There is this mobile game that I like to play when I find myself in situations where I am very tired to be productive at anything, or when there is absolutely nothing else to do. What I particularly like about this game, is that I can play with one hand and much of the time even without looking, and so, not only is it not taxing on my brain, but on the contrary, it could kill me with boredom! This is how I choose to play it anyway.
As with everything in life however, every coin has two sides: On one is the very casual (almost uninterested) gamer such as myself, on the other, there are hardcore people who compete at the top levels and (I imagine) will sooner or later suffer a nervous breakdown from the stress that this level of competition is causing them.
That being said, I am grateful as a consumer that these hardcore people exist. And that is because the game is of the “Freemium” kind: Those who want to play for free, like myself, can do so, knowing that there is a limit to how far and fast they can progress within the game. But if you really want to play it on a competitive level, you essentially have to pay to win.
This means that the people who pay, practically finance those of us who want to play for free. This means expanded player base and competition, which makes the game more appealing to the competitive players, all the while providing immense profits for the developers. (In what was one of the most successful M&As of 2016-17 in the industry, the development company of this game was valued at USD800m according to some analyst reports.)
And here’s the catch 22: In order to make the competitive players pay more, the company is following a logic of constantly increasing the difficulty of the game, thus requiring the players to pay even more to win. And the way they are going about making the game more difficult, is by constantly creating exceptions to the “rules of the game” that they had originally set.
And so, as time passes, you can feel that something is loosening, wiggling, as if ready to collapse. In their quest to constantly ramp up the difficulty of the game, the developers kept creating exceptions to their own rules, and now there are exceptions of the exceptions, and exceptions of the exceptions of the exceptions, and so on and so forth. Oftentimes, those conflicting rules clash with each other, thereby causing the game to crash.
Nowadays, no one is happy: The developers are losing money because with the crashes people can’t buy, the hardcore players are getting angry because they bought in-game items that they cannot use, and free-to-play players are just leaving, thereby eroding the ever-important player base.
You don’t have to reinvent the wheel, day in and day out, but whenever you feel wiggly, lost, unsure about what to do next, perhaps it’s because it’s time to get back to the basics in order to maintain your balance.