don't really know how much of my affection towards it is nostalgia (probably a lot), but I enjoyed the idea of playing it. But -- it was trivially easy.

Then, one day I saw a "No Level Up" challenge guide. Wow, how interesting. It was slightly complicated: you needed to run from the fights you could run from, and in the fights you couldn't run from, you needed to get a special very-complicated-and-not-normal-to-get magic that let you turn those enemies to stone. If you turn enemies to stone, you don't get experience points -- and don't level up. Meanwhile, there’s ways to dispatch enemies that help you develop your technology without getting experience, and you have to do a healthy amount of that, which is also tricky to execute.

That's the sort of thing that got me jazzed. It turns out, FFVIII is actually very easy past the initial stages if you're doing no-level-up; you wind up really overpowered, actually. No matter, the novelty of the challenge, planning it out, executing it is very interesting. Especially the early game which actually becomes somewhat dangerous.

To increase the danger level and improve playing ability, I'd often play games in "Hardcore Mode" that weren't meant to be played that way. Meaning, if I died, I'd erase the save file and call the character dead.

This made Morrowind, the epic fantasy game, this made it playable after the beauty and interestingness of the first play was over. 

Sometimes I'd combine challenges: make a character in Morrowind who wouldn't use weapons at all; only magic; and then make it one-death-game-over. This meant that instead of blindly rushing from area to area, you'd actually have to sit and plan like you're planning a military campaign.

"Okay, what happens if I get paralyzed? What happens if I get poisoned? If I run across a Flame Atronach, can I handle taking a first big nasty fireball without dying?"

Often in games, you're required to go get some item before you can get on with your quest. In "The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time," you'd have to go get a flame-proof suit before you could enter the volcano.

But if you were playing something like Morrowind on this made-up one-death-it's-over hardcore mode, you'd de facto have to go get anti-flame gear before you could go take on an area with fire enemies. The game wouldn't tell you to; rather, you'd need to do lots of planning and thinking ahead.

Sometimes it was tedious having to go search through shops with randomly generated inventory to stock up on +10% resistance to fire items, but mostly it felt like something a real adventurer would have to deal with. If you were going to explore the North Pole in real life, you don't get a Save/Reload button. You need to have your anti-cold gear so you don't die. And, if you have a single pragmatic bone in your body, you would be happy to do lots of research and testing and small trials to make sure you were ready to go, before you got into the most dangerous parts.

Combat, likewise, got very exciting if your character would be over if you lost the battle. Normally you'd reload your last save; you could often go into a fight where you had a 50/50 chance of winning, and if you lose, you just reload. Not so, here. Even a 1% chance of losing a fight from getting paralyzed right as your shield wears off, or something, would mean you wouldn't survive to beat the game.

You can't rely on luck in a game where a single death ends your game; if you're willing to accept a chance of dying over 0% per battle, you'd eventually get killed. Your guy would be over. 

3. Thai Kickboxing, Childproofing, and the Fighter/Wizard

Older games are to modern games what a Thai kickboxing ring is to a child's playpen.

Have you ever seen Thai kickboxing? I went to a match in Chiang Mai. It's vicious, vicious stuff.

They wear minimal gear. They generate immense power.

We were seated in some stands above and a set a little bit back from the ring. My Japanese friend and I were the only non-Thai in that area; these were the cheap seats; the few foreigners there sat on the ground near the ring.

But it worked out well: above the ring, it was possible to see everything play out. Up close, things would be more visceral and more of a blur; further back, the matches took on a Chesslike quality where you could see mistakes happen and get reacted to. Most matches ended after the first major mistake.

The fourth match was two young, energetic, and lightning-fast Thai guys. One maybe 19 years old, the other maybe 22.

The 19-year-old overcommitted on an attack and lost his balance slightly.

Stumbling slightly, the 19-year-old wound up leaning into his opponent's kick, taking a vicious foot to the head.

He hit the canvas immediately, knocked out cold.

The crowd went wild.

Me, too.

Everyone sobered up a little bit when the medics came and put the kid's neck in a splint before carrying him off on a stretcher.

--

If you'll forgive me for comparing the seriousness of Thai combat with the not-quite-as-serious video games, this might be an apt metaphor.

Back in the day, computers were largely for intellectual, analytical, deeply thinking people. This was a relatively small market.

In other words, the prototypical video game player in 1990 was much more armed and equipped to play games that were... punishing.

And they were -- punishing. Think about the original Super Mario Bros. You started with a few lives. You got a rapid rampup of difficulty between levels as mechanics are rapidly added. Dying was unpleasant. It was "Game Over" if you died a few times. You couldn't save and restore. The game didn't "cheer you on" very much, especially not when you died. (You did get points for stomping enemies and minor fireworks when grabbing the flag at the end of the level. But then, alas, the princess is in another castle.)

In the Thai boxing arena, these are already the top 1% of most competent fighters in the world going at each other. Those two young men are two of the toughest men on the planet. And when one overreaches ever so slightly, it's punishing. It's not celebratory-punishing. The spectators wound up almost ashamed to have watched it.

Likewise, games used to be played by the top 1% of most analytical people -- almost exclusively. And when you overreached in a game, you got punished.

--

"Punished" isn't too strong of a word, either. 

Let me tell you a story; you can chuckle if you want, but I don't think you will.

I played "Dungeons and Dragons" -- 2nd Edition and some 3rd Edition -- from around age 11 or 12 to around age 16. 

At age 15, I joined a game with some older teenagers that had been going on for a while. One guy, let's call him Jonny, had a level 18 fighter/wizard (if memory serves) who he'd really built up. 

Level 18 was pretty high in Second Edition Dungeons and Dragons.

He and another player there -- let's call him Tommy -- got into a tiff, and two characters that were once friends split off, and wound up fighting to the death.

This was all on pen-and-paper, occasionally using a checkerboard with little makeshift figures put on it, and rolling dice to determine the outcome.

Jonny lost and his character died. 

He cried.

Oh, I guess I didn't build that up well enough: to be clear, Jonny was not at all some hyper-intellectual kid. It was actually kind of an odd game. The guy running the game was nerdy, but Jonny and Tommy -- friends in real life -- were actually tough kids. Jonny drank and smoked pot and had sex. (I was a couple years younger, and wasn't doing any of those things.) He had bleach blond hair and earrings. He even got a girl pregnant while in high school. (They gave the baby up for adoption.)

He was a really tough kid, from a tough background. He was from the poor part of town and was doing a bad job of trying to get out of it. He could kick your ass.

But when his fighter/wizard died, he cried like a baby.

It was mentally devastating for him; I dare say it hurt him more than the time he talked trash at some older kids and got his ass beaten into the ground, or any of the times he failed one of his classes, or whatever else. Tough kid, but losing this made-up character was mentally punishing to him.

--

Games don't do that any more; in fact, they aim not to do it. They try to fence off the world so that you can play in it, but without hurting yourself.

This makes sense: basically all strata of society play video games now.

No, really, who doesn't play games? Everyone I know in first-world countries have at least played Mario Kart, and often a lot more than that.

As the market for video games has grown, it's gone from people who want to be pushed to their intellectual limits to people who want to relax after work. They want to see some scenery, get some vicarious hero factor going, and not at all suffer or practice to excel.

Scenery was irrelevant for me; a bonus if it's there, but not at all necessary. Vicarious hero factor? I guess, sure, I was into that. But I wanted to know that I needed to really suffer and practice to excel.

This is what led me first to older games, and then to roguelikes.

4. Eating Chicken

I just read that chicken -- poultry -- eating chicken, you know? -- I just read that it used to be a luxury good.

How about that? Who would have thought? Who would have known?

I guess it's obvious in retrospect. Before refrigeration, everything perishable could easily be a luxury good. It's not like you can herd chickens around, either. So if you're not near a chicken farm, how could you get chicken? Well, you couldn't. Not affordably, anyways.

It was less than 100 years ago -- not long before the advent of video games, actually -- that chicken became affordable and common in most of the Western world.

Insights went off in my head upon reading that, insights about culture.

Through most of American history, parents haven't understood their children very well. With a few small exceptions, every generation of Americans have been wealthier and more prosperous than their parents.

This really took off at the end of World War II, and the confusion has been immense in all subsequent generations.

But it's perhaps understandable when you think about the chicken. If someone grew up very poor, in cramped and dirty housing, maybe without electricity and indoor plumbing -- this was the norm really not that long ago -- then getting your own clean house with electricity and toilets and showers must have seemed miraculously better.

If there's regularly chicken on the table -- or better yet, "two chickens in every pot" -- then you'd be well-satisfied. "I came from dirt and lived in squalor. My children live in a clean home with plumbing and electricity. Sometimes I was hungry. My children are never hungry; we regularly have chicken on the table. My education was spotty; my children have the finest education. I've done well."

Easy to understand, when you look at it like that.

But the children growing up with electricity, plumbing, and chicken -- they think nothing of it. It's the norm.

In fact, it's the norm for you. It's probably hard to get your mind around. Allow me to give you an example that might resonate better, then.

Probably the majority of people reading this, if they drink alcohol (I don't, but used to) -- probably you see champagne as a luxury drink.

Imagine then, a self-made couple who works really hard and sacrifice a lot to start a business and build it up. Imagine them going from normal middle class -- you know, normal American life -- into being very wealthy.

Imagine that the first time the couple have champagne together is after the first month that the family business makes $10,000. Then they regularly have champagne with new milestones -- at $20,000 per month, at $50,000 per month, after the first million-dollar in revenues year, after the first million-dollars-in-profit year.

Champagne would be very special. Having champagne for the first time at age 25, 28, 30, 35, something like that, only in celebration after an immense amount of toil, champagne would be extremely psychologically satisfying, rooted and tied to hard work and accomplishment.

But, like almost all people who get wealthy, eventually they would acclimate and be able to have champagne all the time. Maybe they're in their 40's or 50's now, and they've got children who are teenagers on the verge of becoming adults.

And the kids see the grown-ups having champagne, now, every Christmas, most birthdays, regularly celebrating milestones and eventful good happenings.

Champagne would be not-so-special for the children. The taste of champagne isn't the taste of victory over adversity, of the fruit of toil, of the final reaping of the harvest long-sown through years of deprivation and sacrifice.

No, champagne would just be normal.

And perhaps every generation is like this. Automobiles, travel on airplanes with jet engines, computers, the Internet -- these were miracles when we first saw them. But for younger people, it's passe. No big deal. It's not even, "Who cares?" -- rather, it's not even thought about.

It's strange for me, I'm only roughly 30 years old, and seeing teenagers now think nothing of the internet is just really odd. Thinking nothing of smartphones with 3G internet that gets beamed down to them. Thinking nothing of WiFi just being everywhere. It's like -- whoa, don't you realize how big of a deal this is?

Like... electricity or plumbing or cars or air travel or chicken?

Oh. I'm starting to get it.

--

I remember reading JR Tolkien's "The Hobbit" in Barcelona -- and being underwhelmed.

"Yeah, yeah, dwarves, a troll, a hobbit, a wizard, a dragon, magic stuff. Whatever, I've read this before."

Then I realized that Tolkien invented all that stuff.

Whoa.

--

I had to write all this introduction because otherwise I'll seem crazy when I praise 1998's Baldur's Gate.

It was legendary for its time -- but like commonplace chicken, electricity, and the internet -- it might seem quaint that I'm so enamored with it.

--

But let's try. Imagine, for a moment, that you're a teenaged version of me. It's the late 1990's, the new millennia will come shortly (or maybe it's already came).

Dell computers are the state-of-the-art. The internet is dialup and you don't feel it's painfully slow because you don't know any better. Actually, it's hard to get around. Google either doesn't exist yet or isn't commonly known.

At a friend's recommendation -- the one who got you into fantasy novels and Dungeons and Dragons, actually -- you get Baldur's Gate. It's on six CD's.

That's a big game. It's like -- wow, there's going to be a lot to do in this game.

So you insert the CD into your Dell computer and it's got this epic score of music, really rich and symphonic, and the graphics are crystal-clear and have this surreal life-likeness to it.

It's like -- wow, I'm really in for something special here.

This is before online game reviews or spoiler-sites and you don't read magazines. So you have no idea what's going to happen in the game. Really -- none at all. (I can't remember the last time I didn't have a vague idea of what was going to happen in a game before I started playing. But it was around this era.)

You fire it up, and you're in a little scholarly community called Candlekeep. Your adopted father tells you that something bad is going on and tells you to get your things together and you'll leave on a journey. He gives you some money and tells you to buy equipment.

In Candlekeep, the non-player characters in the game, they talk to you like they've known you for years. Some of them offer to teach you little things, others ask you to do a little errand for them.

This is all very normal and passe now, but at the time, it felt incredibly immersive.

Then, as you're wandering around and exploring, someone attacks you and tries to hurt you! Whoa, you're thrust right into the fire.

When you go outside and tell the guards, everyone is very concerned and tells you to hurry up and meet your adopted father.

There's this sense of worry and confusion, of a certain gravity. These have held up reasonably well over time, but the novelty of this has worn off -- after the immense success of Baldur's Gate, this became a very common set of storyline and beginning in games like this. Starting off in a gated community, wandering around, interacting with people from your youth, but there's a tension in the air and things going a little wrong. This is normal and commonplace in games now, but it was the first time I ever saw anything like it.

--

Most of the "twists" in video games are somewhat cliche and predictable. Oh, the "good mayor" of the city is actually the evil mastermind! Whoa, who could have guessed! 

Baldur's Gate is interesting because it hits you with a "twist" right away. You seem like you're about to go on this great journey. Your adopted father helps you get ready for travels, you say goodbye to the people at Candlekeep, and he starts briefing you on the situation. When nightfall hits, you hurry out of the little scholarly community.

Then, as you're walking, the evil antagonist -- a gigantic man in spiked black armor -- intercepts you with two very large ogre henchmen. Your adopted father tells you to run and an epic battle ensues. Your father is able to kill the two ogres, but falls in the end to Sarevok.

You ran. In the morning, you wake up after that nightmare of a night.

And you're alone in the wilderness for the first time in your life.

That's it. That's how the game starts. You don't have superpowers; you don't have any powers at all. You're almost useless.

An old friend from Candlekeep runs after you; she asks to accompany you and offers to help. Then, as you walk through the world, you encounter other travelers. The first you come across are obviously sneaky and untrustworthy, mercenaries looking for money. But they invite you to travel with them.

It is safer to travel with them. But they're obviously bad guys. So right away, you're in a dilemma. A group of four is safer than a group of two, and these look like world-weary and savvy veterans. But they're bad people. Do you let them join you or not?

It's kind of scary. It gets the point across about starting from nothing and improvising.

The game has no overarching plot or narrative that you're aware of and moving towards at this point; it's not clear what should happen next. Your adopted father, Gorion, he told you to head north to the Friendly Arm Inn to find some old friends of his should anything happen. On the way, you periodically get attacked -- the roads aren't safe and bandits are around, and you yourself have bounty hunters after you.

The game starts you off weak and largely useless. The world is dangerous. If you wander around aimlessly, you will be killed. Absolutely. And that was one of the joys of the game. And when you played it "hardcore," it was even more satisfying.

5. Hardcore Mode

Baldur's Gate suffers from the same flaw that almost every mainstream game suffers from: in order to not frustrate the player too much, it makes dying not-so-painful.

The game automatically saves every time you change a level, and by pressing "Q" on your keyboard, you could quick-save and reload from that point at any time. There was no penalty to doing so.

A lot of the fights in Baldur's Gate wind up being intricate puzzles to solve. For instance, there's a number of fights where there is a hostile party of four mercenaries out to kill you, of whom one will be extremely dangerous, and three will be not such a big deal. Often, the really dangerous enemy would be a spellcaster or archer behind a few fighter-types.

Like any other game with liberal checkpoints and being able to reload with no penalty when you die, you wouldn't actually have to solve the puzzles these fights presented. You could just charge in and hope to get lucky. Maybe you win; if you lose, reload and try again, maybe slightly differently.

