Targeting Narrow

This Devin Nash video is from 4 months ago, long before the Logan Paul cryptozoo scandal came under light. Devin Nash is a fantastic content creator that teaches his audience how to grow their following with marketing and branding techniques.

Not in this specific video, but a few times before, Devin has mentioned the concept of 1,000 true fans. Searching for it on Google, you can find this essay.

The premise of 1,000 true fans is that over the course of a year, if you can get a true fan to spend $100 a year, you’d make $100,000 a year. For reference, $100 a year is about $8-9 a month or about 28 cents a day.

If you think about how easy it is for us to spend money, you can imagine it in reverse, which is thinking about all the ways you can ask for money. It’s not possible to take advantage of every single opportunity. But it is possible to examine the world around us and see what is succeeding at taking $100 a year from us.

I like asking a silly trivia question which is, who is the most subscribed to person in the world? I hint that I bet that they are currently subscribed to this person. Who has the most subscribers? Jeff Bezos. Amazon. From individuals, to families, to business, there are tons of Amazon Prime subscriptions. And each of those subscriptions is $14.99, or $139 a year. Granted, Amazon’s combination of service, products, and portfolio is second to none, which is why they are the most subscribed to service.

That is merely the ceiling. Examining the problem from the ground up, we can see that to establish a true fan, we simply need to create enough value for them to contribute $100 a year. Breaking these numbers down and up can expand our optimism for what is required from us to build a niche career. If I can get 10,000 fans to contribute $10 a year, I’d make the same $100,000. If I can get 100 fans to spend $1,000 a year, I’d make the same $100,000.

While scrolling YouTube shorts the past month, someone new came into my feed. I know him as “stay flexy” which is his signature sign off. Googling his catchphrase links me to his Instagram, movementbydavid. David is a flexibility coach and fitness trainer, a niche I didn’t really think about before seeing his videos. David now boasts 1.2M Instagram followers and has me scrolling through all of his short form content. His niche is incredibly narrow, yet applicable to so many different kinds of people in life. He targets young, old, flexible, and inflexible with his informative videos. His low budget, low angle camera setup grounds him as a relatable friend. And his content is supreme proof to me that the only thing you need to succeed as a content creator is great content and a great drive.

Aside from content creation, David has a free e-book and is formulating supplements with other professionals. His route for monetization is a genius one, focusing on free educational content to build up his audience and credibility, before moving forward and taking on a business risk that is building a supplement brand.

The post is primarily about the possibility of finding a niche audience and making a sustainable living by capitalizing off of that fandom. The techniques involved, while briefly touched on, can vary broadly and require individual examination. In general, dedication to the craft and incremental improvement are the basis to growing fans. More technically speaking, engaging fans uniquely, offering knowledge or experience from a personal level, and providing long term value can separate someone from someone with 1,000 fans and someone with 1,000 true fans willing to spend $100 a year on them.

Shamelessness

Two years ago, this YouTube exposé revealed that Vince and his V Shred fitness business were all a scam. Full of misinformation, selling people on what they want to hear, and shilling out overpriced run-of-the-mill supplements, this business preys on the individuals who have low fitness experience and are naive enough to fall victim to their marketing. Unlike other fitness businesses, V Shred specifically targets Facebook ads, Instagram reels, TikTok Feeds, YouTube ads, etc. They specifically do not target those with enough experience or knowledge that could see through their elementary training and fitness advice. The YouTube video is 13 minutes long and is fantastically produced, I definitely recommend watching it.

Despite this video having over 5.5M views at the time of writing this and despite the mass disapproval from other internet fitness personalities, V Shred remains in business and remains relevant.

A company has a lot of choices on what it can focus on and for V Shred, it’s all about its forward facing branding. Vince is insanely good looking, which makes everything he says believable to a degree. The YouTube video above goes in great detail about how Vince is a great model and actor, but even he can barely believe what he’s saying and selling.

While scrolling YouTube shorts, one of his ads came up. I had seen this ad more than once, but it really rubbed me the wrong way after I saw it again and again.

TikTok videos or short form content of any form have been bombarded with clips from the Joe Rogan Experience. Of course the world’s most popular podcast has clips posted regularly. The animated subtitles and red curtain background are a common sight when scrolling, coupled with typical short form song anthems.

