Episode 58: Moving the Goal Posts

Transcript

generally speaking i try to stay away from gotcha games you know these are the these are the games
that i mean candy crush was probably one of the biggest of these the general idea of these games
is that the game it's the game loop itself is typically mobile games the game loop itself is
fairly simple uh the games tend to be progression based so you're progressing through levels or
characters or you know whatever it is you're doing and it's very grindy and it the game will
intentionally get you to certain thresholds and then you almost become stuck and the general idea
is that the game itself then encourages you to spend in a store spend spend real money in order
to maybe break through a threshold in a less frustrating way in theory these games tend to
be free to play and in theory you can progress to the end of the game without ever having to spend
money but when people run the calculations and things well the calculations are bad in both
directions when people run the calculations looking at the if you are trying to do it without spending
money it might be a decades long progression train uh and if you do spend money a lot of times these
things are set up where if you want to get from get to a reasonable point you might be thousands of
dollars deep so these are the ideas of these things are sort of termed gotcha games overall the idea at
the end of the whole thing being that the game is designed to get you right it is designed that at some
point in time you're it's going to encourage you to either spend money or you get stuck or whatever
so generally speaking these are these are largely just gamified casinos uh that aren't much games at
all they they're they're just kind of designed to force you to spend money and kind of addict you
over time so generally i i stay away from these however there's been a couple along the way that
i've played and i generally set a rule for myself to never spend money which generally just holds up
fine and what i typically do in these games is i will play the beginning phase of the game
until i get to a point where it feels like i'm stuck or it's grindy or whatever and that's usually
when i just kind of stop the other thing about these games is that typically as you even if you're
staying at the forefront of things even if you're spending a bunch of money and staying really at the
quote-unquote end game there are still the updates that come out essentially are constantly moving the
goalposts on you right it pushes the game out so maybe you get toward the end of the progression
you're like oh i i've really made it and then an update comes out and now you're you know you have
way more money to spend and further to go and all the rest of it years ago uh during sort of the height
of covet lockdowns i got into one of these games i'd actually played it before but it was it largely
played it because my kids had picked up playing it it's called teenage mutant ninja turtles legends
and it's not a good game at all it's very boring actually that you just kind of run through letter
levels and upgrade characters and whatever however you know i grew up with ninja turtles like that was
sort of my generation's big cartoon thing and and then as and toys and all that and then as
my kids got a little older they discovered the nickelodeon show that came out you know a couple
decades later and we watched through all that so the kids were kind of excited about it they picked
up this game and i was like yeah i'll try it out so for the last five or six years i've actually
consistently played this game now again i sort of use the term game here loosely but what i do is
while i'm when i work out at home there's rest time between sets and the game itself just auto plays
so really what i'll do is i'll set it up sort of near my workout you know area and when i go to do
to have rest time between sets i'll queue up the next level or whatever and just kind of it just
runs through and does its thing so it's not like i'm really sitting there playing the game it's more
like i just occasionally go over tap a couple things and then it it does its thing and over the course of
five or six years i have actually progressed through this game where i i i have obtained some of the
characters that are very difficult to obtain and without spending money and you know progressed
some stuff and i've kind of hit the quote-unquote end game of this thing you know humble brags or
something anyway uh again terrible game but it's just kind of that thing that i have it's just a
thing i do while i work out at home what's interesting about this game oh but it's actually
what's not interesting about this game is it's it seems to be completely dropped by the developers
like it doesn't seem like i don't think this thing has been updated since i started playing it
but for some reason it keeps running so someone somewhere presumably is maintaining something
where this where it continues to to play uh it continues to exist i'd never spent a dollar on it
it's just kind of again that thing that just sort of runs in the background but what it got me
thinking about a little bit was that i i have now hit again sort of the end of this thing there really
isn't much more for me to do i can keep leveling some stuff up but it doesn't actually do anything
like having extra additional leveled up guys in the game doesn't actually get me anywhere there's
nothing that i can't do with the current set of content and levels and challenges in the game
i can already do it all with my existing setup so like there's nothing left to do so in some ways i
have quote unquote beaten this thing and it just got me thinking for whatever reason about the
the difference between this sort of thing where it has been abandoned and therefore it was possible
to hit the end of the game compared to other games of its of its sort where when they are actively
being developed and maintained they're always moving the goalposts on you right you can never quite
get there and it got me thinking about just the overall the overall idea of moving always moving the end
goal and i sort of started thinking to myself about how this relates to people's own ambitions
and i don't know let's talk about it in terms of professional life for the purposes of this
conversation i think that's it's a fairly simple frame you know we go out of the workforce and maybe
you come out of college and you have no money and you think to yourself oh geez like i'll once i
make 50k man i'll have so much money and then you start making 50k and then it's like oh this isn't
quite enough money to sustain myself on now i need 60 70 80 and the titles too you know you go in you're
like oh wouldn't it be great to be a this then you see that your boss has some other title and you want
that one and the next one and the next one and you see your friends and it becomes almost like a
competitive thing i'm not saying everyone falls into this but i don't think that's an uncommon
pattern especially if you're in sort of like organizational corporate america kind of stuff
it just got me thinking about ambition a bit and how we're do we do this to ourselves we always move
the goal posts on ourselves you know we get to the we get to the end or we get to our goal
and a lot of us i think never even take a minute to relish it and maybe you get there and realize
that it's not even the goal you thought it was or it's not the experience you thought it was so you
move the goalposts so you move it and you move it and you move it and you're always pushing this thing
out and never arriving and it got me thinking about pros and cons you know and not to belabor the
whole metaphor too badly but there's pros and cons right the the only reason that i feel any degree of
and i'm gonna use this word pretty loosely but any degree of accomplishment quote-unquote around this
silly ninja turtles game that i've been playing for like six years is that there was never the goalposts
were never being moved there was an explicit place at the end of it and once i got there
i was there but so the pros of that is it almost feels like you you arrived however the con you
know the con obviously is that well now there's nothing left to do but on the other hand you know
when you are doing something where the goal is constantly being pushed out the con of that is
that you're constantly chasing something that you can never really obtain but a pro of that is that
you always have something to shoot for and it gets me wondering about not necessarily which approach
is better but how to balance those things and how and and which approach or which of these sorts of
things might be better in different circumstances because i'm sure many people professionally have
gotten to a point where they feel like they can never quite get there they're no matter how far they
push they're still in search of something that they can't quite obtain and sometimes that's motivating
and other times it's horrendously frustrating and i don't think that either of these paths is a one
size fits all key i don't think in all cases it's good to always have something to shoot for
and i also don't think in all cases it's it's good to have something where you've already arrived
and i'm wondering about this topic so this brings me to i wanted to try something here so this was
this this episode was sort of a premise right it was sort of a metaphor around this idea that i've
been thinking about the next episode what i plan to do is take this episode and turn it into um
i'll probably use chat gpt and what i'm going to ask from it is is there research around this topic
are there is there information out there research thought leaders general philosophical principles
that kind of stuff that would that would be that would shed light on this topic
so it's gonna be like a two-parter and i'm curious how that goes because it there are things
obviously that people think about my i'm definitely one of them that i think about stuff but i don't
necessarily have any specific like research or philosophy background in it so i'm wondering how it might
be to try to use something like chat gpt to inform about sort of a broad topic like this so that's me the
next episode i hope you enjoyed this one if you have thoughts on this subject please feel free to reach
out at lmc.fm and uh make sure to tune in next time for to see what what might be out there on this idea