When you play in a "Hardcore Mode" -- where death is permanent and you don't reload -- it became a detailed challenge.

Some games come with a hardcore mode built in -- Diablo II's "Ironman" mode is probably the most famous; death is permanent there.

Baldur's Gate didn't have those settings available, but I improvised and set those as rules for myself. No reloading. Death is permanent. No resurrecting party members at the temple if they died; they just had to be disbanded from the party. Thus, every encounter was rather leveraged.

And suddenly, you do things quite differently. If you have a party with some mix of rogues or rangers in it, you probably wait until night before a big fight. You probably send someone who has sneak or invisibility out to scout important areas before blindly charging in. In very dangerous areas, maybe you don't move at all without summoned monsters in front of your party to absorb the first wave of damage.

At the start of Baldur's Gate, your main character is incredibly weak and useless. A single arrow from a bandit who just appears on the edge of your vision can kill your character. This doesn't matter if you quick-save after every battle, which is what most people do. It matters a lot if you take all results as permanent and are trying to win.

Sometimes, like the fight at the top of the Iron Throne Building, you have to go stock up on an immense amount of materials and supplies to beat it. The top of the Iron Throne is full of hostile rogues and spellcasters; quite nasty ones too. Really, the only way to be reasonably assured of beating it is coming in with a lot of explosives which can be purchased. Your casters can obviously blow stuff up on their own, but non-caster classes suffer up there -- in "Hardcore Mode," that's a pretty late fight in the game, and so you take the time to carefully prepare (dying means starting over from the beginning, if you keep playing that game) and so you get all your defenses in line, get some escapes ready, and have every person have some opening moves that will blow up basically the entire room full of powerful (but physically weak) assailants.

The nature of a Hardcore Mode-type no-reload all-results-permanent type game is radically different. The risk/reward calculus is different. In a normal game, you'll have at least a few hundred encounters. If you have a 1% chance of dying -- a 99% chance of winning! -- you won't make it through the game in one piece.

In my opinion, this single shift -- towards "Hardcore Mode" where everything counts, no re-do’s, death is permanent -- is what took my video-game playing habit from a mostly useless entertainment indulgence into something that actually starts to produce useful life lessons. 

Life, after all, life itself is run in "Hardcore Mode" -- there's no reload button if you screw up a job interview, or get mugged in a dangerous foreign country, or whatever other thing might happen in your adventures.

By playing in Hardcore Mode, games became about thinking, strategy, preparation, balancing the tradeoffs between safety and resource usage (should I use the potion now to guarantee I win this one? will I need it later?); it requires creativity and patience.

An additional underrated bonus is you'll usually do something stupid and get yourself killed when you're tired, so for savvy players, it de facto sets a "it's better to turn the game off now..." time. 

6. Not Twitchy

As I got older, I slowed down from playing video games; eventually, I mostly stopped.

But before ceasing, I became almost obsessed with finding certain types of very difficult games.

I wasn't looking for "twitchy" games where you needed to have fast reflexes. I was very, very good at the shooters Goldeneye 007 and Perfect Dark on the Nintendo 64 -- 15 years ago. How was I good? I knew all the maps, perfectly. I knew where all the guns, ammunition, and body armor would spawn. I knew which way to turn around a corner and what the room inside would look like. I knew roughly how many shots from each gun it would take to take someone down in multiplayer, and I knew roughly how accurate each gun was.

I think shooters are great, especially team-based shooters like Counterstrike or SOCOM. At a high level, they can teach kids communication and coordination skills and strategy. 

But they lose their luster as a player gets older and can't or won't devote significant time to them. The background knowledge to be assimilated is very game-specific and non-transferable. And then, it takes a lot of time to fine-tune your muscle memory so you can enter commands into your controller fast enough to be effective.

For the same reason, I preferred turn-based strategy games (like Civilization IV) to real-time strategy games (Starcraft). In a turn-based game, you could make up for a lack of knowledge about the game itself with some critical thinking and logic.

With a real-time game, you get punished repeatedly for your lack of knowledge. To be sure, in all games, knowing more about a game helps more than knowing it less, and sometimes an ability that looks useless turns out to actually be pretty good. But, definitely, a logical person willing to sit and think patiently does better at games they don't know and play irregularly if those games aren't real-time. 

That defined my search space for games pretty well: very difficult, and gave plenty of time to sit and think on courses of action.

There was one more thing I wanted: a relatively open world, where I had flexibility to build and advance how I wanted.

A lot of games have clearly defined "best ways to play them" -- for instance, many Japanese-style RPGs have obvious best ways to develop characters to make them strong. The game might be tough and offer difficult challenges, but it doesn't offer the opportunity for creativity and experimentation.

My search for this game -- immensely difficult, many and flexible options for how to advance and develop and play, an open world, and not-real-time -- this led me back further in time from 1998's Baldur's Gate to 1992's Darklands.

7. Medieval Germany

As you go back further in time, games get harder. Darklands is very difficult.

Among people who play rare, old, classical games, Darklands consistently rates as one of the best. 

It also has an incredibly novel premise: the game is set in the Middle Ages in the Holy Roman Empire. The basic premise is that every commonly believed superstition of the era is actually true. 

There are gargoyles, dragons, gnomes, witches. The Knights Templar are evil and satanic. Meanwhile, your party is Christian and can call on saints to perform miracles, according to what the saint is the patron of. Saints can save you from blizzards and floods, can turn back satanic enemies, can make the sky go bright in the middle of the night, can help you pass rivers, can protect you from arrows or fire, and so on.

But outside of these supernatural elements, the game also just did a fine job of recreating Medieval Germany. There's raubritters -- robber knights -- in strongholds that harass shipping and extract "tolls" for passing through their lands. Cities obviously don't like this, and once you either build local reputation or Germany-wide fame, they'll pay you to go take them out.

You can fight raubritters by besieging their castle, by trying to sneak in during the night and set it on fire, by asking to be invited inside cordially and then demanding a surrender, or you could ask to spend the night and then sneak out of your room to confront the 'britter without his guards around.

There's a host of mundane trade to do, and little errands to run. The game starts with an interesting very sandbox-y premise: your party bands together to go "look for fame and riches." That's it. No plot. Depending on how you play, it would be very easy to play the game for years without your characters even coming across the main plot at all, especially if you stick to major cities.

Meanwhile, you can study at local guilds, trade items, study at the university, make donations to the church (money or artifacts) to increase your standing with the church, rest in inns, or even just set up to live in a city for weeks at a time (or longer) working on your trade to make money.

The game is also brutally unforgiving. Parts of the map flood or get covered in blizzards -- if you have no remedies for this (no one with good wilderness survival skills and no knowledge of saints that can help with the situation), your party members will suffer permanent effects of frostbite, or die.

Like Baldur's Gate a half-decade later, Darklands is liberal about letting you save and reload. Like Baldur's Gate, if you flip into "Hardcore Mode" (where you accept every outcome and don't reload from saves at all), the game becomes infinitely more interesting and thought-provoking.

You can make your own party in Darklands through its elaborate character creation system, or you can play an (okay but not great) default party.

I took the default party out in one game and had played it pretty far along when I was caught in a series of disasters in a row. Eventually, the party wound up fighting a lot of bears, and 3/4ths of the party was killed, with only the toughest fighter surviving the battle with only a single point or health or two; the others were permanently killed.

The one fighter rested up and healed a bit, and then carefully limped back to the nearest city, and recruited a new party.

The tough fighter is pretty dumb: he doesn't have good knowledge of religion, alchemy, communication, survival, or craft skills. He's just a tough, dumb fighter.

So the new party wound up with a bunch of green 20-year-olds with this 45-year-old tough fighter. Adventuring consisted of the younger more diversely talented members going around building up their skills and negotiating and supporting the tough fighter, who took the primary role in all battles while the others built up (starting with bow and arrow at first, since to enter close combat would've been dangerous).

This is the kind of emergent result that only happens in a no-reload game. If you were reloading bad outcomes, no way you let 3/4ths of your established party die and limp your one survivor to the city.

But, the way Darklands works, it's more advantageous to continue than to reset, even though you're almost starting from scratch. The party, with its continuity from that one fighter, still has a good reputation in a number of cities, still has some fame, still has some decent money. So this one guy gets a new group together and they out, and they were actually a pretty successful group.

Darklands is almost a perfect game for its era; it's incredibly deep and they get most of the details right. The biggest problem is that, of the dozens of skills in the game, some are used immensely (Knowledge-Wilderness is critical) and others not at all (Riding horses is used only a couple times), and it's not clear at all from the start which are which.

Even with that, Darklands, with its punishing difficulty, was my last step on the way to the most punishing games of all -- roguelikes.

8. One False Move...

The pace of innovation in video games has slowed down. It's still breathtakingly fast, but there are now established genres, conventions, and franchises that dominate the landscape of games.

From around the year 2005 and earlier, for every five years you go back in time, you're dealing with a radically different type of game. In roughly five year increments, the whole nature of games would radically evolve.

If Baldur's Gate, from 1998, looks like a current-day Ferrari -- then Darklands from '92 looks like a Model-T.

1987's Nethack, then, might be a horse and buggy.

Or so it appears on the surface.

Under the surface, Darklands is a much deeper game with more interesting and varied mechanics than Baldur's Gate, and Nethack has the most interesting set of mechanics and interactions of them all.

But Nethack is really hard to get into.

It's the first roguelike we've talked about.

A roguelike is named after the first in its genre -- "Rogue" -- which came from the 1980's. 

Roguelikes typically have three things in common: first, there's permadeath -- if you die once, you're dead. This is enforced by the game auto-saving when you die. (You could get around it if you really wanted to, but it seems to defeat the point of playing this type of game.)

Second, there's "procedural generation" for large parts of the game -- that means, every time you play it, it's different. Shops have random selections of inventory, with random variables and modifiers. Monsters are randomly generated within certain bands of level and difficulty in certain level ranges, according to probability tables. Even level layouts are different each time you play. 

Finally, roguelikes are typically really, really hard.

To even get into roguelikes, you have to take on a steep learning curve. Typically, you character is represented by the '@' sign. Monsters will be represented by one letter: a 'k' is a Kobold, a 'd' is a dog, a 'V' is a Vampire, and so on. If you move your cursor over the enemy, it'll give you a longer description of what it is.

You enter all commands by typing and keypad; in older roguelikes, you don't use the mouse at all. (Newer ones often add a graphical interface on top for convenience and prettiness.)

Finally, the games have a rather finicky about inputting commands and usage. It's (unintuitively) the letter 'q' (quaff) to drink a potion, not 'd' which makes you go down.

The board itself is sparse: all text. The symbols that represent things on the map, enemies, shopkeepers, items, and so on — you have to learn what they mean by playing, and the learning curve is difficult. Again, a single false move and your character is dead forever.

Often in roguelikes, you need to also manage food (run out of food and die), and avoid a variety of monsters that can instant-kill you. There's enemies that can turn you to stone in a single move. If you see one, obviously, run.

Roguelikes became the pinnacle of what I was looking for out of video games: incredibly difficult, and calling for incredible flexibility and creativity. After you've played Baldur's Gate a few times, you know how to stop by and take out Mulahey en route to Nashkel, to get his excellent electrical hammer and collect the bounty on him. In a roguelike in the vein of Nethack, the levels are laid out differently every time, you wind up with different gear every time, and you wind up facing different threats every time. You need to be able to improvise, be flexible, and work with the situation you're facing.

==============
Section II. Lessons
==============

II 1. A Question of Leisure

I remember a series of nursery rhymes from when I was a young boy.

If my memory serves me, one of them went like this --

The bear went over the mountain

The bear went over the mountain

The bear went over the mountain


To see what he could see

To see what he could see

To see what he could see


But all that he could see

Was

The other side of the mountain

The other side of the mountain

The other side of the mountain

Then there is, of course, the famous joke about the chicken --

Q: Why did the chicken cross the road?

A: To get to the other side.

And then there's the famous book by John Kabat Zinn, "Wherever You Go, There You Are."

(It's too bad, the title ruins the ending and gives the whole thing away.)

It would be an eminently sensible thing to ask, "Wait, why, Mr. Marshall, do you look to find and play exceedingly difficult computer games? And why do you take computer games of lesser difficulty and impose arbitrary conventions and your own rules on them which are designed simply to make the game more difficult and less forgiving?"

Entirely fair questions.

I could list you a set of benefits of doing so; in fact, I'll share many of those benefits momentarily, and the mental models gained and lessons learned and such. 

But any such list would be necessarily incomplete. A better reply would be, simply:

"Why do anything?"

We could broadly separate out the reasons for doing things into (1) means and (2) ends.

Most people who work for money, do so not purely for love of money itself, but for what money can buy. (I get that we're not exactly in massively innovative philosophical territory here.)

We could nail down what people's final values are, their terminal values, the thing they just throw their hands up in the air and say "That matters because it just does" and don't explain any more.

I have a slightly more rigorous system of ethics and what I believe is right and wrong, but alas, I'm not superhuman. I can't write, do commercial work, do creative work, do nonprofit work, teach, speak, prepare, and otherwise get stuff done all the time. (I've sometimes tried; the result of nonstop work is burnout.)

So, I take leisure. Grudgingly. Frankly, I think leisure is greatly overrated. I like producing things and making the world a better place. But when I don't sleep, I get fatigued; if I don't eat for a few days in a row, my body and mind start to slow down; the effects of not drinking water kick in sooner, and so on.

...and if I don't take leisure and take a break at all, my mind doesn't compile and recharge, and eventually I'm grinding away through life, ineffectively, uninspired, and not very productive.

So, I take rests and breaks. I've come around entirely on the concept of naps and try to nap daily; the boost after even a short nap is roughly a 10x boost in creativity and perhaps a 2x boost in work speed as opposed to just powering through the mid-day lull.

Likewise, I read a lot, primarily history, and I study a lot of topics with a strong amateur's interest.

Oh and, sometimes, more rare these days, I play games.

I always figured that rest, breaks, and leisure are necessary to some extent, just like sleeping, eating, and drinking water are necessary.

I also figured it's better to spend that type of leisure doing things that'll build my strength, help me recover and recharge, and make me smarter and better going forwards.

Computer games still get a relatively bad rap with people over 40; these folk get worried if their kids are playing games too heavily, but I ask if they'd be equally worried at heavy television watching... if so, that's fine, too much media can easily be escapism. But games, games always seem to me to be much more interactive and immersive than most consumption activities. The television, you sit there and rot in front of it. You don't have to do really any work, mentally or physically. Your reflexes, judgment, decisionmaking are not activated at all. You're not really creating any experience there; you're on your butt, doing nothing, just being force-fed other people's conceptions of the world and what you should pay attention to.

Whereas, a good game seems to offer much more than that. A difficult enough game becomes a relatively low-stakes, low-pressure, no-identity-invested way to explore and test different ideas and strategies, to see how well you can keep composure on the fly when things are going wrong, to otherwise look to improve and perfect yourself -- and to recharge and take leisure in the process.

Why do I play games at times? Because I get more work done and build the world better than if I work nonstop when I take leisure, and playing difficult games is one of the better ways to take leisure while building my mind.

II 2. "This Isn't Quake" -- On Keeping One's Composure

If you haven't played a roguelike game before, an important point: time doesn't pass until you do something.

It's like a Chess board with no timer. You can sit and think very deeply about the problem at hand. 

When you take your turn -- attacking the nearest enemy, casting a spell, using an item, moving in a direction, using a special ability -- all the enemies on the level take their turn simultaneously.

You can be nearly dead, having only a single point of health left, and you can sit and really carefully think through the situation. You can ask yourself, "Ok, is the enemy almost dead? Should I blast it with a wand? What's the standing with my god -- would praying be a good idea? Can I use some ability to make it impossible to attack me? What are the odds the next attack hits or misses -- maybe I could cast invisibility, so that if the attack misses, I can then run away? But if the next attack hits, I die. Hmm. I have an unidentified potion -- I could either drink it or throw it at the enemy; what the odds that something good happens if I do either? My situation is pretty desperate here, what's the best way to give myself a chance to survive?"