The way V Shred frames this advertisement is so disingenuous, make no mistake. The way his headphones look, the position of the mic, the angle of the camera, the background, the direction he’s facing, all of it mirrors what a guest on the Joe Rogan Experience looks like.

Short form content is so ingenious because it removes the labor of reading a title and thumbnail and choosing what to watch, instead being a constant feed of stimulus. To match that, the first thing you see when scrolling upon this ad is the impression that Vince is on Joe’s show and, “Wow, when did Vince get on his show?” and “Joe’s talking to Vince about fitness?”

If anyone else were to frame themselves as a guest of the Joe Rogan Experience, they would lose their credibility. What is this, some kind of joke? Some kind of wishful delusion? Why don’t you just say what you want to say without making it look as if you’re on the most popular podcast on the world, something very easy to verify if you’re not on? Wouldn’t you look silly?

Well that’s the length of shamelessness V Shred has. It’s okay if they very intentionally made their ad look like they were on Joe’s podcast, because hey they just like the look of it!

Do not take any advice in this video.

This video truly is a meme. You have a fitness model scarfing down carbs, selling the dream to many dieters. He poses in a selfie and addresses all the failed dieting trends, even making a funny face and pose addressing CrossFit. And then he goes into a jumble of information which has some truth in it, but is cherry picked for what people want to hear. “Cardio burns fat? No. Cardio actually burns calories, usually in the form of carbs in the bloodstream, that are then replaced with the very next meal that you eat, stored as more fat.” The grain of truth in his statement is that the body typically burns through simple sugars before burning fat, as fat is more easily stored in the bodies and carbs are more quickly consumed. If your body is extremely low on simple sugars, it will begin burning fat for caloric output.

Googling “hierarchy of fat loss” can reveal what everyone agrees on when it comes to weight loss: first is what you put into your body. And it really should be that simple, if your body was a car and you only put low quality fuel into it, it wouldn’t be at its best. You can point to a dozen other things that affect a car’s performance, but it’s disingenuous and even a bit shameless to sell people the idea they can put any kind of fuel into their body.

“Hollywood’s elite actors…” A few years ago, V Shred did do some videos on how to unlock the secret of Hollywood bodies. He’s still selling different bits and different secrets the actors do to get their incredible bodies. Two years ago, the steroid use in Hollywood was much more under wraps and the general population could be fooled into thinking chicken and broccoli and insane trainers could really make it work. Nowadays, V Shred addresses the steroid culture by saying that there’s “a secret that’s been used for generations.” Come on man, how many keywords can you fit into an ad before people just throw their wallet at you?

The very best part of this ad? The Joe Rogan like set to draw you in? It’s actually the closer to the ad. It’s not selling you anything directly. Instead it’s providing a free product internet users LOVE. It’s a personality test. Find out what makes YOU so unique and what YOU should do instead of just any generic routine. V Shred doesn’t have to sell a novice user anything if it can lead them along this convoluted path long enough and gain their trust. Once a naive individual goes down this path, it’s only a matter of time before one of the selling pitches, one of the magical keywords, one of the solutions lines up with what their wallet can afford and what their greed can stomach.

I truly hate V Shred. But game recognizes game. V Shred spent the marketing money and are without a doubt going to gain a lot of customers from this ad. There’s a lot to dissect and appreciate from such a shameless company. The real lesson, aside from the business and media examples listed, is that there will always be some version, some X product, that is so shameless in its business or practice, that it will go to any length to succeed. So what does that tell you about your ideas? Your values? What if your ideas or values were any good, weren’t so shameful? And what if you had the same attitude nefarious companies have when it comes to pursuing their dreams? Wouldn’t the world be better if the quality products and ideas were the ones shamelessly doing anything to get their brand out there? Instead we have companies that knowingly have shitty products do whatever it takes to sell.

So to that I say, if you’re gonna sell out in any way, do it in a way that’s true to yourself. Because you can be true to yourself and lose. You can be a liar and win. But only a few, and what we truly desire, is to have the honest win.

Scarred Discrimination

A little under three years ago, I moved to a studio in Downey to live closer to LA. The apartment complex I chose had a bunch of neighborhood cats. When I first moved in, I was dating a girl who wanted to help out these cats. She found a local Facebook group that helped spay, neuter, and adopt stray cats, which helped reduce our complex’s cat population in half.

