Having transitioned from a gamer to a capitalist, I now aim to bridge the gap between these two worlds. My extensive gaming experience, from competitive Minecraft to Dota and the Roguelike genre, has equipped me with a unique perspective. I hope to use this perspective to guide gamers who see the game in everything and understand capitalism.
Get Verification Checkmark
After being a gamer for 10 years I got bored and I wanted something new. All MOBA games were looking the same. All shooters were looking full of cheaters and Chines superhumans. All roguelikes were amazing, but there were a few of them… That is when I decided to play some capitalism. Surprisingly the game is really well designed. I never played Zelda but I have heard of its system of open world where everything is open, but you still need some tools to complete specific puzzles. Same way here, you can fly to California any day, but will you win California? No, unless you have enough skills.
Skills are getting learned through certification and experience. I am a huge supporter of certificate-less education, but that is not how capitalism works, just give up and accept it. Your resume is your character profile, the unique mechanism of capitalism is that you can write anything you want in your profile, and depending on what you wrote you will look cringe or smart. Sometimes it makes sense to master a skill of Writing which will allow you to create impressive resumes even without having no skills to put in there. What an interesting mechanic isn’t it?
As this article is oriented toward gamers, most probably you wanna deal with computers in the future. You wanna be software engineers, game designers, product managers, paid beta testers, bloggers, streamers whatever. So for most of them, you need to learn some skills first. Unless your family has a big name there is a pretty conventional path for learning skills - college. You can choose a less conventional path like self-learning which I successfully utilize but we will talk about IMBA strategies in further blogs. The certification is a fun thing, it is like someone now gives you a verified checkmark on your profile. We love verified checkmarks in capitalism. We love them so much that Twitter started selling them for money. We love them so much that even if it gives us nothing, we will spend 4 hours verifying our documents to get one.
The bolder the verification checkmark the better. There are 150k colleges in the world and every one of them can give you a checkmark of a “Software Engineer”, but each of them has a different power. Your local village college probably won’t let you apply to work with Apple. Do you think it is inequality? Think more, because Apple gets 10k applicants each month, why would he even consider hiring something who is not from Harvard if he can hire everyone from Harvard for the same price and save tons of time on talking to 9999 other candidates?
College is not the only place that gives you verification checkmarks. Another way is online courses which are perfect for mid and late-game, but a lot of early gamers from 3d world countries abuse them making them lose their verification power. After finishing college and finding a job - the mind game starts and that is when you wanna do courses. Before that, their verification power will be close to 0.
The most powerful verification checkmark in my opinion is a job. If you got accepted to some job as a software engineer you automatically get verified, even if you had no past verifications Which are again IMBA, early employment is an actual cheat code. Abuse before it got fixed by regulators. The verification power of the job also will have different power. If you started your own “Make World Better” startup, spend the evening looking at Miro with a serious face, and brainstorming how to solve global crisis you are not yet verified as a startup founder. There has to be a third person involved in the job who will be in the role of verifier.
If talking about founders, you get verified after your startup gets investments or finds product market fit. If it got none of them - don’t even mention it in your resume, it will just let employers know that you have nothing better to tell them about except failed idea. It is really important to get verified early, so find a job in an already existing company, the bigger company name the better. You may not start from Google, but once you received verification from your local company and worked there for some time you have great chances to work with Google, cause now you are officially Software Engineer.
There are tons of other ways of getting verified like seeking testimonials, getting internships, writing articles, speaking at conferences, etc. But those are additional mechanics which will be a great addition to your core verifications but can’t replace them.
Capitalism is coop
There is one interesting game which is illustrating the importance of collaboration in capitalism using game theory, check it out here - The Evolution of Trust (ncase.me).
The idea of that game is that in a big world with 8 Billion people, the best strategy for interpersonal communication is collaboration. You have to collaborate with everyone you see because the people you see are your teammates, on your opponents. Your opponents are people whom you don’t see. There are only 20 potential software engineers in your CS class. Well, you may think that you don’t wanna divide jobs with them. However, there are 12 000 more engineers who study in other colleges who will be cooperating and who will together still your jobs.
I recently moved to India and I see collaboration being super undervalued. I understand how crowdy this place is and that from a young age, you see too many people and too less resources and you think that the only way is to be competitive. However, if you collaborate with every person you meet they will collaborate with you and as a result, your “team” will win over everyone else. That is a predominant strategy in capitalism and the moment you realize it will be the moment you start playing better.
There are not many people who will be in your team, but the stronger team you have the better for you. You definitely heard of the phrase the average net worth of your friends in your net worth. Yeah, that is how it works, but it doesn’t mean you have to chase high-net-worth individuals, accept friends you have and make them wealthy together with you. help them complete assignments, help them find jobs, and help them with household stuff. With every such interaction, there will be loyalty which you earn from this person.
Loyalty is a measurement that is not directly visible anywhere but it is changing everything. In video games, you may establish some good relationships with a seller so that you get a discount. In Stardew Valley you can donate some crystals to the museum for nothing and there is no measurement for that, but people still do it, because they understand that loyalty to a museum guy is much more important than 200 gold from that crystal. Once the loyalty is established you can expect that person to trust you and help you in any situation you will need help with. Also, it will increase your luck.
The Pseudo Random
Capitalism is a game of luck. However, it is a pseudo-random, which means, you can impact it with your actions. There are strategies that you may apply to increase your luck and coop is the best out of all of them. Luck is when you randomly meet some guy in Starbucks and he gives you a job. Luck is when you join a startup in the early stages and then it becomes a unicorn. Luck is when you write a blog post and it goes viral. You can increase the amount of luck by increasing throughput. Going out more, joining different groups, and writing more articles. But your throughput is still limited. You can increase your throughput by hiring someone or, by making loyal friends who will also be generating luck and sharing it with you.
Think of it as a clicker, where you can spawn auto clickers or farms which will click slower than you but still will give some offline benefits. You can't win auto clicker without those.
Conclusion
The interesting part is that Verification, coop, and pseudo-random are looped.
If you get great verification, you will be able to cooperate with great people and you will be able to generate tons of high-quality luck. If you cooperate with a great person, you will be able to get verification which will lead to more cooperation and more luck. If you get lucky at the beginning, you will immediately get verification which will again lead you to cooperation and more luck.
This thing can go pretty exponentially if you have the right strategy. Capitalism is much more like Zelda or WOW and much less like Dota 2 or CS GO. The world is open, resources are infinite, and you just have to get verified, collaborate, and generate luck. Easy enough to win, isn’t it?