Again, in a typical roguelike, a single death and you're dead. No saving, no reloading. 

One of the chief ways people die is via panic. Not "panic" cast on your character like blindness or silence or getting frozen. No, I mean, panic as a player.

The best advice I ever read about Nethack went something like this: "Remember that this game isn't Quake."

(Quake, of course, being the famous hyper-fast-paced shooter.)

You get no points for playing fast. Actually, you're likely to die if you play fast. Playing fast means making bad decisions.

But here's the thing: when things start going wrong, people naturally start to panic. While there's no real stakes in a video game, not like real life, it feels a bit like there's some stakes when you're 5 hours into playing a character that's started promising and it seems like you've got a chance to win the game. Then, all of a sudden, you run into a whole pack of nasty enemies, and you're low on health and almost surrounded.

What do you do?

Most people start mashing commands on the keyboard, doing things frantically, trying to run or rapidly attack the biggest nastiest enemy nearby, or all manner of stupidity.

By the time they come to their senses, they might be out of options. It might be "mate in 6" as they say in Chess; you've already lost the game and there's nothing you can do; it's all over but the pain.

But, like Chess, you don't get rewarded for playing faster. When a bad situation hits, randomly mashing the keyboard does you nothing except burns turns.

If you've got 40 life and a nasty creature is  hitting you for 10 damage per turn, you've got (at least) four actions before you're dead. If you rapidly mash attack!, attack!, attack! -- you've got one turn left. That might just be too late.

Roguelikes, again, punish you for blunders. In my opinion, thus, they can actually serve as reasonably good training for emotional management and keeping your composure.

It won't make any sense if you haven't played a game on hardcore mode or played a roguelike. I would expect someone who hasn't ever done it to not quite get what I'm saying. The feeling of a character about to die, who won't be able to get back up, the character gone forever; this is a significantly intense feeling. 

But at the same time, it is just a game, and doesn't really matter.

In some ways, thus, it's a perfect training ground for dealing with panic. There's seemingly real consequences and it's really frustrating. You've maybe invested hours getting where you're at. You might even "like" your character or feel excited about the prospect of winning with them.

And then, all hell breaks loose.

Your natural inclination, if you're like most people, is to speed up, play faster, start making a compounding series of mistakes and errors, and wind up with your guy dead.

Over many repetitions of this fundamental error, you learn to stop doing that. You learn to force yourself to slow down, breathe, think when things are tough. Maybe you even realize that if you get ambushed by some intense skeleton warrior that you don't need to do anything right now; you could go make a coffee, have a snack, do some pushups, wash your face, and then come back and think about it clearly.

Many dangerous situations in these games are survivable -- if you keep your composure. But if you let your panic take over and start spinning out of control, you dig yourself into a hole that eventually gets filled over with dirt on top of you.

Does this transfer to real life? I believe it has to some extent for me.

The lesson is this --

Panic: it's almost never the right answer.

II 3. Staying Out of Messes in the First Place

You know what's better than keeping your composure when you're in a hell of a mess?

Not getting into a hell of a mess in the first place.

We could speak about planning and preparation -- in fact, we will speak about planning and preparation. But not yet.

Before that, let's agree with something obvious, and analyze why people don't do the obvious thing.

The blindingly obvious statement is this: you want to stay out of situations where very bad things can happen to you. 

Well, that's obvious.

It's not particularly insightful.

Likely, the statement doesn't even register when you read it.

"You want to stay out of situations where very bad things can happen to you."

Duh.

I mean, who wants to be in situations where very bad things can happen?

Nobody. Nobody wants that.

Duh.

And yet...

Let's start with the video game metaphor first.

You're playing Tales of Maj'Eyal. If you die once, you're dead.

You're a berserker. There's different ways to build a berserker, but you've got for a fragile high-damage build: you've taken some basic defenses, but you've put almost all your points and specialties into speed and damage. 

You're in a dungeon and you descend a level. Right by the staircase -- unusually -- are a group of 12 tough enemies, including one boss.

Maybe that's still not a problem. You've got answers here: you turn on Blinding Speed, Precise Strikes, a Shield Rune, and then you unload with your highest damage attacks and use Warcry.

You kill four of the enemies.

Your shield gets broken by damage, the speed and accuracy boosts are starting to wear off. You use Regeneration; now you'll be healing.

Here's the thing: you're looking pretty good. Four enemies are down. A few of the rest are wounded. You'll be able to definitely kill a few more of them without any problems.

But you've used all your resources, powerups, defenses, and threats.

If you stay in that battle without running and don't do anything novel, maybe you'll survive it. But probably not. A single unlucky stun, blindness, confusion, or variety of other effects could take you out.

You've used your shielding and healing. You've used your best abilities to shell damage. You now (1) take more damage, (2) do much less damage, (3) are less accurate, (4) are slower, (5) can't heal when you take damage.

On the one hand, your character looks in good shape -- you just took out four of the enemies, another 3 or 4 are about to hit the deck and are wounded. You're in almost full health. It looks like you're in full control.

You're not. You're on the verge. You just don't see it.

When I write it out clearly, it's really obvious to see what you should do: run back upstairs, get away, and let all of your abilities cool down. In 50 turns or so, you can come back and shred the remainder of the enemies.

But it looks like you're fine. That's the thing. Your health bar is full, enemies have been dying, the others near you are wounded. But if you do the math and run it out, you're now at your worst part since the battle started, and it's less than half over. You're fine; you can just press "Up" right now and in one move you'll be in total safety.

The wounded enemies might heal up, but it doesn't matter. When you came in, you were facing 12. Unloading your attacks and defenses got you down to 8 enemies alive, with 4 of them wounded. When you go back and do another volley, they'll go down to 4 alive, all of them wounded. It'll be easy to wrap it up after healing up.

And to be clear, if you don't retreat, you've got a reasonably good chance of surviving. Maybe it's over 90%. But that means a 1 in 10 chance of dying, and one death is game over. Why accept a 1 in 10 shot of losing the game, right there, with nothing to be gained? It will literally take you 30 seconds of real world time, max, to retreat and re-prepare.

That's how people get wrecked in these games. There's other ways, yes. Sometimes you walk into a room and an opponent is generated with the exact perfect mix of threats to just wreck you. Sometimes you can even get one-shot killed when you first see an enemy, if you're really unlucky.

But these are rarities if you're preparing and building smart. No, most deaths happen because of hanging around. At the start of a battle, you have tons of options. After you've spent all those options, you might still have a full health bar, but you're actually in a very precarious position. Even at 100% health, you might be more than halfway to being dead.

Again,

"You want to stay out of situations where very bad things can happen to you."

Duh.

But most people don't.

Why?

I don't know. I can speculate, but I don't know.

To be clear, I'm not talking about games here.

Take real life.

"You want to stay out of situations where very bad things can happen to you."

I'm not talking about avoiding getting mugged or getting in a bar fight in real life. I'm talking much more mundane things, like blowing a huge opportunity, or failing to win a contract, or screwing up your studies.

What many people seem to do with their lives is exactly what the berserker who hangs around downstairs and gets killed do: they let themselves get into a situation where they don't have options, and thus they're vulnerable to chance and luck.

I remember one university class I took, I think the title was Management Information Systems. The subject matter was boring and I already knew most of it, but the professor was cool and had a great personality, so it just kind of felt like I was hanging out when I was in that class.

One little eccentricity about the class is that the "Final Project" wasn't necessarily due the final week of class -- instead, one of each of the students would present their "Final Project" each week to the class. The professor gave you like 15 minutes to teach the class something.

When he said that we'd get to fill in the date we were to present, I darted up to the lectern and claimed -- Week Two of class.

I did it. It went fine. And I never had to think about it again.

I'm not always able to follow this policy, but it's something I try really hard to do: if a project doesn't have an enduring impact, EG, if higher quality isn't worth much, I try to get it done as quickly as possible.

I think it's uncontroversial to say that just about every human has emergencies and things that go wrong in their life. Car accidents happens. Deaths-in-the-family happen. Serious illnesses happen. Sometimes even wars and riots start.

Now, it's entirely understandable if you can't get a Final Project in university done if you're deep in grief, or recovering in the hospital, or if your flight back to your university gets canceled because flights are grounded due to some crazy event.

On the one hand, it's totally reasonable.

On the other hand, I think it's useful to think that's my own damn fault when you leave yourself in situations where luck can affect you.

I'm not saying assign any blame to anyone else. Not at all. Be compassionate, of course. But you, yourself, the individual -- it's easy to get some mix of cocky and lazy. If you normally do your final paper for a class in the last 48 hours in a caffeine-fueled nonstop work frenzy... then why not just do that the weekend after it's assigned?

I know, I know. Easier said than done. But if you're leaving things to the last minute, sooner or later that broken ankle, that family emergency, that massive blizzard is going to catch up with you.

Many universities are understanding, but the professional world is far less so, especially if you're wanting to be a top performer. 

I went to London to go to a wedding. I stayed with Josef Wasinski. My good friend and oft-collaborator Kai Zau came; he was staying there.

The first night in town, we broke open the board game Puerto Rico. If you're never played, it's terrific fun: it's one of those games where you can enjoy it at all levels of the skill curve. It's got incredibly deep mechanics when you study them, but on the surface it's simple. You can play an enjoyable round the first time you play, and people of different skill levels can have a good game together.

Josef played, I played, two of Josef's roommates played -- Kai didn't play.

Kai was doing his consulting work.

He had something like five more days to get it done, but, no, he didn't play Puerto Rico with us. And to be clear, he quite likes the game and plays it quite well.

This memory stuck with me. It seemed alien to me. Why not play?

I asked Kai and he said, in his typical Kai-like way, "I wanted to get it done, and then I wouldn't have to worry about anything while I was in London."

See, by passing on the board game that he likes, Kai guarantees he can seize future opportunities and protects himself from downside. There's no way he'll let his long-term excellent client down. And actually, sure enough, three of those remaining five days became full-on days with long discussions and events and things, and Kai could partake fully without running himself into the ground.

This isn't how most people do things. Most people get their taxes in at the last minute, get their papers in at the last minute, choose immediate leisure and delay over completing work projects early... and they choose not to retreat their berserker back up the stairs.

Of course, attacking is more fun than retreating, and playing board games is often more fun than doing routine contracting work, but here's the thing: there's no deprivation there.

The biggest argument against this is deprivation. But it's false. Sooner or later, you'll need to heal your berserker. Clicking "Up" and then healing and going back "Down" just adds an up and a down; you've healed right away instead of waiting for the battle to end. Likewise, Kai got just as much leisure and socializing by getting his work done first.

No, really, I think letting yourself come into the grasp of luck is due to some mix of being cocky and lazy. "Oh, I can get away with it."

Many you can. Sometimes. Then you get killed when an emergency hits and you've got no time to fix it.

"You want to stay out of situations where very bad things can happen to you." 

I know that's obvious. But it takes some training to actually live it.

II 4. True Objectives

Being cocky and/or lazy can get you killed. That's true.

And yeah, it's dangerous to put yourself in the grasp of luck. When you burn your resources and flexibility, a bad event can sink you.

True enough. All true stuff. You should stop making those mistakes.

But let's dig a little deeper into decisionmaking. 

Decisionmaking is a funny thing.

Decisionmaking is like that acquaintance of your other friend that stops by during lunch, has a few things, and then "has to go" quickly and is gone. The check comes; who will pay it? "Oh, Jimmy didn't pay for his cornbread and hot chocolate... I guess we'll all have to throw in."

It's not so much that the $5.50 plus tax and tip to cover Jimmy's cornbread'n'chocolate is so offensive. It's not the end of the world, especially split a few ways by the remaining revelers.

The aggravating thing isn't that Jimmy does that, either. He's Jimmy; of course that's what he does. It's like being aggravated at the scorpion for being the scorpion.

And heck, you can't even really get aggravated at the kind-hearted person who invited Jimmy. They're a good person, probably. They offer to cover all of Jimmy's nonsense. ("He's my friend, after all." The remainder of the group nobly refuses this self-sacrifice.)

No, the person you get aggravated when Jimmy pulls his shenanigans is yourself, because how did this just happen?

You should have caught it. "Hey, Jimmy, throw some cash down."

But you didn't.

Decisionmaking is a lot like Jimmy. Fun and simple on the surface, seemingly easy to comprehend, but gone in a flash if you're not paying attention.

The topic of decisionmaking is elusively difficult to discuss. It's easy to come up with excellent actions and decisions when you're calm, composed, and far away from chaos. You get in the battle; poof, good judgment goes the way of Jimmy. And you're left holding the bill.

Much of everything generally teachable comes down to decisionmaking. You assess the landscape, think through options, make a decision, follow through on it.

This is trivially easy to discuss, but harder to follow through on.

Hardest of all is keeping one's true objective in mind.

Playing Tales of Maj'Eyal, I'd often feel a compulsion to kill every enemy and clear out every area. You got experience points for doing so, and you got items which might be useful or otherwise could be sold for money.

Many times I'd come across an enemy that was a bad matchup to fight -- one with nasty abilities that I had poor defenses against and not many options to use -- and yet I'd stupidly power on into the battle, ending with my guy getting killed.

It's hard to remember that there is very little utility in killing almost any enemy in TOME. There are a few that are required to be defeated by the storyline; sooner or later, you'll have to defeat them.

But with most, it's not so. You can go around them. You can retreat, get better gear to counter the threat, train and get stronger, and then come back later. 

Of course, we rarely do this. We get caught up in beating a particular enemy instead of winning the game.

--

TOME is enjoyable in that it's largely non-linear. Right away, you have access to about half the game world. You start at Level One in a starter dungeon, but you could get up and go to the very nasty Daikara Mountains immediately, if you were feeling suicidal.

Again, like most roguelikes, TOME has procedural generation. You get random elite enemies mixed in with the normal ones. Sometimes an area that's normally rather safe and harmless has something very nasty and dangerous in it. You could, of course, run and come back later. You should do that. You're under no compulsion to finish the area you're currently in, and there's usually no benefit to doing so.

But, how often do we forget to keep objectives in mind? Most of the time.

What's that expression? "When you're knee deep in alligators, it's easy to forget you wanted to clear the swamp" -- it's something like that.

The metaphor is apt for life, of course. How often do people get in stupid petty political battles at work that doesn't result in them building the company's success, doing work they're proud of, or advancing their career? Too often. How often does a couple in a relationship get into domestic strife for no good reason at all? Too often. How often do parents get battles of will with their children over trivialities, turning what could be a non-issue into a source of discord?

... too, too often.

We can easily lash out at things when we get upset, trying to take out our internal frustrations on the world.

This is rarely productive.

And of course, perfectionism is also failing to keep true objectives in mind.

So there you are, you're in the Kor'pul, and a tough unique vampire spawns who does heavy blight and darkness damage, has high speed, has spellcasting that renders mental effects that you have no way to clear off.

What should you do? Run, and forget about Kor'pul for about 10 levels. Clear out the forests, lakes, the random missions that spawn as you walk across the map. if you find blight resistance, darkness resistance, or wild infusions that heal mental effects, hold on to them. Then come back, well-equipped, and pound the vampire into the ground.

How often am I able to take my own advice here?

... not as often as I'd like. It's too easy to get fixated on clearing a dungeon or fighting with one enemy, and much harder to get one's mind fixed on the true objective -- winning.

II 5. No Heroism

"In war the victorious strategist only seeks battle after the victory has been won, whereas he who is destined to defeat first fights and afterwards looks for victory." -- Sun Tzu's Art of War

It is December. The year will end in three-and-half weeks.

I completed a yearlong consulting assignment working with the CEO of a small international technology company on the rise. We had a good year, the most notable effects being greatly increased revenues, greatly increased efficiency in the sales process by having tougher qualifying standards before pursuing a sale, and a massive reduction in the age of accounts receivable. 

He asked me about the parameters of working together again for another year, wanting to sign me to a one-year agreement.

This is flattering, and I very much like and admire him and his company, and we work well together. 