A resident favorite of my property manager is Tarzan, who managed to stay after the adoption wave. Because I have cats in my home and these apartments have screen doors, my cats and outside cats would naturally hang out at my door’s threshold, especially late in the evenings when the summer nights were hot.

Tarzan appears to have glaucoma. I have never seen this in a cat and I had never seen this in a person outside of Fetty Wap or maybe a random encounter that I had forgotten about. Tarzan would hang out with the property manager and lounge around by the stairs, the pool, and sometimes my unit.

Initially, I was hesitant to like Tarzan. I tried my best not to get too close with outside cats, as fleas or mites may spread to my cats, and I have no idea what Tarzan or the other cats do all day. After settling in a few weeks into my studio, I mentioned Tarzan to my twitch stream and described his eye. A chatter dubbed him Kitty Wap and my perspective of him really changed.

For some reason, I thought his disfigurement was a result of something aside from being born with it. Like he had a battle scar from a terrible fight. But even if that was the case, should that really change my opinion of this cat? I had thought of him as a terrifying and maybe vile creature, when he really was a sweet cat that was pretty trusting of humans. Even my neighborhood homie, who has lived here his whole life, thinks Tarzan is freaky looking, terrifying.

The pictures in this post were captured after my girlfriend and I had started leaving cat food outside for him and other cats. After a month or so of leaving some kibble outside, Tarzan and his girlfriend, and even their kittens, have regularly hung out and even sprung forward towards my door whenever I am heading out.

I have volunteered at no kill shelters, I have seen the homeless problem in Chicago and in LA, and I myself have battled with disfigurement and discrimination. Upon reflecting on all of this, it is disheartening that I myself could learn and experience so many of these things and still hold prejudice against a stray cat.

I have a lot of memories of inaction or apathy when it came to being physically different. I’d like to expand on them in a future post, especially with how it was combined with being culturally different. While we are allowed our prejudices or dislikes, we should remember others could irrationally and unfairly feel the same way about us. For now, I’d like to sign off and leave with the message that the neighborhood cats are well fed and happy, and that there are always opportunities for compassion.

The Valley of Disappointment

While scrolling youtube shorts lately, Alex Hormozi has been on my feed a lot. When googling him, he comes up as a YouTuber, which says a lot about what people think. Because Alex wouldn’t be the kind of YouTuber he is without his portfolio and his net worth. YouTuber doesn’t quite describe Alex entirely, but it does represent what people know of him.

He touched on a subject: why do we start so many new things but fail to finish them? The answer is the valley of disappointment.

This graph labels them as Expectations and Reality, but Alex phrases it as uninformed optimism and informed pessimism. These terms carry a lot more weight to me even though they convey the same meaning in this analogy. We want something to happen and we experience something different. In between those places lives the Valley of Disappointment. It’s why we avoid finishing new exciting things we try out. We learn that the nice, attractive elements we once sought have a lot of tough, unattractive qualities that we had overlooked.

When navigating the Valley of Disappointment, most people either quit due to the frustration or lack of progress, or people stagnate and sludge through their progression, taking far longer than they had ever imagined. Granted, many things take years of experience and effort before results come in. And as the graph shows, our reality can dramatically improve if we give it enough time.

Time is the enemy of many. Especially when it comes in the form of delayed gratification. How many times has something just gone away if you gave it a few hours, a few days, a few weeks, or just let the time slip by until it was forgotten?

Many recognize time as the enemy and very few are willing to look into the mirror to see an antagonist of their dreams. It’s why we want to get results quickly. Because we believe that if only we had more time we could get over this disappointing period of return.

We’ve seen get rich quick and lose weight fast. While researching for this post, one thumbnail I saw was end your laziness in 1 day. These titles are attractive not only because they promise immediate results, but because they combat our negative experiences with time being the enemy. If we removed time as a factor, if we could just get the shortcut and figure it out just a little quicker, we could finally get over the Valley of Disappointment we had experienced before.

This realization made me understand that if we can always frame something aside from ourselves as the culprit, we will always find it soothing, comforting, reassuring, and simple. We like to think that we perceive the world around us so clearly, which means that we must perceive ourselves with that much clarity. But we all know that’s a lie we tell ourselves. It’s why I believe social pressure is so high, because as societal creatures we must understand our position in society as others see it, not only as we see ourselves. It’s much simpler to have everyone around us give us indirect or direct feedback than it is for us to examine ourselves the way we examine the world.

