In the NBA, you've "made it" the second you're drafted into the league.  You're signed to a 7-8 figure guaranteed contract.  Of course there's incentive to keep developing and eventually sign a 9 figure contract, but you are in an elite tier of earners starting very young, some as teenagers.  And winning honestly does not correlate to this income at all.  And so the only real drive to win for notable players is their innate competitive spirit.

I do quickly want to shout out Richard Jefferson for writing a fantastic piece about winning a championship for Cleveland.  It's a great read, but to be honest, I don't believe this level of emotional attachment is there for most players.

Back in the day, a big StarCraft II tournament could be half of a player's earnings for the year - could be way more honestly.  Victory and defeat felt more emotional because there were real, tangible effects to the players' lives.  You could fly to MLG and walk away with either $10k or $1k - and when your earnings for the year is on the magnitude of $50-100k, that is a substantial difference.  So your performance over time had an outsized impact on your income - for top players it could double, triple, even 10x over other players of similar skill if you won the right events.  Winning an NBA championship would not do this for the players, not even close.

Now this is also bad because it means professional esports players (most of them) lived inherently more unstable lives, where the outcomes were also highly skewed, some players could pull in $10k while others were winning $400k+.  A more managed ecosystem could ensure salaries and reduce a lot of stress that came with the lifestyle.

So it feels like a tradeoff between a stable, healthy ecosystem and more raw, emotional competition.  Obviously as your professional scene finds more success you lean harder into the latter for the wellbeing of the players, but you do lose something there.

One last example I think of is LCS, where at its peak the top players were signing 7-8 figure contracts, and every team had salaried players, and the league played in seasons.  And while it was very cool to see such a legitimized esports league, I often felt the same detachment from the players that I do with regular sports.

This genre gets more and more saturated every day, but for some reason it still feels like a massive growth lever for gaming to me.  I'm always eager to try out a new friendslop game, and I feel like there's still tons of space in my life for much more of them.  I've never played Roblox, but I imagine it's basically these style of games but community developed?  There is probably a huge market for games that are:

• cheap (<$10)
• adult-oriented (so not Roblox)
• online multiplayer (of course with proximity voice chat)
• extremely easy to play (no tutorial required)
• shallow or gimmicky (players can just jump in and play)

So the idea would be you come up with a core gimmick (climbing a mountain, selling drugs) and build a sandbox around that gimmick that you and your friends can have fun in.

Movie tickets are more than $10 at this point, so getting a even a few hours of fun from a $10 game is well worth it to me.  From my perspective, this seems like a much more sustainable model of game development - faster dev cycles, shorter time commitment from players.  As I've gotten older, I really do value less content in games - I want cheap games that I can try a lot of!  A 2-3 hour adventure feels a lot less daunting to start over a 40 hour JRPG.

Now, the ideal game I'd love to develop is not friendslop unfortunately, but as I think more and more about trying my hand at game development, I more and more think my first game should be something like that.

Instead of consuming all that crap, I'm hoping to actually start working out my writing muscle, and produce the kind of writing I miss running into on the internet.  I know it's still out there, and I want to contribute to it.  It kind of feels nice to have my own little site here in the corner of the internet where I can put up whatever I want.  And I would hate for my writing skills to atrophy as I just rely more and more on AI generated content.  Cause as we all know, writing is thinking.

I would love to make a game like this - if I did it would probably look like this:

• Based in the real world / a realistic setting.  Not something like yu-gi-oh where the fate of the world rests on playing cards or anything like that.  Instead, you're just some regular dude trying to be a progamer,  in a world like ours that doesn't care that much about progaming.  You would travel around the country, entering different tournaments.  Maybe money would be something you have to worry about.  There will be drama in the rivalries, but at the end of the day everyone realizes you're just some person playing video games.
• A simplified esport in the game.  Think of the esport being the "combat" of a more traditional RPG.  I loved all the handheld RPG games about tennis or yu-gi-oh.  I like when a story-heavy RPG can deviate from conventional turn-based fights.  I say "simplified" cause I imagine it would be difficult to essentially create 2 games in 1: an RPG and a ground-up, perfectly balanced esport. So I'd probably borrow heavily from other games for inspiration for this "esport".
• Feed into the fantasy of amateur turning pro.  I love basketball, and as a kid I used to dream of making it into the NBA. And so it always annoyed me that every NBA 2k story mode had to come up with some crazy alternative path for your character to make the NBA (remember NBA 2k18, where you were a DJ who got discovered in a made-up pro-am tournament?).  That, or they gloss over that rise from nobody, to notable prospect, to NBA draftee, to bench player, to starter, etc., etc.  I want to actively be a part of that rise.
• Relatively linear story.  It would be a crafted narrative with a set ending rather than something more open-world.  Think something like Pokemon or Inazuma Eleven - maybe parts of the adventure have some exploration/customizability.  But at the end of the day you're gonna have to get through a set group of opponents and rivals to beat the game.  In general I like stories in games, and I think that esports (and actually all sports for that matter) are a great stage for drama.

It looks impressively faithful, and that's...almost disappointing in a way.  I get reminded of all the Disney live action remakes that are trying to be too fanservice-y to the original.  Makes it feel like the remake lacks any sort of identity, like the director(s) had no creative freedom to try anything too new or different.  Like, the show clearly cared a lot about recreating the character's costumes and the different places and all that, but that makes it seem like this production was more mechanical than creative (how do we exactly emulate One Piece vs. what kind of One Piece story would work in live action).  As a result, they may end up making something that's good, not great.