On the other hand, I intentionally try to limit my consulting hours to 20 per week at a maximum so that I can complete my nonprofit and creative work. As such, I'm regularly turning down assignments. I'm not in a hurry to sign new or repeat business, even from a fantastic client who is also a great guy.

The great irony of me intentionally limiting my hours and clients is that I don't make much less money, if at all. By being very selective and not particularly caring if I get any particular piece of work (I turn good assignments multiple times per year) -- ironically, due to that, I command much higher rates than I would if I wanted every assignment, where I'd have to bid more conservatively or be willing to take terms that have a lot more hassle in them. (I never take paid-on-completion and never guarantee a minimum set of hours or face-time; just focus on results. Both are life-changingly nice terms.)

Over the last year, I've done some good work, met a lot of people, and my general prestige and credibility has risen quite a lot. The client I worked with, he made a lot of money as a direct result of working with me, directly attributable. The time-savings (I net-eliminated more wasteful time than it took to work with me) and the improved cashflow and less defaults on receivables (was: somewhat high; now: low) -- this is just icing on the cake.

So, I could have asked for more money for this year. I did, in fact, ask for more money. But not a lot more.

No, the biggest thing I negotiated for was changing the format of our regular calls. We try to speak roughly weekly, for roughly an hour, so we wind up with something like 40-70 calls over the year.

On far too many of these calls, we would immediately open the call with what's on fire and that’s currently a serious problem.

For instance, very often, we'd have a situation like this:

*Broken prospect: This prospective client really wanted to buy three weeks ago, we got a proposal in slightly late, something went wrong and fubar on the followup, it got postponed once until yesterday, and then the meeting to discuss the proposal yesterday got pushed back "another two months, because things are so crazy right now."

However, we'd often simultaneously have a very good client who bought who is ending the first installment -- with no plan to take advantage of that for referrals, testimonials, case studies, and expanding our role in their organization.

Meanwhile, we'd also often have a brand new prospect who is very excited -- who is getting postponed while we fight fires.

While I wouldn't normally write quite like this -- this CEO and I have a very trusting and frank relationship -- this was actually a section in the proposal I wrote for 2015:

"Suggested Prioritization Shift During Calls

As per the last call, Marshall recommends that the majority of calls intentionally focus on mildly upstream opportunities that have the greatest chance to be won without heroic effort, followed by discussions on how to systematize/processize whatever actions we manually discovered as valuable.

Marshall would recommend that, on an hour call, we have a “hard stop” 30-40 minutes in at most, where we begin shifting to systems-building, procedures-writing, etc, to build up the Operations Manual of the company. (This will likely be painful at first, and require some adjustment.)

Marshall suggests intentionally consciously de-prioritizing low-percentage “stuff on fire” whenever there are high-percentage undamaged upstream opportunities, until those opportunities are complete and the lessons of them are externalized into business materials (for a staff member later to take over, or even for [CEO] to use just refreshing himself and continuing his own development)."

Please hone in on this line:

"...Marshall recommends that the majority of calls intentionally focus on mildly upstream opportunities that have the greatest chance to be won without heroic effort..."

Without heroic effort.

This is actually a surprisingly difficult thing to understand.

Due to human nature, we tend to spend more time on the wars and conflicts that are epic in scope and disastrous for one side. We spend much less time focusing on where ugly things could have happened, but were prevented.

Unsurprisingly, I think Roguelikes are a good teacher of this.

In Tales of Maj'Eyal, there's a variety of types of damage: fire, cold, acid, electricity, physical, arcane, temporal, psionic, blight, nature, etc.

In many regions, the most dangerous enemies all use one type of damage. In the standard map of the Daikara Mountains, for instance, there's frost giants that do heavy cold damage, and then a few enemies also have lightning attacks.

Physical damage you take almost everywhere and guard against it through armor, dodging, and hit points. But the remaining elements can be either trivial to handle or extremely dangerous depending on how well you prepared upstream.

By the time you're ready to go crash the Daikara Mountains, you've probably come across literally hundreds of items. If you keep some rings, an amulet, a helmet, and perhaps another piece of armor with cold resistance, you might be able to achieve 40% cold resist. 

If you've built your character with some generic resistances or found a weapon that's anti-cold, you might get to 70% resistance to cold.

When you do, you basically just waltz through Daikara. Actually, your biggest risk when you have great upstream defenses is that you get yourself killed by being lazy.

If you need to play it heroically and you're dropping down under 50% of your health more than once or twice in clearing a whole area, you're playing "heroically" -- and doing something drastically wrong. 

Sooner or later, you might find yourself forced to tackle a zone you're poorly equipped for. But the vast majority of the time, you want to accumulate the gear, resistances, and abilities to make walking through the area a breeze. If you're barely surviving "heroic" battles, you're not playing heroically -- you're playing stupidly. 

Sun Tzu can wrap this up: "What the ancients called a clever fighter is one who not only wins, but excels in winning with ease."

Section III.

III 1 Fixed Rules

I was having tea with a professor-friend of mine and on my way to play a round of Puerto Rico with some smart people an hour later.  It's a lovely board game; I invited him to play.

He gave this sort of professorial chuckle -- (yes, professors do this type of thing in their private lives, too) -- and declined.

I thought he would like Puerto Rico. It's a great game. And we had a really good crowd to play it.

But no, he made a joking remark along the lines of: "I try not to socialize in places where there's closed rules, even though it appeals more to nerds... board games and video games, they're ways to avoid unscripted parts of life. Regular people just go out dancing, nerds go to do very precise things like line dancing. I'd rather go to an art exhibit than play a board game."

Do note that I'm paraphrasing; it wasn’t said that harshly. The issue was this: a lot of the work of his life has been very un-spontaneous and scripted. He saw many friends and colleagues of his shy away and pull back from unscripted spontaneous interactions, and get gradually more uncomfortable with them, retreating to fixed and clear rules for how to interact in order to feel safer.

There is, in fairness, something of a point to that. He thinks the fixed ruleset of games is a disadvantage.

I would disagree. I would say,

Au contraire, mon ami. The limited ruleset is the point. 

Reality is unfathomably large. And paradoxically, as society resolves uncertainties and great mysteries, it becomes more impossible for an individual to truly understand the corpus of known knowledge. 

I study just about everything, and -- pardon me for the cliche -- the more I learn, the more I realize how little I know. 

Games offer something special, thus: they let you turn a magnifying glass on some small aspects of reality and explore those.

Gambling in Limit Hold'em with real money, the amounts that can be bet are precisely fixed by the rules; you know precisely how many cards will be dealt and when, you know precisely what hands beat the others. The game is almost purely about math, statistics, judgment, calmness and emotional management, and a little bit (but not so much) perception of other people's patterns and behaviors with some inductive reasoning.

In No'Limit Hold'em with real money, all of the above is true, except that now, anyone can bet or raise any amount of money at any time. Playing limit against players worse than you, it can basically be beaten purely mathematically. Understanding human psychology would help, but it's bonus, icing on the cake, and really just not necessary at all.

You change one rule -- from a fixed amount to bet to no fixed amount, and suddenly the money in front of you becomes a way to alter people's affinity and commitment to continuing to play. You might raise a large amount before any cards hit the board to try to get people out, or you might raise smaller to try to get lots of people in, depending on the situation.

The parameters of negotiation, cooperation, leadership out in the world are infinite and varied. If you sit down at the poker table to play Limit, you can start learning about math, decisionmaking, personal emotional management and self-control, perception, and reasoning. 

These skills all transfer to real life.

If you want greater complexity, you can add it in by the modification of a single rule regarding the betting. Suddenly, you're learning about human rationality, commitment and overcommitment, people acting strong or weak, understanding a range of outcomes that could happen, variance, table image, etc. The game gets much deeper.

If you go a step further and shift to a game like playing High/Low where the best and worst hands split the money, the mathematical complexity and decision trees get more difficult to do in real time. The starting hand values are incredibly different, and you need much more entrainment and exposure to how often there even will be a low hand in that round. It's obviously deducible from the rules, but counterintuitive the first time you do it.

Well, society has gradually come around on poker as being a valuable activity for mental training; this is not so controversial a viewpoint in 2014. "High prestige" games like Chess and Go are well-respected.

And of course, a great example of fixed rules to help understand reality is lionized for self-management, teamwork, training, keeping one's cool under pressure, etc: sports.

Games are next.

Puerto Rico or Magic: The Gathering or poker or Tales of Maj'Eyal or playing Morrowind on a self-enforced "Hardcore Mode" lets you explore the nature of reality, and then generalize that to spontaneous interactions.

It's not easy or automatic to do so, and perhaps most people won't bother trying to "level up" at being a better human through interactions with fixed rulesets. For my part, though, it's been one of the more shockingly valuable areas for mental development.

III 2. The Road to Balmora

The first great opportunity to get yourself killed in Morrowind is on the road from Seyda Neen to Balmora.

Like all games in the Elder Scrolls series, you start the game as a prisoner. In Morrowind, you're getting off a prison transport ship at the town of Seyda Neen. The guard commandant tells you to head to Balmora because there's important work for you, and he gives you a package of papers to give to your contact there.

The game is then largely unbounded. Sometimes games like Morrowind are called "sandbox" games because you can entirely ignore the plot and just go play around doing anything. The world doesn't have a set of linear levels: you can go where you want, do what you want, and play like you're in a sandbox.

Seyda Need has some safe basic versions of the things to do that you'll later do out in the world. A tax collector disappeared -- would you go look for him? There's a warehouse that's locked that's owned by the shipping company; if you can pick locks, you can make some early money if the guards don't see you committing that crime. There's a couple other little missions around town, and then most people will head for Balmora, the first real city you come across in the game.

You can take fast transport to Balmora for a few gold coins, or you can walk along a beautiful winding coastal road.

Most new players will take fast transport, but after you've played the game a few times, you'll probably walk. There's a few things to do along the road.

I had built one of those self-imposed challenge characters: the character would only use magic, not weapons. Weapons are generally stronger and more versatile than magic until very late in the game; the beginning is very difficult if you don't use weapons. And I decided on the, "one death and it's over" self-imposed-Hardcore-Mode thing.

So my weaponless mage jaunts around the little fishing village where the game starts, runs the little errands, buys equipment, explores, does more stuff, and is then walking to Balmora.

On the road, there's a guy just standing there. I talk to him. He demands to be paid 40 gold coins... or else.

I click the "No" option reflexively; in games like this, when someone threatens you or demands something, you generally just click "No" and fight them.

He takes out an ax.

He attacks.

It hits.

The blow is hard enough and my character is weak enough that he's knocked down to the ground by the first hit.

He hits once or twice more, and the character dies. True to form, I delete that save file, the first hour or two of setup gone.

Hardcore Mode.

In a normal playthrough, you'd have probably saved the game not long beforehand. If the bandit had dropped you, you'd just reload and play again. It wouldn't be a particularly big deal.

Now, if we dig a little deeper into what's going on, we'll note something so obvious that it might seem silly to write:

Being a "good person" or "bad person" had nothing to do with it.

The bandit, he has two options in dialog. They basically resolve to 

Option A: -40 gold.

Option B: Fight starts.

If you click Option B, and you're not strong enough, you die.

That's it. Period. Nothing else to the story.

In a game, you've got a limited and bounded ruleset. In real life, if someone gives you an ultimatum, you have practically an infinite number of replies, and the endgame probably won't be a melee if you chose the wrong option.

Real life is almost infinitely complex, but we could still navigate it pretty well if we wanted to see it clearly, understand what's happening and what's likely to happen, and choose options that support our life.

But so often, we don't do that. We're often more interested in editorializing or providing commentary than we are in engaging with reality well.

So you're out and about in your life, and someone takes a metaphorical ax out, and you say:

"They shouldn't have an ax."

"Axes shouldn't be used here."

"I'm just walking to the city; who are you? I don't want anything to do with you."

"It's wholly inappropriate to demand money from someone under threat of hitting them with an ax."

"If I hadn't started this dialog, I wouldn't be in this situation, which is stupid when you think about it, why is this even happening?"

And while you're feeling bad for yourself, an ax goes right into your skull. Ouch.

III 3 The Mechanics Know No Morality

Would it be too provocative to assert, "Time spent feeling bad for yourself is not time being spent well"?

This seems true, no? What ever got accomplished by people wallowing in self-pity? 

Here's the thing about self-pity, though: it's a sneaky beast.

It knows that most people won't let it in the front door, so it wants to come in through the back door, or the window, or the basement.

Take the all-too-often-heard complaint that people who politick well tend to get more authority, promotions, and resources than people who just put their heads down and work.

Here is my contention: you would do better by yourself if you looked to understand the mechanics, rather than editorializing or providing moral commentary.

In a video game, the mechanics are set by whoever did the computer programming.

An enemy attacks you. It goes like this:

*Take Enemy's (TOTAL_ATTACK_SCORE) + (RANDOM NUMBER FROM 1 to 20)... If this number exceeds (HERO'S_DEFENSE_SCORE), then the attack hits. 

You can't argue with this equation. There are only three things you can do: lower the enemy's attack ability somehow (cast a spell of blindness or weakness, maybe), increase your defense score (perhaps better armor), or put yourself in a position where you can't be attacked at all (shoot the enemy from a distance with a bow, cast a spell of paralysis, etc).

Forgive me if this is too obvious, but I think it would be completely and entirely futile to argue with the computer that this equation should be different while playing a round of the game.

Let's say you're a playing a round of the game at 5AM. An enemy hits you, taking your last life away; you die.

You run to the bedroom and wake your significant other.

"Get up! Get up!"

Groggily, your SO gets up."Uhh, what? Is everything okay?"

"No! No! Things aren't okay! Why the HELL did that goblin have such a high attack score? And how come I don't get TWO TIMES my defense score in the attack equation? It's ridiculous! It's outrageous!"

That seems absurd, no? Why argue with a video game?

No, most sane people, if they wanted to play the game well, would say, "Alright... next time I need to get the goblin's attack down, get my defense up, make it impossible for it to even get an attack on me, or make it so that if the attack hits it doesn't matter." Then you dive into the numbers and do better. 

Another controversial proposition, then: I think you'd be better served doing this in the real world, too.

Let's get back to that politicking example.

Perhaps the manager you report to has a mental function for who to promote that is something like this:

*Take all people who are (COMPETENT_ENOUGH). Select the three who have the (MOST_VISIBLE_RECENT_PERFORMANCE) over the last (THREE_MONTHS). Then select the one I (LIKE_BEST).

Maybe you this is outrageous. Heck, maybe it is outrageous -- maybe this equation should cause outrage.

But it seems mostly useless, to me, to argue with the equation.

"It shouldn't be like that! It should be 'Take HIGHEST_COMPETENCE.' And that's it! Nothing else!"

So you don't get promoted, despite being the most competent. Yeah, maybe it's stupid for people to overly bias the very recent performance instead of looking at long arcs. And then, promoting the finalist you like best indeed would indeed probably not be the way to select the most effective person.

I'm not disputing that; I wouldn't want anyone who works for me to use that equation to filter and promote people.

But that's not the point.

You can go play a different game. There's nothing mandating you work at a particular company, vocation, role, or for a certain manager.

But if you do, you really should try to deduce what the mechanics of the situation are, completely independently from your morality of what they should be.

Now, you might be able to get things to happen more like your moral standards -- but if you do, it's because you mechanically did it.

For instance, maybe goblins shouldn't attack people.

That's fine. If the game you're playing has a spell called "passivity" that stops people from attacking entirely, you could cast it. If the spell goes through, the goblin now presumably will abide by your standard, and be more passive as you walk through the forest.

Or perhaps there's a way to go meet the goblin chieftain, and become friends with all the goblins. Maybe that's in the game, or maybe it's not. If it's not in the game, it'd be dumb to curse and yell and wake people up complaining that it's not. But if it's in the game, sure, go do it. Go build peace and friendship with the goblins.

Or perhaps you say, "I don't care if the goblins want to be all crazyopathic for no reason; I'm just going to opt out" -- and so you cast invisibility or use stealth to try to get around the goblin without ever knowing you were there.