What’s most interesting to me is that the graph above is quite modest in its expectation levels. There are much greedier, more unrealistic versions of what our expectations could be. In reality, we optimistically believe that the 45 degree angle is the baseline of how progression should work. We really never dive head first into something thinking it will be much worse than that baseline. It’s why all these shortcuts are sold and why very few talk about the long-term, delayed growth. It’s just a lot sexier to talk about the immediate wins than it is to say another day went by and it was difficult to see a difference.

There are a lot of interesting topics I’d like to further expand in the future, like self-examination, pointing the finger to others, and short versus long term gratification. You can check out the Alex Hormozi video here.

we see the world so clearly but we are blind to ourselves -created with midjourney

Loneliness and Individualism

Yesterday my neighbor had the television on while I was visiting. A commercial came on, something that I’m not particularly used to as primarily an internet user. It’s great to get a pulse on what the market is selling and what the market thinks of its customers.

It was a cellphone commercial for Visible. Visible is some sort of independent partner of Verizon. Looking them up, they are:

an American mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) owned by Verizon Communications.
Wikipedia

While it’s interesting on its own to go into the rabbit hole of what an MVNO is or how companies like Visible partner up with Verizon, I wanted to touch on Visible’s targeting approach. Their approach is to target individuals, offering plans that have discounted rates without the need for buying a family package. This niche targeting is only possible once a market speaks up about its need, usually in the form of shying away from larger, bulkier, family packages.

The first thing I joked about when seeing this commercial was that this marketing strategy would never work in Asia, as everyone is close with their family and there would be immense guilt shaming for moving away from the family, let alone the family cellphone plan.

As a Chinese American, I of course think about the duality between the East and the West, and how different our values are especially when it comes to collectivism versus individualism. I thought nothing more of this observation of mine aside that individualism was indeed a defining characteristic of the West.

What I didn’t expect was to stumble upon this reddit thread this morning covering the article, The State of American Friendship: Change, Challenges, and Loss. The first line of the reddit thread title is: [Today I learned] more than 1 in 10 Americans have no close friends.

The article is actually quite in depth, with multiple parameters and graphs. The article addresses things like the pandemic, gender differences, number of friends, satisfaction of friendship, childhood friends, best friends, emotional support, and politics. The article compares data from 1990 to 2020. Although it is indeed a 30 year range (don’t make me feel old), I’d like to see further back a generation and see how the effects have trended since then. I suspect things like the internet as a whole, smartphones and social media, and globalization or urbanization led to a less quantity of in-person interactions as a whole, which led to overall less quality social interaction, and all of these catalysts are rather modern.

To my surprise, in the reddit comments was a fantastic discussion on the breakdown of the third place and why it may be the culprit to our modern loneliness. When I first learned of this phrase in high school, I was taught Starbucks and all other coffee places were attempting to become the third place, the place were people hang out most outside of home or work.

[Loneliness is caused] in part due to the breakdown in civil organizations such as churches, clubs, etc. combined with the distancing caused by social media and technology.
reddit user

I thought the comment to be quite profound, as communities do seem to have collapsed or segregated farther the more our political and digital divide separates us. More profound was an analysis by another commenter replying:

One of the reasons the show Cheers was so profoundly popular in the 1980s was because generations of Americans were mourning, whether they realized it or not, both the death of (and the crass capitalization of) the third place.
another reddit user

He cites the book Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community. I’ll have to check out the book. In modern days, the capitalization of public spaces and the intense focus on individual liberties has alienated us from each other. Commenters suggest that our car is the most appropriate winner of the title of third place, with us spending so much time commuting or using our car as a second room. In California, it’s so typical for people to hang out in cars, to take naps or have sex, or to just sit idle in park. I’d argue the most apt third place we have is our smartphone, hooking us into what Aziz Ansari coined as our “phone world.”

None of these aptly fit the definition of a third place, as they are intensely private and definitely not neutral. Where we are willing to spend our money and where we are intensely private lies the intersection of an echo chamber. And that is the tragedy of the death of the third place. When we lose our ability to convene on neutral territory, we lose our ability to engage in conversations we may not want to be a part of. And when we lose our first contact with contentious ideas, we lose all ability to approach or engage at all.

