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Numbers Go Up

There’s a genre of computer games called incremental games, whose entire design philosophy can be summarized as, “numbers go up.” These games focus on the fundamental gaming loop rather than plot, characterization or anything beyond the foundational satisfaction of numbers increasing. The initial idea here was social commentary exposing the addictive core of many games, but like all good commentary it’s also inadvertently spawned the genre of gacha games that focus on extracting revenue from addicted gamers.

This is personal vanity, I imagine it’s a fairly small club to have two books reach 1,000+ ratings ( An Elegant Puzzle got there a year or two ago), but there’s something therapeutic about numbers going up. I think about that a lot when I lurk in Reddit’s r/fatFIRE where people debate whether or not it’s possible to retire on $10m–it’s clear that many folks in there are psychologically dependent on the comfort of numbers going up. That’s a big part of why I started looking in 2022 for a more meaningful way to set targets for my work, and eventually landed on the idea of “ advancing the industry.” That goal hasn’t been as perfectly illuminating as I’d initially hoped, but it has been useful.

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