That, too, will be a mechanical process. If the goblin sees you trying to sneak by, it's going to attack -- that's what goblins do. But if your stealth succeeds, then you don't have to fight.

I think complaining that your manager is stupid -- a common refrain -- is really just self-pity sneaking in through the back door.

The boss does some stuff, by the boss's standards. The mechanics of the real world aren't as clean as video games, but there are mechanics. You can figure them out, and work to either have the success/failure checks go in your favor, or to not be in that same situation at all.

We must do this in games, if we want to win them. If we can learn this lesson from games and apply it to life, we get gains.

III 4. Deserve's Got Nothin' To Do With It

The scene pans slowly. Rain pours down on the frontier.

Coming into focus is "Greely's Bar" -- and on front of it, a middle-aged black man is laying dead in a coffin, beaten to death. A sign hangs from his neck,

"This Is What Happens to Assassins Around Here."

Raucous cheers come from inside Greely's. Cowboys, ranging from young green hands to tough grizzled vets, are getting a posse together under the Sheriff to hunt down the black man's partner, "William Muney from Missouri."

The Sheriff is being bombastic, rallying the crowd. Law and order are going to reign.

The rain pours down.

The crowd slowly gets quiet... someone's in the back of the bar, just walked in...

The voice calls out, a weathered and weather-beaten old hand, trenchcoat, the droplets of water falling off his black cowboy hat.

"Whose the fella that owns this shithole?"

Greely speaks up:

"I -- I'm Ned Greely. I own this establishment."

The weather-beaten cowboy slowly raises his double-barreled shotgun.

Bang.

Greely hits the ground.

The Sheriff speaks up. "That -- that was a hell of a cowardly thing! You just shot an unarmed man!"

Weather-beaten speaks up: "Well, he should have armed himself, if he wanted to decorate his bar with the body of my friend."

Weather-beaten is surrounded by over a dozen men, hostile and raucous and full of bravado until moments ago.

The Sheriff squints his eyes. "You're William Muney from Missouri."

"Yeah."

"You've killed women and children."

"Yeah."

The Sheriff turns to the crowd. "Alright boys, he's got a double barrel shotgun; he's got one round left. After he shoots me, shoot this dog down."

Of course, the Sheriff doesn't say anything about torturing Ned to death, the black man on the front of the bar. He doesn't mention his own sadistic sort of pride. Well, no, it's not necessary. Like the torrents and sheets of rain coming down outside, Sheriff and Muney are less so humans and more forces of nature. They don't justify themselves.

Muney trains the gun on the Sheriff.

Pulls the trigger.

Click.

Hmm?

Misfire.

"Misfire!" the Sheriff yells. "Get him!"

Muney throws the now-useless shotgun in Sheriff's direction, moves for cover, takes out his revolvers.

The gunfight is, of course, intense. A few of the cowboys get cut down; most run.

Eventually it comes down to Muney and Sheriff. As predicted.

Muney gets the drop on him, firing straighter. Sheriff is hit the gut and hits the ground, bleeding. Everyone else has run off.

Muney walks up to this man. Was he a good man? A bad man? He did bad things. He did good things. He's bleeding to death now.

Sheriff scowls up at Muney, then sighs.

"I don't deserve this... I just built a house..."

"Deserve's got nothin' to do with it."

Sheriff looks knowingly. He's not sad or defiant; more resigned.

"I'll see you in hell, William Muney."

"Yeah."

And the weather-beaten cowboy walks into the rain, walking alone; his oldest friend tortured to death; the bounty collected; striding back to his Midwestern farm to take care of his children, their mother having died of tuberculosis not so long ago.

III 5. Han Shot First

Unforgiven, with its plot with no good guys, just more and less experienced people, is probably the finest Western ever made.

We turn now to one of the greatest characters ever made in a science-fiction movie, from 1977, when we first get to meet Han Solo.

A bounty hunter gets the drop on him, tells Han to sit down.

Han quietly, slowly unbuckles his pistol from his boot… the tension builds, there’s no compromising… Han quietly levels his pistol and fires, bang, the bounty hunter dies badly.

Han does an apologetic smile as he walks out, flipping a little pouch of cash at the bartender.

"Sorry about the mess!"

This all changed in the re-released special edition in the 1990’s.

The gritty violence of the 1970’s aesthetic had faded, and Star Wars had gone from being an epic swashbuckling film set in space… to a multi-billion dollar franchise.

It’s all different now: Han gets ready with his blaster, fixes aim on the bounty hunter, but then... sits and waits.

The bounty hunter fires at point blank… and misses. Somehow. Then, and only then, Han fires back.

"Sorry about the mess."

Lame.

There have been many critiques of this change. Han Solo's arc in Star Wars, of course, is that he's a selfish criminal smuggler rogue who is aggravatingly charming and aggravatingly effective to more pure-minded heroes. 

In a tough galaxy a long time ago, Han was a survivor. You don't become a rich criminal in an authoritarian fascist empire without a heck of a lot of pragmatism.

But, no, the conventions of the 90’s were different from that of 70’s.

Good guys don't resort to violence unless it's fully over-justified. Violence is bad, kids. Look, Han had to shoot; maybe the bounty hunter would have hit with his second point blank shot if Han hadn't fired back; he couldn't have just been a pacifist.

The problem with the bounty hunter shooting first, though, isn't that it makes Han Solo's character arc less interesting (it does) or that it's doesn't make any sense with Han's backstory (it doesn't) or even that it makes such an iconic scene watered down and crummier (much crummier, in fact).

No, those aren't the largest problems.

The problem is that it teaches children exactly the wrong thing. 

Han knows he's dealing with one of his enemies. He's dealing with a bad person. A dangerous person with a gun that just alluded he's going to kill him. And Han lets this hostile killer get a free shot off that... luckily misses at point blank range.

It's stupid.

But this type of stupidity is everywhere. It's anti-Unforgiven.

"Deserve's got nothing to do with it" is maybe one of the most truthful lines in the history of American cinema. Muney doesn't say "this happened because you did a bad thing" -- no, it happened because Muney surprised the vigilante posse and then shot straighter.

Han didn't win because he's a good guy. He won because he shot first.

III 6. Protagonist’s Privilege

In almost all media, protagonists win by virtue of being protagonists.

It doesn't matter how stupidly they act. In fact, if they act stupidly out of a sincere genuine goodness, they become more likely to win.

Movies, television shows, books -- and yes, games -- all fall into this convention.

We want good to win. We'll pay $16.50 for a movie ticket to see the good guy win in IMAX 3D. We'll also buy some crummy popcorn doused with pseudo-butter for another $6.50 to enjoy while watching the protagonist win despite repeated brazen stupidity and actions that would be deemed completely incompetent if followed by a leader in real life.

I, for one, think that media greatly shapes culture, and that the views we subtly inherit from our media, entertainment, and mythos determine a heck of a lot about how people act.

The American mythos have some wonderful heroes and arcs in them; we invented so many new genres of art. We created Batman. All of this is amazing.

But "Protagonist's Privilege" is incredibly dangerous.

Protagonists win by virtue of being good people; not by virtue of preparation, training, planning, careful thinking, and excellent execution.

This, I contend, is one of the most valuable things you can beat out of yourself.

In a good roguelike, you don't get Protagonist's Privilege. You better shoot first. You better not let the dragon gets three rounds of attacks while you try to reason with it that you can all be friends. You better study the mechanics.

Games are moving more towards being un-lose-able. Everyone's a winner. How many times did you have to save and reload? Who cares. Look at the special effects.

Mark this down:

Deserve's got nothing to do with it.

Being a good person isn't enough.

The mechanics determine the outcome.

Han shot first.

Section IV.

IV 0. Math Warning

What the heck? “Math Warning?”

Yeah, math warning. Halfway through this section, and for the rest of the book, there’s a bit of math and logic that, if followed closely, might be useful to you and make you smarter.

But here’s the thing: you can skip it. If the math is killing you, skip ahead to the next chapter.

Some early readers loved the math and it’s their favorite part. Others felt overwhelmed. I’d challenge you to try to stay with the math since there’s nothing more advanced than algebra and it’s useful to start to think like this, but you can get 85% of the value of the book by skipping any sub-section with math if it’s getting you down.

IV 1. Will Perfect Play Win You the Game?

As you go downwards deeper into the dungeon in Nethack, the enemies get tougher. You should do so cautiously and judiciously, as you get stronger, and be careful to have escapes ready.

Your starting inventory in Nethack is somewhat randomized. For a class that starts with simple weapons and armor, like a knight, it's not a big deal. For a class that starts with magical items, rings, and potions like a wizard, it's a huge deal.

It's very possible to start a game and have an absolutely awful set of starting inventory, having almost nothing useful. The Nethack community generally has an ethos of trying to play these games; they call immediately killing off or fleeing with your guy and restarting "scumstarting" -- though it's a very common practice.

The idea behind not scumstarting is that you get much more versatile, become a better player, and the game becomes more interesting. If you'll only play a game if you get one of the top 3 or top 5 most useful of the possible magical items, you don't learn how to play well with less resources.

So okay, you fire up Nethack. Your random equipment... is awful. You decide to play it, and because your equipment is so awful, you go slowly and judiciously.

You go slowly, being careful with the monsters, looking for resources. You're not finding much of anything.

Then, two levels deep into the dungeon, you get a CLICK.

What's that?

You fall through a trapdoor... dropping you two entire floors lower, from Dungeon Level 3 to Dungeon Level 5.

You started the game with a pet that could protect you; the pet didn't come with you. You're on Level 5. You've got terrible equipment.

You start looking for the stairs to climb back upwards to safety.

Then, CLICK.

Another trapdoor. You fall down three floors to Level 8.

You take a deep breath. You don't really have many options except to, again, try to cautiously walk your way back.

And then -- yes, this does occasionally happen -- CLICK -- you're down on Level 11 now.

A pack of fast-moving, high-attack insects show up. You're dead. History.

That game was unwinnable, even with perfect play.

You could take a group of the best Nethack players in the world, and for the heck of it, throw in Chess grandmasters, game theory experts, top game designers and computer programmers, statisticians, whatever -- and analyze every single move you made in that brief game... and not a single one was a bad move. There were never better options than what you did. You achieved perfect play and yet, you still lost.

Many real-life games are like this. Two players can both do perfect play in a round of the board game Monopoly; if so, the dice will determine the winner.

In poker, you can have pocket aces preflop (the strongest hand) against absolute junk all-in, and you're still going to lose a small fraction of the time.

Poker players -- winning ones, anyways -- eventually learn to get philosophical about it, and start analyzing based on their Expected Value, or what they statistically would win on average if they played the same way every time.

But here is an illuminative question to put to someone who plays video games: do you think games should be designed so that if you play perfectly, you should be able to win every time?

The original Super Mario Bros is always beatable with perfect play. You can watch runs on Youtube of people getting the timing down perfectly and going through the entire game without even getting hit, let alone dying.

If a game has no random elements or emergent mechanics, and it's beatable, then it's always beatable with perfect play.

Life, perhaps, isn't.

You can make the best sales presentation ever, have a deal almost signed, and then an executive at the company you're pitching that you haven't interacted with takes a kickback bribe from another vendor, a worse company, and you don't get the order. You won't even know that's why it happened.

What's interesting is that this question about game design isn't quite a question of fairness, but it sometimes feels like one.

Most people want to know that if they play a game to a high skill level, they'll win. 

But as you get into real-world endeavors, two things start happening: first, you get complex variance that can't be predicted in advance. Second, you get opposition from other people who are also trying to win.

In this way, I think most games are bad training for life, but great games are great training for life. If you play a game like Mario Bros and memorize the patterns and get your reflexes sharp, you'll win every time. It'll be a comforting solace for you whenever you want to unwind; you can just fire it up, get Mario going, and start stomping goombas. You will win, so long as you don't get distracted, if you're good enough.

Not so in Nethack. No matter how good you are, the game will put you in almost unwinnable situations sometimes. Continuing to keep your composure and adapt, so that you sometimes survive those and go on to win, is useful. And frankly, so is keeping your composure and playing well when the roof does metaphorically cave-in on you, and defeat comes.

IV 2. In Praise of Radically Unbalanced Games

In a major commercial game with a multi-multi-million dollar budget, an intense amount of effort goes into creating all the textures, sound, mechanics, and production quality.

The older roguelikes are built on text characters and simple algorithms that 1980's computers could easily handle.

That made it easy for roguelikes to rapidly introduce different classes and weapons. The developers of these games, usually working as small volunteer efforts, could easily spin up something entirely weird and interesting to add depth to the game.

As such, these games were often radically unbalanced, and it didn't matter. Oftentimes there'd be a class like "Explorer" that got maybe a little bit of extra movement or money, but no notable offensive or defensive abilities.

You wouldn't want to play this type of character unless you were already quite skilled at the game, of course. But if you did -- and won with one -- it was far more impressive and satisfying.

Meanwhile, often there'd be clear "game-breaking" abilities and items. In Nethack, the wizard's first sacrifice artifact, Magicbane, was an insanely good weapon. It (basically) made you able to make yourself unattackable with melee attacks, and it defects/absorbs the nastiest curses in the game, and it boosts your core abilities.

A wizard with Magicbane has already almost won the game. Add a couple more of the best items, and it was over -- the late-game play for a wizard is actually pretty boring. Once you're set up, you just go win.

Nethack is ridiculously stupidly unbalanced. That's part of the joy of it. 

Of all its unbalanced points, probably the most unbalanced are "wishes" -- a wish is (typically) rare and hard to get, but probably the most valuable thing in the game. It can duplicate almost any other thing you'd want to happen.

Usually people use wishes to get the best bodyarmor, boots, helmet, gauntlets in the game, then fill out their repertoire with any elite spells they're missing, and extra amulets of life-saving.

Wishes are rare; you might not get one in a game. I think the average number you'd get in playing would be around two?

The first time I won, I got seven. Just... nice variance. It gave me a lot of defense and a lot of slack to compensate for stupid mistakes I made.

In Tales of Maj'eyal, probably the single biggest gamebreaking combination is the berserker ability "Unstoppable" + the elven ability "Timeless."

Unstoppable makes it so your health can't drop below 1; you can't die. It lasts a short while. Timeless gives you a huge boost to positive status effects.

An elven berserker can entirely ignore his health, health recovery, and all physical defenses and only load himself up with speed items, status defenses (against blinding, stun, etc), and then max out on damage.

That's huge. You can specialize an elven berserker and just ignore whole aspects of the game, becoming unkillable for quite a while.

It still requires skill to play, so you don't get yourself into a situation where you'll die right when Unstoppable wears off. But it's game-breaking, almost certainly the best combination in the game.

And you know what? That's fine. Elven berserkers that get past the early game have a very high win rate, and that's good. Other classes that don't have a gamebreaker win less... but that's a big part of the point. There's about a dozen lessons to take away from this.

IV 3. Paying the Inexperience Toll

The first time I invested in the stock market, I was, I think, 20 or 21 years old.

I opened a Roth IRA with Fidelity. I transferred some money in, maybe $3000.

Then I started thinking about what to buy.

I saw one mutual fund that had gone up a lot. If I remember correctly, it was FSEAX, Fidelity's Southeast Asia fund.

It had returned something like 30% per year for the last few years. That's pretty good, I thought! It said it was "Southeast Asia" but there was actually a lot of Chinese stocks owned. Supposedly, that region was going to keep growing like crazy.

So I bought it.

It promptly lost half of its value.

I held on to it for around five years, by which time it had crept back to slightly below where it started... I don't know the full numbers, but maybe I made a -5% over 5 years, something abysmal like that.

And you know what?

I don't regret it, not for a single minute.

My line of thinking goes like this: it was very, very likely my first investment into the stock market was going to be stupid. I thought I was smarter than everyone else and wanted to learn how to invest more actively than just buying an index fund of the whole stock market regularly (which still wasn't quite common wisdom in the mid-2000's anyways).