Individualism has incredible benefits. As always, in a future post I’ll cover more about individualism and collectivism, as well as expand on themes of loneliness. To read more on an incredible reddit comment about third places and Cheers, here’s the thread.

Gazing Upon Ourselves

Popularly known as a daffodil, this flower has an interesting etymological and mythological origin.

The exact origin of the name Narcissus is unknown, but it is often linked to a Greek word for intoxicated (narcotic) and the myth of the youth of that name who fell in love with his own reflection. The English word “daffodil” appears to be derived from “asphodel“, with which it was commonly compared.
Wikipedia

We know the modern word of narcissist and its definition of selfishness.

[Narcissus] rejected all romantic advances, eventually falling in love with his own reflection in a pool of water, staring at it for the remainder of his life. After he died, in his place sprouted a flower bearing his name.
Wikipedia

I had learned of this myth through Ovid. There are many versions of this myth, all with a tragic ending, all ending with Narcissus either killing himself or rendered immobilized and turned into a flower staring into the water. In Ovid’s version, Narcissus is mentioned with another name, Echo. Echo was a nymph that quickly fell in love with Narcissus. As all myths go, there is always a quirk or a catch or something just enough to make the story awry. In Echo’s case, she could only repeat what Narcissus said, leading him to confusion and anger. Narcissus rejects Echo’s affection, angering one of the gods. Yes, in typical fashion, Greek and Roman gods loved to interfere and meddle with the affairs of humans. As punishment for rejecting Echo, Narcissus was led to his demise. For when Narcissus was a baby, the oracles predicted Narcissus would live a long life, as long as he never discovered himself (another typical mythological setup). Narcissus found himself staring into a pool of water where he caught his reflection.

Narcissus did not realize it was merely his own reflection and fell deeply in love with it, as if it were another young man. Unable to leave the allure of his image, he eventually realized that his love could not be reciprocated and he melted away from the fire of passion burning inside him, eventually turning into a gold and white flower.
Wikipedia

[side note: wikipedia does a fantastic job at condensing and summarizing classic literature, at least at the base level]

Other versions change out details such as Echo being a different character or gender, or Narcissus ending his life in different ways. What’s tragic looking back at this story is that Narcissus does very little to earn or deserve this punishment. Many of the myths with gods punishing humans involves humans having unbridled arrogance or hubris, especially when measuring themselves up against the gods. There very much was a “respect your elders” and respect the history/culture theme in the ancient myths. Can you blame them? Innovation wasn’t exactly around the corner in those times.

And after knowing this story for so many years, it’s finally clicking to me now as I’m researching and writing this post that Echo is another irony of this story. What else would Narcissus hear from someone who fell madly in love with him? Why, his own words of course.

Yet Narcissus rejecting love advances only to die by falling in love with himself seems like a very undue punishment.

The myth is remarkably memorable. But its start? Narcissus was doomed by the oracle in the very beginning. His fate was only in good hands as long as he never discovered himself. What does that say about us? What does that say about individuals? The Greeks and Romans were obsessed with oracles and fate. Did this story pertain to ill-fated individuals? Or was this story more about our actions within our lives?

The metaphor I like to interpret with or without the mythology is that by devoting ourselves to others, we limit our obsession with ourselves.

This post was prompted by today’s reddit post citing the article Narcissism reduces the quality of long-term friendships, study finds.

If all you care about is you, what do those around you get out of it?
top reddit comment

Shocking, a negative trait makes people like you less
another reddit comment

“Friendships”. These people are incapable of even comprehending what that means. They see people as means to an end and that’s it.
another reddit comment

The article’s conclusion seems obvious, as well as the comments. The takeaway I got from this article and the thread is that narcissism bad, kindness good, and there are two kinds of narcissism: admiration and rivalry, which lead to different outcomes, however ultimately both lead to more conflicts and less close relationships.

Defining personality traits and behaviors is helpful, especially when we can collectively agree X trait is negative. Acknowledging and focusing on specifics is the first step towards changing something. But that is where I find the reddit thread and article to fall short.