I'm also reminded of the Nintendo remakes (Pokemon BDSP, Link's Awakening, etc.) that are literal square-for-square reproductions of the original game, just with new 3D models.  I would much rather a remake really try and mix some things up instead of just following it's predecessor 1:1.  I mean, for Pokemon BDSP I even think the original looks better and I would rather play it due to my nostalgia!  What was the point of the remake exactly?

Regardless of my trepidation, I'm pretty excited to see how this thing turns out and will definitely be watching it on the first day.

I find them kind of entertaining, but to be honest I don't think they're that useful to actually improve.

One of my favorite books on "performance mentality" is The Inner Game of Tennis.  The most memorable quote from that book for me is this:

Focus is not achieved by staring hard at something. It is not trying to force focus, nor does it mean thinking hard about something. Natural focus occurs when the mind is interested. When this occurs, the mind is drawn irresistibly toward the object (or subject) of interest. It is effortless and relaxed, not tense and overly controlled.

And actually there's a ton of these little quotable snippets throughout the book.  They all boil down to the same thing in essence: your body intuitively knows how to perform best.  And the best trick you can do is get your mind out of the way.

I think the same is true for gaming too.  Especially because a video game is supposed to be fun.  When I'm playing League, I don't want to be thinking hard about certain macro timings or how I should be positioning relative to my support.  And, honestly, when a tough fight breaks out, you can't really think hard about anything, you have to let your instincts kick in.

Instead, as you play games, you will naturally learn how best to play.  So you will likely learn much of the "essence" of these lessons by just playing the game & having fun with the intent to improve.

So I actually had high hopes when Velma was announced.  It seemed made for exactly someone like me, someone who really loves the Scooby Doo characters and universe, but who is also dying to see this IP juiced up with some really good, adult-oriented writing.  I actually also had faith in Mindy Kaling, as she was involved with another Netflix show I really liked (Never Have I Ever) and worked on another show I've never watched that apparently has gotten some critical praise (Sex Lives of College Girls).

Unfortunately, all that goodwill I had toward the show evaporated in the first 2 minutes of watching it.  It hit almost every WRONG beat.  A condescending opening speech by Velma.  Some terribly unfunny meta jokes.  Cockroaches having sex.  Wow.

The show gets right up in your face that Velma is an asshole.  First thing you see, she hits Daphne across the face with a cane.  Why the hell would she do that?  No explanation.  And this was after Daphne was acting unreasonably cruel to a friend.  Everyone in this show sucks and is needlessly mean (except Shaggy, I guess).  And it almost feel like they're playing this purely for laughs a la Family Guy.  I really hope that's not the case and these characters actually develop into more likeable people.  Cause right now they're unbearable.

This show is underpinned by a really mean spirit.  It's also obnoxiously irreverent, like they want to make it really clear they're trying to subvert the Scooby Doo concept.  And hey, I wanted them to subvert it, like I said, I want talented writers to try and stretch and mold the concept of Scooby Doo.  But I guess what's missing here is that the writers seem 1) not to be fans of Scooby Doo and 2) aren't talented enough for me to forgive that.  They don't seem to have a lot of respect for this property, which, while annoying, can be forgiven if the writing is compelling.  But so much of the writing and jokes fall really flat, so flat that I wonder what the writers' goal is.  Who are you trying to please with this show?

It's not all terrible at the very least.  The show is saved by the fact it has continuity, and a story.  I'm at least invested enough to see how the plot evolves episode-by-episode, with the hope that some of these fundamental problems will improve.  I actually did laugh at a few of the jokes too.

Anyway, I don't really have the talent or patience to tie this post together as a coherent essay.  So here's just a few other things I wanted to call out:

• Felt like they added nudity every 5 minutes.  Every time it was a joke that just didn't work.
• Open the damn gift from your mom Velma.  It's gonna be plot critical, and it's gonna be exasperating if they hold onto it until late into the season because Velma is an idiot.
• Fred has almost no connection to any of his past personality traits.  I get deconstructing a character, but right now he's just a massive asshole and an unfunny masculinity punch line.  I hope they have a plan for him that isn't this.
• Fred chopped a student's leg off - nobody cares and it's played as a joke.  Like I said, this show is irreverent, and details like this set a tone that's just not to my taste for Scooby Doo (again, Family Guy anyone?).
• Daphne being a drug dealer feels...tryhardy?  Similar to how I think Daphne's character has developed in broader media, where writer's are pushing her into more of a "girlboss" archetype.  This feels like that but, of course, with an "edgier" angle.  Meh.
• Shaggy is alright, but I'm not liking this whole romance with Velma angle.  Velma is completely unlikeable, why is he like this?  At least he's not a massive asshole like everyone else is.
• Voice acting is overall pretty good across the board.
• Did anyone else think the animation got weirdly choppy at times?  I especially noticed this in the alleyway scene with Velma and Fred.
• And, of course, there is no Scooby Doo.  Honestly doesn't bother me, doesn't feel like a harmful change.

Lastly, I just want to say that I do appreciate the creators making this show.  A lot of comments I read online say "Why'd they make it Scooby Doo?  Should've just made their own thing" but honestly I Velma infinitely more interesting because it's Scooby Doo rather than an original concept.  So despite my criticisms I am glad people made this show.  I like Scooby Doo, remember?