I'm actually very glad that my first investment went poorly, and thus, I was humbled -- with a relatively small amount of money. As the old expression goes, "The worst thing that can happen when you go to Vegas is that you win."

It's natural to overrate oneself for long stretches of time; most people do this, not just smart and analytical people. It's too easy to assume that having generally good intelligence, learning, and mental models will transfer rapidly even though you don't have knowledge of the specific domain you're going into.

On the one hand, it's true: mathematics applies everywhere. Humans are human everywhere, with all the good and bad that entails. There's broad commonalities between all sorts of unrelated disciplines.

What that means is, as you get smarter and wiser, you become able to pick up new fields faster. But I think part of that wisdom has to include that you're going to be dumb and inexperienced when you first enter a new foray -- call it "paying the inexperience toll."

In any complex multi-variable domain, especially one with heavy variance or randomness, inexperience gets in the way of doing well.

Roguelikes or other games on "Hardcode Mode" are wonderful at training in this, because they're just the right feeling of "sort of high-stakes" without actually having anything at stake.

When you get into a new game that has long technology trees or specializations, you won't know which ones actually pay off well. You can start thinking about it and make some guesses, but you don't really know what enemies are dangerous, whether the early-game, mid-game, or end-game are the hard parts, and so on.

Sometimes the "super awesome ability" that you can work towards will only become available after you're already so strong that it doesn't make a difference, whereas a modestly faster recovery rate might save your life a couple times.

In real life, if you're getting into a new domain, it's highly recommended you do "Key Decision Analysis" -- meaning, you write down your reasoning and predictions for what you're doing. It forces you to clarify your thoughts.

My mutual fund blunder might have looked like this: "It's been going up, and I think it'll keep going up. The region is good. Uhh, looks good to me!"

(Actually, I don't recall my full reasoning, aside from knowing it was rather shoddy.)

Likewise, I've consistently found myself surprised by what abilities in games are good. The most recent game I got into -- the one that kicked off my writing this work -- was Tales of Maj'Eyal. The first few builds I tried to construct on my own were uncohesive and focused on abilities that didn't scale well at all, leading to a very weak character going into the difficult early-midgame.

Noting that down -- noting down that my naive intuition was unable to spot what combinations of abilities would be powerful together -- this is a valuable lesson in humility on getting into new domains, and a reminder to look for the hidden patterns in things.

IV 4. Gamebreakers, part one: The Enchanter’s Magic Pocket

Dropbox landed like a Category 6 hurricane.

One day, it didn't exist, and all sync and all large-file-transfer software was a disaster.

Then, it was everywhere, on just about all tech-savvy people's computers, and the founders had a net worth in the billions of dollars.

Dropbox's magic wasn't particularly exotic. It got five things right:

1. The product was easy and pleasurable to use. It worked right away.
2. The product worked well for a single person to backup files or transfer them between computers.
3. The product worked well for sharing files between people.
4. The product was very useful for sharing and transferring files between friends, colleagues, and clients.
5. And the gamebreaker -- sending an invite to a friend gave you extra space in your Dropbox in a way that was incredibly pleasurable and addictive to do.

If the company Dropbox was a character in a video game, it'd be an enchanter. This wizard had just three spells:

*Magic Pocket: Creates a rift in the fabric of the universe, allowing things to be stored in there and pulled out in different places.

*Spacetime Duplication: Duplicate an item from your magic pocket into a friend or ally's pocket.

*Fanaticize Pocketholder: Take a person who has a magic pocket and turn them into almost a religion fanatic whose whole reason for existence is creating more magic pockets out in the world.

That's it -- Dropbox worked well for one person, worked well to share between people, and Dropbox got people who downloaded it to spread it like crazy.

It was gamebreaking. It was worth billions of dollars. And it made a lot of people's lives much, much easier. (It's merely convenient for a person who doesn't have a very digital life, but it's game-breakingly useful for photographers, videographers, illustrators, designers, etc.)

You can actually reduce all these complicated parameters to just a single number, the "viral coefficient."

If you're making software, the number of people each person shares it with is the viral coefficient.

If Alfred, Bob, Candy, Denise, Edward, Francesca, Gary, and Helen all download a piece of software, and share only Denise recommends it to one other friend who downloads it, then its viral coefficient is 1/8th, or 12.5%.

That might actually not be a bad rate, depending on the industry. 12.5% growth strictly from word of mouth could be pretty good.

On the other hand, if Alfred signs up 3 of his friends, Denise signs up one, and the rest don't sign up any, then they're at 4 referrals from 8 people, a 50% viral coefficient. Obviously, that's better.

Now, there's a magic number -- 1.

If, on average, every person who joins signs up one other person, then you have infinite growth (until you reach the "carrying capacity" of the market you're in).

Facebook achieved that radically fast growth by trawling your email address book once you joined. It was gamebreaking; Facebook went on to be worth billions of dollars.

Eventually, this pathway to getting users for software largely got closed up -- email providers stopped people from doing it, outlawing it in their terms of service, rapidly dumping services that do this into spam, etc.

Dropbox came after the Facebook-email-inbox-wave. It actually got you wanting to recommend the service individually to people you knew. 

Gamebreaking. Billions.

Most gamebreakers are actually pretty simple in retrospect. Tales of Maj'eyal's Unstoppable+Timeless combination is pretty easy to see: you load up on speed, make yourself unkillable, and then double the duration of your fast/unkillable statuses.

Yet, so often there's opportunities to grab money, prestige, fun just sitting around in plain site, and people don't grab it. One of the reasons we'll study gamebreakers in video games is because we want to grab gamebreakers in real life.

So let's start with the question -- why do people miss huge advantages that are so, so obvious in retrospect?

IV 5 Gamebreakers part two

The standard four-character party in a fantasy game tends to look like Fighter, Wizard, Cleric, Rogue.

Micropose's Darklands, that great masterpiece from 1992, turned some fantasy conventions on its head. Instead of being based on Tolkien's fantasy conventions, or the Dungeons and Dragons-type themes that were somewhat inspired by Tolkien, it came at it from a different angle.

It took all the superstitions, prejudices, and beliefs held in the Holy Roman Empire, and just said -- poof, they're all real. 

They set this against a historical background: the German Fugger Bankers, the Medici from Italy, and the Hanseatic League have offices in most cities. There's foreign traders, arms merchants, doctors. Every city has at least a small church; cathedrals tower over the greatest cities. There's various local rulers and garrisons, you can travel by water, and the countryside is littered with bandits and raubritters -- "robber knights" -- have their strongholders with which they harass shipping and commit their various crimes.

The supernatural takes something of a backseat to the historical at first, but as you explore deeper, you find that gargoyles are often alive, witches' covens worship the devil and commit atrocities from dark powers, the Knights Templar is the corrupted version that worships Satan and follows debauched rituals... rarely, demons are summoned. Dragons occasionally ravage the countryside. Mines are sometimes haunted.

The game is brutally difficult. Blizzards hit; they'll kill you. Floods hit; they'll kill you. Passing clerics and bishops demand tithes of you; if you don't pay, they'll send their (rather tough) guards to kill you. If you should happen to kill the bishop's guards, you'll lose reputation in the eyes of nearby cities. It's kind of one of those can't-win type things, when a bishop tries to extort you.

It's incredibly easy to get yourself killed in Darklands. The game is just stupidly ridiculously punishing and unforgiving if you don't know what you're doing, and maybe barely survivable if you do know what you're doing. 

So you need all the firepower you can get.

Thankfully, it's not just the negative arcane and supernatural that lives in this world: alchemy is real, and you can brew powerful potions.

Likewise, you can appeal to saints for epic miracles. If your virtue, knowledge of religion, and divine favor are high enough, saints can shelter you from natural disasters, banish satanic enemies, or just make you really tough in combat.

(When you play the game, you wind up getting not just a knowledge of Medieval Germany, but also of the history and doctrine of the Catholic Church: every saint has a bio that explains when they lived, why they were canonized, and what miracles they can perform if you appeal to them.)

Your bread and butter in the game will be melee combat. It's nice to soften up enemies with a round of projectiles, but they'll almost always close for combat in significant fights. Throwing an explosive potion does even more to even the odds, but you only get good alchemy going late in the game: the ingredients are very expensive and alchemy is very dangerous when you're not good at it. (You can burn entire small villages down if you make a small accident; if you create an explosion in a major city, you'll be arrested and potentially sentenced to death if you can't pay the substantial fine... you can try to break out of jail through a variety of means or appeal for a pardon before they finally get around to executing you, though. Sometimes it works, but not usually -- again, the game is rather punishing.)

So, in Darklands, you don't have these traditional classes: fighter, cleric, wizard, rogue.

But the default party vaguely approximates it: your default leader is charismatic and nimble (rogue), next in line is a burly and useless-at-everything-but-combat guy (fighter), then you've got a religious prayer-caller (cleric), and an alchemist (wizard).

The majority of people who play Darklands will either play with the default party, or will create one that looks vaguely like it. You'll have your religious prayercaller character, you'll have your smart-but-weak alchemist, etc.

But here's the thing: Darklands doesn't have classes. It just has skills.

In other words, it's possible to build a party where everyone can call saints. You get much more effective -- close to devastatingly effective -- if you can set it up.

It's easy to just assume that most of your party won't be able to use religion, because that's how it's set up in most games.

Darklands has a highly in-depth character creation where you go through each character and choose what professions they were in their life, assign stats and skills, etc.

When you choose these "professions" in Darklands, it feels a lot like choosing a character's "class" in other games.

But it is not so.

The only lasting thing professions do is alter the mix of statistics and skills.

As such, one very viable way of playing the game is to ensure that every character, no matter their profession, takes an early profession in novice monk before going on to their future career... it means they'll have some nascent religion ability.

Furthermore, the party alchemist has only two duties: get better at alchemy skill, and make potions.

Once the potions are made, anyone can use them. So, as powerful as alchemy is, it's really not worth ultra-specializing someone in it... most people do, as a default, just because it seems like a thing to do.

But in a party where everyone has religious ability, it's not necessary. You can make a charismatic leader that can also do alchemy. Your alchemy won't be good for a while longer, but given that many saints can boost alchemy and intelligence, you can consolidate two roles into one. 

"Everyone can use religion well" is a gamebreaker in Darklands.

It's also incredibly unintuitive.

Our very conception of the game mechanics, playing ability, and traditional roles in video games mean you don't expect someone to have excellent stealth, wield a broadsword, and be able to use cleric's magic.

And yet, there it is. It's very possible. It doesn't even occur to most players to try unless they play the game a fairly large amount and then really think deeply about the mechanics.

IV 6 Gamebreakers part 3

Okay. You're going to go fight an ice dragon. It doesn't matter what game.

The ice dragon has exactly one attack: breath of ice.

Breath of ice does exactly 40 damage, and it's all ice damage. The dragon has no other attacks. There's no other significant enemies near the dragon.

Before you go, you get a choice: you can get 5% resistance to ice, or you could 100 extra health points.

Now, mathematically inclined people might go like this: "Okay, every attack does 40 ice damage? 5% less means taking 2 less damage per attack..."

That's correct, yes.

The break-even point, then, is turn 50. If the fight lasts such that the dragon attacks you more than 50 times, you'll save more life by choosing the ice resistance than the extra health.

On a quick look, the extra health looks pretty good. It'll let you survive two full additional attacks right away, where the ice resistance won't help you survive until at least 20 rounds in.

But, if we're looking for gamebreaking power, we need to ask some more questions before we decide.

Let's try this one first: what was your ice resistance beforehand?

Because... on the off chance you had 95% ice resistance, that last 5% crosses a threshold -- you become 100% immune to ice.

"100% immunity" is a very special threshold in a game; it means you can entirely ignore it as a factor. As soon as you can't take ice damage, ice damage becomes irrelevant. You can jaunt up to the dragon and leisurely tickle it to death if you want; it can't hurt you.

But let's say you're not at 95% immunity. The next questions to ask are, "Will this choice swing the battle one way or the other?"

Again, if we're playing a roguelike, if you lose, you die. So winning the next battle matters.

But if you're totally good to go in this coming battle regardless of which powerup you take, then you can start thinking long-term.

After that, how much does ice damage factor into the game, and how much is 100 health worth?

100 health sounds like a lot, but what if by the end of the game your health total was in the tens of thousands? That 100 might not mean anything.

Meanwhile, if there's late-game tough enemies who do 4000+ damage ice attacks, that 5% ice resistance might add up to lots of life saved.

This gets to three fundamental points: people consistently underestimate exponential gains, consistently overrate linear gains, and consistently forget to consider thresholds. 

IV 7 Gamebreakers part 4

Thresholds are everywhere. Most people don't see them.

The simplest application of threshold thinking to everyday life is whether your income is higher or lower than your expenses.

In a big picture sense, if your expenses are higher than your income, it almost doesn't matter how much in the red you are -- the endgame, if nothing changes, is bankruptcy.

A consistent slight shortfall, compounded over time, heads towards infinity.

All over the world are hidden numbers and parameters that can be derived by careful thought.

For instance, no video game that I know of has anything like a "stuff you're most vulnerable to" measurement.

For instance, let's say there's a variety of status effects in game. We'll use Tales of Maj'eyal as an example.

Sample status effects:

*Stun

*Pinned

*Other physical effects

*Confusion

*Cursed

*Frozen



Then there how the status effects were generated:

*Physical

*Arcane

*Elemental

*Poison

Etc.

Finally, there's different ways damage comes at you:

*Ranged physical damage (archer, etc)

*Standard melee physical damage (enemy fighter)

*Getting critically hit (large damage multiplier on either of the above two)

Etc.

If you have 100% immunity to stun, you can stop thinking about stun. An enemy that has a powerful ability to stun you every single turn, but doesn't do much else, is no longer dangerous.

At 100% stun immunity, that's true. At 90% stun immunity, that's not true and that enemy is still dangerous. Even if you have two healing runes to cure two stun effects, there's still a 10%*10%*10% chance of getting stunned three times in a row, or a 1 in 1000 chance. "Ah, 1 in 1000? Who cares?" But in TOME, you're going to fight a couple thousand battles to beat the game. If three stuns in a row will kill you, and you take that .1% chance of three stuns in a row "because it's unlikely," then you're relying on luck to get through things alive. Meanwhile, if you can bump that anti-stun percentage up to 100%, you can literally just ignore stun for the rest of the game -- as a bonus, you can use those rune slots to do something else.

You can do these same analyses for the most common types of situations in games: maybe it's basically impossible to kill your character unless they get both cursed and hit with a high volume of arcane damage.

Thus, what should you be doing? You should start stockpiling resistance to arcane damage, curse removal items and abilities, and ways to disrupt spellcasters.

It’s too easy to not think about these things.

If you already can do a huge amount of melee damage, it’s tempting to keep choosing abilities and items to ramp up melee damage higher and higher, simply because it’s exciting.

That works great until you come across a wizard with a bone shield that absorbs the first five attacks they make -- who can case curse, and then nuke you.

Threshold thinking would prevent this: you'd say, "Okay, I have enough melee ability to basically kill anything at this point... I'm never going to die because I lose a slugfest. I'm still vulnerable to curse and arcane damage though. How to deal with that?"

This pattern plays out in real life. Consider how many high earners focus more and more and repeatedly double down on earning power, but never get their expenses under control and never translate the income to net worth.

If you're making $220,000 per year and you're spending $219,900 per year, earning more money probably isn't going to solve this issue. You're incredibly vulnerable. If -- when -- your income slides a bit, you're going to be in a world of hurt.

But it’s natural to work on things you're good at, and it’s generally painful and unpleasant to examine one’s weaknesses and vulnerabilities.

More on this in a moment. But first let's look at the seductiveness of linear games.

IV 6. Gamebreakers, part five: The Seductiveness of Linear Gains

In Tales of Maj'eyal, on Normal difficulty, a human berserker will start with 132 health and a health regeneration rate of .25 per turn.

That means, every fourth turn, you'll gain 1 health back. A pretty slow rate of recovery.