Is it just enough to understand something is bad, recognize that bad quality in others, point it out, and repeat a list of symptoms or consequences associated with said bad thing? I’m obviously not placing the onus of changing difficult individuals upon each reddit commenter. Some redditors even come forward with their experiences with narcissists.

Story time!!: I used to date a girl with Borderline Personality Disorder and she went through friends like she changed clothes. And it was all because she was so afraid that they would “see through her” and leave her.
another reddit comment

This redditor goes on in more detail about this girl’s behavior and her consequences. This story, along with others in the comments, are powerful enough for users to type up their bad experiences and share it with strangers online. This amount of power seems irreversible, as people are in charge of their own lives, with their own autonomy. Is it really our place to stop a narcissist? Isn’t that life’s responsibility?

Well, I’m not asking for us to stop the unstoppable. In fact, taking steps in identifying narcissism and its consequences is a first step towards socially engineering narcissism out. And while it’s unrealistic to expect narcissism or any other negative qualities to become fully eradicated, it’s hopeful to think we are able to navigate negative traits with others and with ourselves more easily as our social knowledge becomes more powerful. I say this because there are forces of technology and innovation which inadvertently affect our social constructs and interactions. It becomes easier for a narcissist or sociopath to remain hidden in an online world, but it also can become more exposing for them and others as well.

What I would love to see more discussion of is:
How do we define narcissism as a long term trait and how or should we prevent it?
To what degree is selfishness important in society and how wide should the spectrum of generous to selfish be?
How do we interact with or limit the power of narcissist within our lives?
Are traits like disagreeableness, independence, stubbornness mutually inclusive of narcissism?
How has innovation such as social media, globalization, and internet alienation affected narcissism?
Are techniques like labeling or othering causing more tension and negativity, creating a feedback loop?
Is narcissism curable?

Player Made Content: Examples

Aeon of Strife was a custom game from StarCraft which many cite as the first predecessor for a now famous genre of games: MOBAs. It was released the same year as StarCraft Brood War, 1998.

World famous, DOTA 2 has the largest international championship prize pool of any gaming series. Its rival, League of Legends, was at one point the most popular game in the world. The fundamental core of five versus five gameplay remains the same across several new titles spawning in this genre. Surprisingly, Blizzard, the company which created the games and custom tools available to create Aeon of Strife and Defense of the Ancients, remains outside of the MOBA market despite attempts like Heroes of the Storm.

Counter Strike is a custom game modified from Half-Life, widely considered one of the best competitive first person shooters series of all time. Counter Strike 1.6 was first released in 2000, 2 years after Half-Life.

The Team Fortress series started out as a mod of Quake. It popularized a class based system in shooters and was the only popular game of its genre for nearly 20 years.

Holding the record for the most ambitious esports league of all time, Overwatch changed the face of shooters. With franchising fees of upwards of $7.5M, the broadcasting and sponsorship rights overshadowed even the enormous million dollar plus prize pools. While reception of the Overwatch League was mixed, the breakthroughs in viewership and sponsorships were history defining. Hero shooters would become increasingly popular, with additions like Apex Legends and Valorant.

Released in the first month of 2019, AutoChess came seemingly out of nowhere to capture a huge audience overnight and spawn a new genre of gaming. AutoChess seemed to capture chess, mahjong, dota, tower defense, and king of the hill gameplay designs all in one game. Created by Drodo Studios, the same custom game creator of Gem TD in Warcraft III, AutoChess would become completely overshadowed within its genre by its competitors.

Within months, Valve had created a short-lived competitor named Dota Underlords and Riot had created Teamfight Tactics. Even Hearthstone, a collectible card game by Blizzard, created a custom mode to replicate the themes of an auto battler.

Day Z was a mod for Arma 2, released in 2012. Custom servers for Minecraft supporting Hunger Games began springing up around this time as a result of the pop culture film of the same name. The Battle Royale genre was born. Games like H1Z1 rose in popularity, even hosting leagues of its own, before becoming entirely overshadowed by games like PUBG or Fortnite.

The popularity of Fortnite cannot be understated. Becoming immensely popular with kids and teenagers alike, Fortnite capitalized on not only the popularity and rise in shooters, but also the popularity of games like Minecraft or Roblox which rewarded creativity and building. The trending popularity of the game was best captured by a developer supported custom event with Travis Scott, the same year he had a slew of deals with McDonalds, Sonny, and Tesla.

