If it's in the game

Tonight I made a massive trade and picked up a cool 16 STEEM on the turn around. That's a cool $2.24 right there. Boom! Actually, I was glad that I was able to get anything on it as I had a sell set which got picked up near the top of the spike a few hours back and almost missed the buy back as I don't watch the charts often and was lucky to look not long after. It is trading up from there about 4 percent at the moment, but it looks like there might be another peak coming in. But what the hell do I know - so, don't listen to me.

My trading and the direction of the price have a magnetic attraction - the kind when two like poles approach each other - they repel. When I pick up, it goes down, when I pick down, it spikes. I have tried to do the opposite of what I planned to do, but the candle line sees me coming a mile away.

Trading isn't my strong suit, but I enjoy the emotional process of it as it helps me identify various feelings and work on my reactions to fear and loss. While there is a lot of people talking this and that, unless there is skin in the game it s hard to take them seriously. However, it doesn't take much skin, just enough to make the game feel real.

For a long time, resource management and allocation games have been popular and once upon a time back around the year 2000, I used to play Total Annihilation online - before I shifted over to Ghost Recon and wasted the next decade of my life pwning. We all know how invested gamers get and this is considering that for the most part, they have no skin in the game other than the purchase price and the immense amount of hours they have sunk into participating.

But, once enough is invested to make it feel real, the emotional wiring short-circuits and it is all-in and while people play for fun, they tend to spend a great deal of time shouting at screens, calling players who are better than them cheats and generally being rather foul. And remember, this is without having financial return on the table at all.

For first-person-shooters like I played, rounds are fast and hard and the strategy is a variation between run and gun and boring ass sniping who sit off in the distance waiting for the perfect shot as I sneak up and take their tags with my knife.

While I haven't gamed for about a decade now and am likely too old and slow to get back into FPS, I am not interested in playing Minecraft or something similar either because - it is pointless.

However... I am on Steem.

And, Steem has got to be by far the best gaming experience online as not only is it highly dynamic and strategic, it also allows for buying in, making profits and selling out. Unlike buying better weapons though, buying STEEM doesn't really upgrade much and it is still up to the individual player to use their resources well and because of the dynamic nature of the environment, this isn't easy - nor obvious. There are so many ways to play on the Steem blockchain and so many different approaches being used simultaneously that there will likely never be a perfect way to play.

There is no clocking Steem.

Steem is up until this point, the ultimate Sandbox game as it imposes very little restriction on the players and those it does are applied by the code to everyone uniformly. Essentially, Steem is unhackable and no one can cheat, though they can find loopholes in various forms and they can also play to the code in ways that other players are unwilling to for their own advantage. However, while there are benefits to take the darker path, there are drawbacks to that gaming style also as other players have tools at their disposal to combat them.

There is no clocking it because it is always evolving and changing based on the way people play and the code changes they support and this is performed by thousands of people through every small action they make, globally.

And then, there is the skin in the game component with essentially everyone having time, money or hope for the future invested into the blockchain, and this brings in emotional attachment and reactions to events, in the same way those FPS'ers cry cheat or look for ways to cheat of they don't have the skills themselves.

Unlike most games, when people play the Steem game they feel entitled to win.

It is interesting to think that most people who would start playing a new game would expect to have some kind of learning curve where they practice how to maneuver, use items or learn maps and features. People come onto Steem however and think that they can do what they always do and be able to not only get traction, but make significant earnings. What they fail to realize is that while there are similarities, there are also large differences to what they are familiar with on social media, namely the skin in the game aspect that is not present unless invested.

But everyone is invested on Steem, so all feel that they have skin in the game and due to the freedom the blockchain allows, feel they are entitled to post and act in any way and get support. Yes, you can do what you want, but if looking for resource support in the Steem game, you are either going to have to buy in first, or offer those with resources something to trade, something they find valuable - and not everyone is going to find the same things valuable. Best approach might be taking both paths, putting money where the game is and offering something that people like. If you prefer to offer obscure content and aggressive commentary, your "brilliance" is likely to be ignored.

That's not fair!!

Yeah, it isn't fair that I don't have the hand-eye coordination of my teens either, nor the ability to drink heavily and not have even the slightest of hangovers. Such is life. It is all part of the game and while I dislike the "Code is Law" justifications, the code can always be changed once there is enough of a push from the community to change it.

On Steem, If it's in the code, it's in the game.

While, All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players, the same can be said for the Steem game except their is an important distinction that has to be made. The players are not "merely" anything, *we are the game itself.

Still people do not seem to recognize that the entire value of Steem is in the people and how they use it. Whether it is add content, sell Steem, onboard from Twitter, write an application, start a Tribe, build a community, witness or do any number of an infinite range of things - all actions affect the ecosystem and all other players in some way.

What is interesting is that so many people look at the Steem ecosystem as a Sandbox like Minecraft, without recognizing that it extends out past the digital realm and into the real world where we live. This makes Steem a far more encompassing and complex than anything that has ever come before it - as it is a layer on top of what we are already living and it will slowly include more of the every day interactions that we are constantly performing daily, including the financial and economic transactions.

While not everyone sees Steem like a game and others don't take it seriously at all, for me as someone interested in life and future life it is the;

Best. Game. Ever.

Taraz
[ a Steem original ]