Berserkers have an ability that can be trained, "Fast Metabolism," that increases their healing rate by 3.4 health per turn for the first point you put into it.

When you first fire up the game, that looks pretty good. If a fight lasts 20 rounds, it's effectively like having 85 higher health. 

Here is the problem: it's a linear increase in health.

Later in the game, your health will be quite a bit north of 1000; a winning character might have around 1300 health at the end of the game.

That 3.4 health per turn is really rather trivial at that point.

It gets worse, actually. The two best builds for berserkers are the Timeless/Unstoppable berserker, where health literally ceases to matter as you go into an unkillable frenzy, and the Antimagic Berserker, who gets huge multiplicative synergy health bonuses that the +3.4 normal healing becomes a straight rounding error to. An Antimagic Berserker is going to have a healing rate that's something like +50 to +200 per turn, every turn, or even more.

Ivan Mazour, the talented mathematician, investor, and entrepreneur, wrote on New Year's Day 2014: "If instead of buying the first iPod you bought Apple shares, you’d have $26,000 dollars right now. Opportunities like that exist all the time, and we just need to find them."

It's easy and nearly automatic to get attracted to linear gains. If you're at the start of the game and you do 5 damage per turn, and you're offered the choice between "+5 damage per turn" or "+10% damage per turn," the easy thing to do is this: "Hey, if I choose +10% damage, I'll do 5.5 damage. If I choose +5 damage, I'll do 10 damage. No brainer, I'm taking the +5!"

This is usually a sucker's bet.

If your damage ever climbs over 50 per turn (in most games, it will), that's the breakeven point for +5 damage or +10% damage. If your damage per turn gets up to 500 per turn, then the person who chose the +5 gets less than a tenth of the long-term gains. If your damage reaches 2000 per turn...

This is exceedingly difficult to do in real life. Faced with the choice of drinking 30 Starbucks coffees or buying 1 share of Starbucks stock, most people will take the coffees.

Likewise, most people would buy a new $20,000 car for the "cool factor" and "comfort" instead of buying a used $7,000 car and investing the $13,000. Five years later, what difference did the "cool factor" make?

Investing vs consuming is an obvious place to have the discussion, because most consumption gives linear and immediate gains (pleasure, right now) that become obsoleted or irrelevant over time, whereas smart investments grow, multiply, and keep making your life better.

But that can get somewhat preachy, so let's instead look at developing your own personal skills and abilities.

IV 7. Gamebreakers, part five: Combinations and Cohesion

Certain skills and abilities multiply and combine with other skills and abilities highly effectively. Others do not. Whenever possible, you want to take skills and abilities that give you multiplicative gains that help with many important things over linear gains that get obsoleted and become irrelevant later.

For instance, let's say we're playing a video game called "Life Simulation" and there's just two categories you get points in: Professional Points and Leisure Points.

Let’s let the math do the talking. There's two gentlemen who are taking the exact same professional points skill tree in, say, "Accounting."

One of them makes his chief leisure activity snowboarding; the other makes his chief leisure activity public speaking.

The first accountant has a great time snowboarding, becomes an excellent snowboarder, really loves the beauty and majesty of the mountains. I personally snowboard. I've been in the Austrian Alps and in Hokkaido, Japan. It's really amazing and awe-inspiring and a wonderful way to recharge. 

Meanwhile, the other accountant goes to Toastmasters, buys books and tapes on speaking better, practices speeches, and so on.

The snowboarding accountant more-or-less doesn't get any combination value. Training and honing his ability in snowboarding doesn't make him better at accounting (beyond the fact that mastery in anything is good for mastery at everything, and recharging is always valuable).

Meanwhile, public speaking combos decently well -- as you become more effective as an accountant, opening your own accounting practice or making partner at one of the big accounting firms will start becoming more about communication and the ability to reach people than it is purely about understanding and methodically applying generally accepted accounting principles.

What combos well and what doesn't depends a lot on what field you're in. Motorcycle maintenance or flying an aircraft probably combos better for an engineer than someone doing public relations. I took up the study of poetry recently; it combos reasonably well with writing. A graphic designer is going to get better combo ability out of art history than a first lieutenant in the army.

You don’t have to maximize on everything, but it’s inarguable that if your leisure activities also advance you professionally, then your leisure activities also advance you professionally.

It's a tautology. It's obviously true. There's many caveats and exceptions, but -- just like the cold hard math of video games with their clearly defined rules -- when the "points" you put into leisure make you better professionally, you get synergy and combo value, that's probably a good thing.

The only issue: it's sometimes hard to predict what will combo well.

Steve Jobs is probably the best example. In his 2005 commencement address at Stanford University, he discussed how a seemingly impractical indulgence earlier in his life made a big difference later:

"Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn't have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can't capture, and I found it fascinating.

"None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, it's likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later."

This is where video games diverge from real life. In a game, if you could look at all the code and knew all the areas and challenges that could arise, you could map out perfectly what skills and abilities your character should take to maximize your chances of doing well.

In real life, the boundaries aren't so clear. But at the same time, completely neglecting practical applications seems wasteful. Someone who understands finance, financial statements, and mathematics to a high degree would likely make a better investor in equities; someone who has knowledge of construction, mechanics, interior decoration, and so on would have an easier time improving a property and making higher returns as a landlord. Entirely neglecting that there's cross-training bonuses in leisure, professional life, social life, relationships, investing, and so on -- this seems wasteful. Math doesn't lie.

But, yet, doing things that seem impractical and filling out one's skillset is really not so terrible of an idea. Even in Jobs's case, though, we can note a few things: Reed College offered perhaps the best calligraphy in the country at the time -- learning from the best, at anything, is worth something. Then, the level of sheer fascination Jobs had with it meant that he was able to make huge gains there... obviously anything you're highly engaged with will have higher payoffs than a seemingly-rational choice that you can't stomach and put no effort into.

There's endless ways to specialize and focus in life. This hyper-pragmatism is unfashionable right now in American culture; nevertheless, if your activities and social circles and profession and leisure all support each other well, it will be easier to make big things happen in your life.

IV 8. Gamebreakers, part seven: Linear and Multiplicative gains

Let's look at linear and multiplicative gains.

You're playing a video game.

Every level, you get 10 health points.

So at Level 1, you've got 10 health. Level 2, 20 health. Level 3, 30 health. Simple, right?

You also get to choose a poweup at the start of the game: You can get a “Health Addition” of +10 extra health per level, or you can get a “Health Multiplier” of +10% health bonus calculated after all the addition.

Which is better?

Let’s see…

Level 1:

Addition: 10 + 10 = 20 health

Multiplier: 10 * 110% = 11 health

You get that, right? The +10% multiplier means you get... 1 extra health. Instead of 10.

Okay, let's look at…

Level 2:

Addition: 20 + 20 = 40 health

Multiplier: 20 * 120% = 24 health

Hmm. The gap is even bigger. Before, the Adder has 9 more health; now he has 16 more health. You'd be a fool to take the Multiplier, right?

Level 3:
Addition: 30 + 30 = 60

Multiplier: 30 * 1.3 = 39

It's getting worse. Now the Adder has 21 more health. It's getting bigger each turn.

Wait, or is it?

The Adder got +10 health at Level 1... and +10 health at Level 2... and +10 health at Level 3...

The Multiplier got +1 health at Level 1... and +3 health at Level 2... and +5 health at Level 3...

Let's look at the whole scene.

Level: 4

Addition: 40 + 40 = 80
 health
Multiplier: 40 * 1.4 = 56 health

Level: 5

Addition: 50 + 50 = 100
 health
Multiplier: 50 * 150% = 75 health

Level: 6

Addition: 60 + 60 = 120
 health
Multiplier: 60 * 160% = 96 health

Level: 7

Addition: 70 + 70 = 140
 health
Multiplier: 70 * 170% = 119 health

Level: 8

Addition: 80 + 80 = 160 health

Multiplier: 80 * 180% = 144 health

Level: 9

Addition: 90 + 90 = 180 health

Multiplier: 90 * 190% = 171 health

What’s going to happen at Level 10? We already know…

Level: 10

Addition: 100 + 100 = 200
 health
Multiplier: 100 * 200% = 200 health

So, okay, Multiplier looks stupid from Level 1 to Level 9. He just straight has less health, if you look at that as the final output. And health is good; we want health.

But at Level 10, it evens out. What happens next?

Level: 11

Addition: 110 + 110 = 220 health

Multiplier: 110 * 210% = 231 health

The trend is going to get worse for Adder…

Level: 12

Addition: 120 + 120 = 240
 health
Multiplier: 120 * 220% = 264 health

Level: 13

Addition: 130 + 130 = 260
 health
Multiplier: 130 * 230% = 299 health

Level: 14

Addition: 140 + 140 = 280 health

Multiplier: 140 * 240% = 336 health

Level: 15

Addition: 150 + 150 = 300 health

Multiplier: 150 * 250% = 375 health

It’s, of course, going to keep growing.

Level: 20

Addition: 200 + 200 = 400
 health
Multiplier: 200 * 300% = 600 health

Level: 30

Addition: 300 + 300 = 600
 health
Multiplier: 300 * 400% = 1200 health

Level: 40

Addition: 400 + 400 = 800
 health
Multiplier: 400 * 500% = 2000 health

Level: 50

Addition: 500 + 500 = 1000
 health
Multiplier: 500 * 600% = 3000 health

I promise this isn’t mathematical trickery. It’s counterintuitive; yes. But these aren’t some odd set of numbers that could never happen in real life. If anything, getting +10% long-term multipliers is easier than getting straight addition.

But let’s keep talking about games.

Imagine if in this game, the best helmet is a Helm of Foresight. The Helm of Foresight doubles your health multiplier.

Remember, that the Adder gets a de facto 100%; he invested in raw linear health, not in multiplicative health.

Level: 20 (with Helm of Foresight)

Addition: (200 + 200) * 200% = 800
 health
Multiplier: 200 * 600% = 1200 health

Level: 30 (with Helm of Foresight)

Addition: (300 + 300) * 200% = 1200
 health
Multiplier: 300 * 800% = 2400 health

Level: 40 (with Helm of Foresight)

Addition: (400 + 400) * 200% = 1600 health 

Multiplier: 400 * 1000% = 4000 health

Level: 50 (with Helm of Foresight)

Addition: (500 + 500) * 200% = 2000
 health
Multiplier: 500 * 1200% = 6000 health

You know what’s terrible? It gets worse. There’s inevitably more combos available.

Let’s say there’s an ability where you take half your maximum health in damage to deal 10 times your maximum health in unblockable damage to one enemy, Let’s say that ability is called “Blood Wrath” damage.

Level: 20 (with Helm of Foresight)

Addition: (200 + 200) * 200% = 800 health | Damage from Blood Wrath: 4,000

Multiplier: 200 * 600% = 1200 health | Damage from Blood Wrath: 6,000

Level: 30 (with Helm of Foresight)

Addition: (300 + 300) * 200% = 1200 health | Damage from Blood Wrath: 6,000

Multiplier: 300 * 800% = 2400 health | Damage from Blood Wrath: 12,000

Level: 40 (with Helm of Foresight)

Addition: (400 + 400) * 200% = 1600 health | Damage from Blood Wrath: 8,000

Multiplier: 400 * 1000% = 4000 health | Damage from Blood Wrath: 16,000

Level: 50 (with Helm of Foresight)

Addition: (500 + 500) * 200% = 2000 health | Damage from Blood Wrath: 10,000

Multiplier: 500 * 1200% = 6000 health | Damage from Blood Wrath: 30,000

Remember we mentioned thresholds earlier?

Let’s say there’s a boss with 20,000 life that does 1200 damage and casts a bunch of nasty curses and status effects on turn 1… The Level 50 Addition-user can’t use Blood Wrath to open the fight without dying.

(2000 - 1000 - 1200 = dead)

Meanwhile, the Level 50 Multiplier can take

(6000 - 3000 - 1200 = 1800 life remaining)

… and the boss dies on turn 1. Fight over. Don’t need to run a difficult battle.

As such, The Multiplier is perfectly safe and can kill the boss in one hit on turn 1 with no hassle at all. The Adder can’t use his highest damage ability, because he’d die if he uses it, and needs to open the fight with something much weaker and go through a difficult perilous combat.

Multiplication isn’t always better than addition; it’s of course situational. If the highest level in the game is Level 10 and there’s no Helm of Foresight or other combination, then the Adder would be ahead until the very end, and the Multiplier would only even out at the highest level.

But generally speaking, we have all sorts of choices that multiply and combo, or we can take short term gains that become irrelevant over time. This is true in games and real life.

IV 9. Gamebreakers part eight: linear and multiplicative in real life

The advantage of games in this regard is that we can actually calculate out the math and decision trees. Life isn’t so simple or precise.

But these principles hold remarkably well in sales, negotiations, credibility, cooperation, team-building, communications, project planning, contingency planning, quality control… it’s actually shocking how many multiplicative gains are out in the world.

Let’s say there’s a salesman who is required to do five hours of face-to-face sales meetings per day.

Each sales meeting, giving the presentation and answering questions, it takes exactly an hour.

He’s going to work exactly 8 hours per day, and he can spend the last 3 hours however he wants.

How should he spend those three hours?

Good question.

Okay, let’s look at his weekly performance. He works five days per week. Right now, he’s got —

Week 1: 25 prospect meetings (25 hours spent), 15 discretionary hours

If we add his numbers cumulatively, we’d have —

Week 2: 50 prospect meetings (50 hours spent), 30 discretionary hours

Week 3: 75 prospect meetings (75 hours spent), 45 discretionary hours

Week 4: 100 prospect meetings (100 hours spent), 60 discretionary hours

This is all pretty straightforward, right?

Now, let’s say his closing rate is 10% to start. Right now, he closes 1 out of 10 prospects he meetings. Thus, his average sales will look like this —

Week 1: 25 prospect meetings (25 hours spent), 15 discretionary hours

— 25 meetings * 10% closing rate = 2.5 sales on average total

Week 2: 50 prospect meetings (50 hours spent), 30 discretionary hours

— 50 meetings * 10% closing rate = 5 sales on average total

Week 3: 75 prospect meetings (75 hours spent), 45 discretionary hours

— 75 meetings * 10% closing rate = 7.5 sales on average total

Week 4: 100 prospect meetings (100 hours spent), 60 discretionary hours

— 100 meetings * 10% closing rate = 10 sales on average total

You with me? Still pretty simple, no?

Okay, let’s say he decides to go all-in on more meetings. That’s never a terrible idea for salespeople. His sales now do this:

Week 1: 40 prospect meetings (40 hours spent)

— 40 meetings * 10% closing rate = 4 sales on average total

Week 2: 80 prospect meetings (80 hours spent)

— 80 meetings * 10% closing rate = 8 sales on average total

Week 3: 120 prospect meetings (120 hours spent)

— 120 meetings * 10% closing rate = 12 sales on average total

Week 4: 160 prospect meetings (160 hours spent)

— 160 meetings * 10% closing rate = 16 sales on average total

That’s great! That’s 60% more sales. Which makes sense, because he’s spending 60% more time selling. Great. Terrific. What a champ.

But, hmm, what if he did something else with the time? For instance, what if he analyzed and saw that, “Hey, hold on a moment… in probably 2% of the meetings I take total, I’m *close* to getting the sale… but I barely miss it to an objection I can’t answer.” So he spends a few hours writing down every objection he gets on why he can’t get the sale, and he sits down to create collateral to address those. To the objection “Your product costs more,” he creates a pricing table that shows that shows the longer-term durability and less service costs, and how that turns to savings. To “You seem like a small company, why don’t we go with the big guy in the field?” he goes to two of his best customers, and films a video testimonial where the customer says “These are great, they’re so responsive, I’d never use a big heartless corporation that doesn’t care ever again; I get such great service and I love these guys.” It takes him 30 hours to build all this collateral out, get the videos, get them edited, get the pricing table accurate and cited and such.