These examples illustrate games embraced by their community or developers. Player made content is crowd sourced content, which will always have more creativity and range, given time and passion. With each new experimentation of games comes the possibility of a new genre of gaming, from MOBAs, to Hero Shooters, to Auto Battlers, to Battle Royales, and more. In a future post, I’ll cover different developer attitudes towards player content, as well as why new genres of gaming become popular when they do in accordance to game history.

Hearing What We Want to Hear

In my last post, I went over remasters of older games. StarCraft II, while not a remaster, was a sequel to the most famous Real Time Strategy game of all time, StarCraft: Brood War. In my early college days, I spent a lot of time watching streams of this game and grinding the ladder. I hit a plateau in Diamond and did not push myself too hard to get past that level. I watched a few of my replays, looked up a few builds and guides, but ultimately shied away from pushing myself further competitively.

Whenever I become engrossed and immersed into a game, I start to see it everywhere, even in my dreams. I remember the month I really got into Dance Dance Revolution and started seeing arrow patterns in my sleep. The brain is an extraordinary thing and it rather joyfully seeks out patterns, even when they might not exist.

I was taking Metra train rides at the time from Chicago to the suburbs once a week. I always enjoyed riding trains. I would nap or watch youtube videos to pass the time. I remember so distinctly one afternoon I was falling asleep on the train and I overheard a conversation. “Supply block… twelve… depot…” Was I overhearing a StarCraft II conversation? “Lings… two base…” Were they talking about Terran versus Zerg?

I sprung up from my slouched slumber and eyed around the train. The conversation was coming from two older professionals, one man and one woman. I focused more closely on their conversation. It had nothing to do with StarCraft.

StarCraft was a great game that I enjoyed for many years, even more years as a casual spectator. I have fond memories of the game, but ultimately it was a chapter in my life. Contextualizing one chapter of my life and one misheard conversation, what other conversations have I misinterpreted due to the lens I held at the time?

One of my very favorite quotes in all of Mad Men is in Season 4, Episode 8: The Summer Man. Don writes to himself in a journal.

People tell you who they are, but we ignore it because we want them to be who we want them to be.
Don Draper

This line struck me and has never left. Our perceptions of our lives and of others deeply shapes how we interact with them and how we perceive them. It seems obvious that our perceptions shape how we perceive things. But our biases go much farther than selecting bits of information we like and censoring out others. Our perception and biases blind us to who people identify themselves as. Of course, this quote can be read into as first impressions or taking people’s word for face value. But the more powerful message to me is that our minds will change reality when it conflicts with our desires.

Is Don talking about the women in his life? Or is his question more of a reflection of himself and what others perceive of him? This extends to ourselves as well. We may perceive others incorrectly because of our desires, but that also means others may do so as well, seeing us the way they want to see us. It takes time and a lot of experience to understand who people truly are, especially when we give each other the benefit of the doubt and we have our biases filtering out reality.

The next time you find yourself thinking, “am I just hearing what I want to hear?” try taking off the strongest lenses or paradigms you’re holding and remember that others have the exact same problem. Communication is about conveying ideas across to one another, accurately. After all, do we talk to each other or are we talking to ourselves aloud?

I Came, I Saw, I Returned

Not every franchise successfully pulls this off, but when a remaster or a revisit of a game does well, fans and investors alike rejoice. There’s numerous reasons why coming back to a game could be a massive failure. It could be the wrong time, as the genre of the game is no longer popular or is being overshadowed by newer and more popular games. It could be a big miss with the fans, with developers being unable to appease or please the fandom while working under constraints of investors or backers. It could be just a money grab, with very little thought placed into visiting a beloved game.

While it’s easy to criticize and point in hindsight to why projects failed, I’d like to do a justice, an obvious one, to why revisits are so celebrated.

Hitmonchan, an innocuous Pokemon card which was the cornerstone to the first Pokemon card game metagame. As an adult, it’s obvious why this card is so powerful and how it was able to define metas. As a child, I could only see it as a boring Pokemon card with boring flavor. It wasn’t until I was losing to this card and a combination of other basic Pokemon cards did my perception shift. Imagine preteen me, visiting a local Toys R Us, to be destroyed by teenagers who studied card lists and had disposable income.

Thunderfury, Blessed Blade of the Windseeker, legendary item crafted in Vanilla World of Warcraft. During its initial release, a lot of mystery surrounded the item, with very few players completing the epic quest involved with crafting the item. As an RPG item, it held the best three qualities an item could posses: it was incredibly unique and rare, it was the most powerful weapon of its kind, and it was aesthetically unique and beautiful. Because it was so rare and it required a 40 player group for just a chance at starting the quest, politics, drama, and luck would all play against anyone’s dreams of obtaining this sword.

Final Fantasy VII, initially released in 1997, was the first 3D Final Fantasy in the series and widely celebrated as one of the best in the series. Fans cite the characters, gameplay, story, and music as genre defining, changing player’s expectations permanently. For many players, this was their first Japanese RPG or first AAA title on their Playstation, while those who did not have a Playstation or did not play RPGs missed out on this title and master piece entirely.

While technically not a revisit, Nintendo is famous for reusing signature characters and has been recently embracing cross-platform interactions with other staple franchises. Connecting with characters over the years through their personality, their gameplay, and their stories is what allows Nintendo and these franchises to continue reusing the same characters in the same stories without them feeling stale. Iconic characters in iconic settings played in predictable ways is what our brain is seeking from stories and games.

Classic games of past do not need remasters or revisits since their base technology never changes, unlike video games. As our hardware changes and updates, our general population expectations may exceed what games of past could handle. Players revisit old games to remaster old metagames and champion strategies, to accomplish goals that were once thought impossible, to experience games and stories they once missed, and to continue living out stories and gameplays of their favorite characters.

Modern games using technology will always face a question of when or should it get remastered. Today, there are two popular systems. One is an everlasting game, with seasonal passes or DLC to continue updating content and inspiring longevity. The other is yearly released updates to the game, changing one variable at a time to placate and innovate. And while there are a dozens of reasons as to why a game could fail when rebooting it, it’s important to focus on the few key ingredients on what makes a game so good that it not only stands the test of time, but it demands a fresh spotlight on it.

Distancing the Mind

In 2015, I started taking my Super Smash Bros. Melee career a lot more seriously, attending and hosting hundreds of events. At its peak, I was attending 8 tournaments a week, one each evening of the week and two on Sunday. It was a rush having an event to practice for and to compete at each evening. Even when the stakes were small, the volume of events and the endless grind took a toll on my emotional and spiritual mood.

I use those terms because my performance was indirectly affected by my mood, but more largely affected by my discipline and my decision making. I always thought of myself as a poor discipline, poor execution player, with a creative mind and edge over my opponent. Whenever I was able to handle my execution, tournaments were exceptionally easy. When I wasn’t able to handle my technical abilities, I would crumble.

Warriors of the past would meditate before serene pastures, silencing their mind as if sharpening a blade.

There were times I would walk myself out of a tournament venue, sit outside or in my car. If the venue ever served food or had a bar, I would pace the timing of my tournament games around food and beverage. It was unwise to eat too close to the end of the tournament, the most stressful time. But it was also unwise to lose steam early into the tournament, especially since there was a tournament tomorrow and a tournament the day before.

The most powerful drug we all possess in our pocket is our smartphone and its ability to connect to any piece of information at any time. It’s easy to find ourselves passively scrolling news feeds, social media feeds, or forums and zoning out from the world around us. What is most interesting is what we choose to scroll through and where we choose to send our minds to when we are not present.

I am not a very sentimental person, especially when I was growing up. However, long nights of going to new and old venues had me preferring my offline content over what I found on social media. Connecting with images of my cat or the girl I was dating at the time kept me connected to the dream I was chasing and the life I was building.

It seems cheesy and cliché to appreciate family photos at work. The warmth sentimental photos provide now live parallel to social media access. I could look at my cat, or I could look at all the cats and all the cute dogs and those interesting new moments. Both offer powerful tools for distancing the mind and finding relaxation.

In a future post, I’ll cover how top players at tournaments operate by a hurry up and wait M.O., similar to soldiers in the military. When stress is segmented and delayed, training and best practices are enforced to ensure that the user can persist and achieve victory. One way users can wait is by practicing, keeping their skills sharp and their mind ready. The other way is to simply wait. Wait, relax, and distance the mind. For soon, the battle begins.