Week 1:

“Sell harder”: 40 meetings, 10% closing rate = 4 sales total

“Build collateral”: 25 meetings, 10% closing rate = 2.5 sales total

Week 2:

“Sell harder”: 80 prospect meetings, 10% closing rate = 8 sales total

“Build collateral”: 50 meetings, 10% closing rate = 5 sales total

Okay, the guy lost three sales. What is this guy, a moron screwing around with his iPhone video camera and making some paperwork? He’s not all-star like Captain Sell-Harder with his beefy linear gains.

But wait, our collateral-builder is done. So let’s say he now shifts to “selling harder” and just does maximum meetings like his colleague.

Week 3:

“Sell harder”: 120 prospect meetings, 10% closing rate = 12 sales total

“Collateral built”: 50 meetings at 10% closing rate pre-collateral = 5 sales, then 40 meetings at 12% closing rate = 4.8 average sales = 9.8 sales total

Week 4:

“Sell harder”: 160 prospect meetings, 10% closing rate = 16 sales total

“Collateral built”: 50 meetings at 10% closing rate pre-collateral = 5 sales, then 80 meetings at 12% closing rate = 9.6 average sales = 14.6  sales total

Week 5:

“Sell harder”: 200 prospect meetings, 10% closing rate = 20 sales total

“Collateral built”: 50 meetings at 10% closing rate pre-collateral = 5 sales, then 120 meetings at 12% closing rate = 14.4 average sales = 19.4 sales total

Okay, so after Week 5, dumb people are still crowing in our collateral-builder multiplier’s direction. “You did all that work, and you’re still behind in sales!!” Uh-huh, well, I wonder what happens next…

Week 6:

“Sell harder”: 240 prospect meetings, 10% closing rate = 24 sales total

“Collateral built”: 50 meetings at 10% closing rate pre-collateral = 5 sales, then 160 meetings at 12% closing rate = 19.2 average sales = 24.2 sales total

Hmm.

Week 7:

“Sell harder”: 280 prospect meetings, 10% closing rate = 28 sales total

“Collateral built”: 50 meetings at 10% closing rate pre-collateral = 5 sales, then 200 meetings at 12% closing rate = 24 average sales = 29 sales total

The numbers will further diverge from there.

Week 20:

Sell harder: 800 prospect meetings, 10% closing rate = 80 sales total

Collateral built: 50 meetings at old 10% closing = 5 sales, then 720 meetings at 12% closing rate = 86.4 sales, 91.4 sales total

Week 30:

Sell harder: 120 sales

Collateral built: 139.4 sales

Week 50:

Sell harder: 200 sales

Collateral built: 235.4 sales

Why don’t the numbers diverge as rapidly as the Health example last time? Remember, our collateral-builder only invested in getting a multiplier ONCE, only spending 30 hours on it, and then just went to working as hard as possible and not looking for any process improvements. Nevertheless, after a year, he’s going to sell about 18% more for his two weeks of collateral building. (The next year, he’ll sell exactly 20% more: going from a 10% closing rate to a 12% closing rate is a 20% increase.)

That’s really not so bad for two weeks of work. If they’re both on commission and get paid $500 per sale, Sell Harder (Linear Addition) pulls down $100,000 after Week 50, and Collateral Built (Multiplier) pulls down $117,700 after Week 50. $17,700 for two weeks of thinking smartly about the problem, and then doing everything else exactly the same. It’s really not so bad.

Again, there’s no mathematical trickery here. If anything, with an unrefined sales process, there’s much larger gains than this available.

Once, I was working with one of my clients who was an owner/CEO who provided specialized services to Fortune 500 companies in an expensive multi-step sales process. After being on retainer with his company for around three months and making some good moderate improvements, I just started to have some overwhelming feelings that certain types of deals “that really look like they’re going to happen” were actually garbage.

It was vague and hazy and I couldn’t explain it, but I insisted on taking down certain types of data and adding a few simple parameters to track and see which deals closed.

Eventually, we found two factors that, when present, we had a 70%+ closing rate, and if they weren’t there, we were well under 15% (and they were worse clients, and caused most headaches, etc, etc).

We promptly installed a process that extremely deprioritized prospects that didn’t fit that criteria, we changed our payment terms, and just quickly made “take it or leave it” offers to firms and buyers that didn’t fit our criteria instead of investing in requirements-getting, getting approved as a vendor by their procurement processes, and all the rigamarole that comes with that.

Basically, our numbers did something like this —

Month 1: 25 prospect first interactions (25 hours), 20 prospects to sales stage 2 (40 hours), 15 contracts bid on (150 hours), 4.5 sales total in 215 hours

We realized that around one-thirds of the leads were “highly qualified” (70%+ closing) and two-thirds were “not so highly qualified” (sub-15% closing). Also, when we did that, our closing on highly qualified prospects took a slight bump to around 80%, since we could give them more bandwidth. (It didn’t even really take longer, just with less chaos going on, clear thinking prevailed.)

Thus we modified to:

Month 2: 25 prospect first interactions (25 hours), 15 prospects to sales stage 2 (30 hours), 5 contracts bid on (50 hours), 4 sales total in 105 hours

I’ve simplified the numbers a bit, but that’s the general idea — we kept close to the same sales volume in less than half the time because there was a whole cohort that took lots of time and produced no results.

These numbers often occur in young businesses that haven’t sat down and done some rigorous math. Really, this isn’t mathematical trickery. Obviously, a mature company like Xerox likely won’t have such gigantic boosts lying around (or, perhaps they do) but even small multiplicative gains go a very long way, far moreso than working harder.

Of course, you can then redeploy the 110 hours saved into the newly more efficient process… if you add prospects of the same qualification level to the top of the sales process because you want to be 215 hours on sales that month, the numbers would look like this:

Month 3: 50 prospect first interactions (50 hours), 30 prospects to sales stage 2 (60 hours), 10 contracts bid on (100 hours), 8 sales average in 210 hours.

So yeah, roughly doubling sales in slightly less than the same amount of time.

Better “qualifying” in sales — or rather dis-qualifying people who aren’t likely to be buyers — can produce staggering increases like this. If you’ve already got something like a good process going, multiplication is so much more powerful than addition over the long-term, it’s not even funny.

Again, this isn’t mathematical shenanigans. There’s all kinds of little math problems where you phrase a question oddly and get some odd unexpected result; those things are like riddles which might be fun and good for a laugh, but are mostly useless.

No, no, this isn’t that. Getting a multiplicative gain anywhere stacks up to so much radically more than linear additive gains that it’s almost unbelievable until you start working with it.

Section V.

V 1. Sacrifice

Why don't we all build gamebreakingly powerful builds, both when we play a difficult computer game and, of course, in our everyday lives?

The answer is one no one wants to hear: sacrifice.

Many video games have a level cap; "Level 20" is the highest level in the game.

Every level, you get 3 stat points, 1 class point, and 2 generic points. That means at Level 20 you'll have:

60 stat points

20 class points

40 generic points

Maybe there's some cool once-off quests where you get some bonus points; you could add those to the totals above.

But here's the point -- with a level cap, you know in advance what builds are mathematically possible.

And you need to choose.

I already told you about "Fast Metabolism" in Tales of Maj'eyal. It takes your early-game healing rate on a berserker from pitiful to actually quite good.

The question is, do you want to spend 1 or your precious class points on it?

You don't get to max every stat and ability -- you have to pick your build.

And again, the Timeless+Unstoppable combo renders healing rate almost irrelevant.

The problem, of course, is you don't get access to the Timeless and Unstoppable abilities until around level 24, and they aren't excellent until around level 30.

That means the first half of the game, you don't have your killer combo. Health recovery rate still matters, and yours is pathetic. The player who takes the linear increase to health really does make those first few levels easier to play.

The player who says, "Okay, I'm going to take a slight multiplicative boost to speed, accuracy, or damage even though it doesn't pay off as well in the beginning" -- that player is set up for a more difficult early game, but for vastly more power later.

In a game that you're familiar with, you know how many levels you get, you know what abilities become available with, maybe you even know what the challenges are that are coming up.

Sacrificing present-toughness for future-toughness isn't always a good idea, of course. You have to ask yourself some questions. 

Can you survive right now if you take the long-term multiplicative gain? If you can't, make you need to take the linear gain to get to the next level. In real life, if you're on the verge of bankruptcy, maybe you need to take some linear pay gains instead of investing in multiplicative or exponential longer-term payoffs. Cashflow matters.

It might be worth asking if you're going to play the game through to the end. If you know you're firing up the game and you're going to play through the first few dungeons only and then delete it from your computer, then do whatever seems most fun for that session. 

But if the game is hard enough, and you can afford the sacrifice, you can wind up vastly more powerful if you sacrifice things irrelevant to the core build. The Timeless+Unstoppable berserker doesn't care about his health recovery rate; it's almost all about speed and damage, with a little bit of status defenses being important. If you cross the threshold where status effects aren't a threat to you, you basically only want speed and damage after that. Total health, health recovery, armor, dodging -- none of these matter. You're unkillable while Unstoppable is active; Timeless makes it last a long time; make yourself fast and do massive impact in that invincible window.

But that means sacrificing irrelevancies. No armor, no dodging, minimal investment in health, no damage resistance, no healing rate boosts -- this, of course, can be unpleasant until your combinations come together.

When you play a difficult and careful early game and get through it, you get insanely ridiculously tough later.

When you have 40 attack, it's very hard to see how a permanent +4% can be worth so much more than a +10... but if your final attack score is 800, it's the difference between +10 and +32. If there's multiple opportunities like that (and there usually are), you might wind up literally twice or three times tougher...

...and twice or three times tougher might not be "double the betterness" -- if there's a boss who can do a complete heal every two turns with 2000 health, the difference between 840 damage per turn and 1100 damage per turn is the difference between being able to beat that boss at all, or having it be effectively invincible against you.

If you don't sacrifice in TOME, if you do "a little of this, and a little of that" haphazardly, at no point will the roof collapse on you, showing you the folly of your ways. Things just gradually get harder than they would otherwise be, if you were doing things in a more long-term fashion.

You're never explicitly told this. If you haven't run any of the math, you might not even realize how underpowered the character you’re building is. And if you only play on low difficulties, maybe it's a moot point whether you pay any attention to the math and combinations.

But gradually, the character built long-term is able to move faster through challenges, going to places that are safe to him and would be dangerous to the sloppily built character, and then a "rich get richer" effect takes over -- more powerful items, money, quest rewards become available. The long-term built character that sacrificed early gains that fall off, later on, is moving much faster... life becomes a slog for the character who is built haphazardly, as every battle is a fight to the death, whereas the long-term built character breezes through, thus leveling quicker and safer, with less stress.

Optional ultra-powerful bosses with ultra-powerful rewards aren't available to the sloppily built character; the well-built character can take these challenges and get their rewards, which further makes things easier.

And again -- this is just math and planning. Deserve's got nothing to do with it.

V 2. 168

Real life doesn't have specific points where you level up, with explicit points to be distributed between your stats and abilities.

As such, it helps a lot to make some mental models of what you want to achieve in the world, to ensure you're progressing at a rate that's pleasing to you.

The first and most obvious constraint is that there are exactly 168 hours every week.

You can almost always do something worthwhile in a week. A week is a rather long time. If you got at least a minor gain each week, that's 52 gains each year. That's pretty good.

But, in order to get gains, you might actually have to sit down with a piece of paper and figure out what's required to get the stat, trait, or skill boost that you want.

We mentioned previously the smart salesperson who invested 30 hours in documenting, researching, and building collateral to answer the most common objections, and how that increased his sales closing rate -- permanently.

That sounds all well and good; it is all well and good. In our fictional example, his 30 hours of diligent work made him around $17,000 in the first year he did, and he'll be able to reap those benefits as long as he's selling the same types of products and services. (Furthermore, he's a little smarter and more experience, so there's probably some long-term benefits even if he changes career or job.)

If you're playing a video game and there's a quest-giver that says, "Hey, go kill this rabid bear, and I'll give you +2 toughness forever." Is there a catch? There's no catch. Can you take the bear out? You can take the bear out.

What do you do? You go take out the rabid bear and get tougher, forever.

Real life works similarly, but often the "quests" of real life are much more subtle, hidden in plain sight. It's not exactly a novel idea to prepare answers to the most common objections in sales. Preparing explicit collateral, documents, and videos that very persuasively answer objections is a little more rare, but this is not exactly a Nobel Prize quality innovation.

And yet, most salespeople do not do it as individuals, and probably even a majority of businesses do not do it.

Why?

"Too busy" is probably the answer you'd hear. If we want to be kind, let's them have their "too busy" answer. But privately, just between us high-achieving people, let's replace in our mind "too short-sighted" as what's really going on.

Run the math! If you're selling and 10 out of 100 people you present to buy from you, and there's a few more that you're close to closing deals with, it's really worth investing the time to improving so that you can make those sales.

Find the time. It's worth it.

But again, sacrifice. You might need to slow down on frantic "work harder" efforts... much of which are likely motivated less by an actual desire to succeed and achieve results, and more by some vague impression that equates being busy with being successful (as opposed to just looking to be effective).

You don't need to start with a heroic effort to grab gains; you don't need to go from sitting around lazily to conquering the enemy's biggest fortress.

But you can do more to get multipliers and get your build in place.

In 1910, the English author Arnold Bennett wrote a marvelous short work called "How to Live on 24 Hours Per Day."

It's worth reading. One of the recommendations he makes is to find a mere 7.5 hours per week to dedicate to a program of improvement -- any improvement at all.

He then rebuts the idea that this is a "trifling effort" --

"It is not really a trifling effort, as those will discover who have yet to essay it. To "clear" even seven hours and a half from the jungle is passably difficult. For some sacrifice has to be made. One may have spent one's time badly, but one did spend it; one did do something with it, however ill-advised that something may have been. To do something else means a change of habits.

"And habits are the very dickens to change! Further, any change, even a change for the better, is always accompanied by drawbacks and discomforts. If you imagine that you will be able to devote seven hours and a half a week to serious, continuous effort, and still live your old life, you are mistaken. I repeat that some sacrifice, and an immense deal of volition, will be necessary. And it is because I know the difficulty, it is because I know the almost disastrous effect of failure in such an enterprise, that I earnestly advise a very humble beginning. You must safeguard your self-respect. Self-respect is at the root of all purposefulness, and a failure in an enterprise deliberately planned deals a desperate wound at one's self-respect. Hence I iterate and reiterate: Start quietly, unostentatiously."

You want two free levels in toughness? It's a good idea to go get them. When, then, are you going to clear the forest?

Bennett recommends you start quietly and unostentatiously. That's sage advice. I recommend a step further -- actually go in and figure out how to conservatively get those next gains.

Too often, a person in a bit of a slump gets inspired, but instead of being conservative, reaches for some basically unsustainable (and perhaps entirely unachievable) goal, and perhaps doesn't carve out the resources needed to reach the goal at all.

In a video game, you increase your stats by leveling. If you want 6 points in strength and you get 3 points per level... you're going to need to go level up twice to get your stat points.

In real life, you increase your stats by spending time that translates to gains. You must actually find and dedicate the time to do it.

This is a very practical matter, not a theoretical matter. The most likely times to dedicate to improvement projects are first thing in the morning, during a long lunch, immediately after work, or in a dedicated block of time on the weekend.

Where will your time come from? Where will your level-ups come from? Bennett's guidance of targeting 7.5 hours per week is sound; perhaps even 3.5 hours would be enough to start, which is only 30 minutes per day.

But it needs to be found and dedicated. You get your levels by pouring the time into the activities that cause the level-ups. 

V 3. Constructing One's Build, I: Overview

If you're playing a game that's generally unforgiving, you need to intentionally take and build advantages that work together. Randomly doing "a little of this and a little of that" won't get the job done.

In real life and in deep games, you've got limited resources. You need to use them well to get the maximum yield, to make yourself effective, and to keep yourself out of situations that will cause you to fail.

So let's look at one game element again: health. We'll look at Tales of Maj'eyal.

Again, you start the game with around 100 health, give or take, and a rather poor healing rate. Towards the end of the game, your health will range from 800 to maybe 2000 at the very most.