If you’ve ever spent some time with me that isn’t in the middle of class, chances are more likely than not you’ve seen something on my phone looking like this. 

What we see here is a screen that has become all too familiar to me over the past 7 years. Many people have asked me what game I’m playing or what it is, so what better place to answer every question possible (and more) then right now. 

 

This screen is a gameplay screenshot of Dragon Ball Z: Dokkan Battle. Now, as you may have established already, this is a complete nerd game (it’s based off of anime). I have linked an hour long video explaining the mechanics of the game if you’re really that curious, but I will also break it down for those who don’t have an hour to spare. There are two phases of the game, the gameplay phase, and the “summoning” phase. The gameplay phase is relatively simple: you click the little orbs and you try and kill the enemy characters before they kill you. The “summoning” phase might be a bit more familiar. The overall structure of the “summoning” phase is one called “gacha”, which essentially entails using in game currency (that can also be purchased in mass amounts for actual money) to roll a chance to get certain characters (think Clash Royale or loot boxes as an example). You use the characters that you get in the summoning phase to beat bosses in the gameplay phase in exchange for in game currency that you can use to continuously summon new characters in the summon phase and so on. 

 

So, why in the world would I decide to spend 7 years of my life (and an unholy amount of time) playing what seems like a very simple, predatory, money grubbing game.

 

The answer to that question is pretty simple: I was an addict. A gambling addict.

 

As a 10 year old, the adrenaline rush I would get when I pulled a rare character gave me an unmatched sense of euphoria. I would put hours and hours into Dokkan, grinding out the raw materials to summon again and again, each and every time looking for that same feeling. The issue was that I never had the time to truly invest into the game, so that meant that the amount of chances I would get to even try to summon a character would become even more sparse, thus making each successful summon all the more greater.

 

However, the main issue with basing my personal happiness and satisfaction off of a black box spitting out probabilities is that sometimes, probabilities just don’t work out great. While perhaps it is true that the law of large numbers exists, that is completely contingent on me doing lots and lots of samples in order to activate the low (5%) chance of pulling a rare character, and as I have already established, I had very few chances to do so. I also had zero money to spend, so forcibly buying in game resources was also not an option. The final nail in the coffin to these two facts are that I have the worst game luck ever known to man. So, just like that, after a few years of sweating super hard, trying my best to keep chasing the feeling and joy of pulling rare characters, I gave up. I determined that it was no longer worth it to keep playing, as I could enjoy other games which did not require the time sink that Dokkan did.

So how did I go from giving up the game to playing it today? The answer is high school, specifically COVID. At the beginning of high school, my parents got me my first phone. Prior to this, I had a tiny old little iPad in which my parents, in typical asian parenting fashion, would not let me have on the weekends, but a phone, that they wouldn’t take away. So armed with this newfound power, and inspired by some dude I saw in the hallway playing Dokkan, I determined it was the perfect time to start playing again. What I have not explained yet is the system of “dailies” in Dokkan. Dokkan, as with most mobile games, heavily rewards daily logins and playtime, meaning that me not being able to log in and play daily before receiving a phone was a primary reason as to why I could summon so little, but now that had all changed. After a year and a half of not playing, I had so much more to do, and so many more resources to summon with. My addiction came back harder than the 2016 Cavaliers. 

 

Then came COVID. 

 

Being stuck at home all day meant there was zero reason to not play every single day. Don’t tell my sophomore year teachers, but I would straight up ignore class and play Dokkan instead. I would watch tons of YouTube content on the game while simultaneously logging in thousands of hours over the course of the 18 month COVID period. I think the first time I left my house after the restrictions died down for a reason that wasn’t athletics was to go to my friend’s house all the way by Nequa so I could play Dokkan with him in person. Even now, I think my login streak is the 900s, and honestly, I think I will probably play this game all throughout university.

(me playing Dokkan during Hoco)

 

The only main thing that is different now than from 7 years ago is the fact that I now hate summoning. As I said before, probabilities can be brutal, and nowadays, I am much more addicted to the novelty of new characters than the actual act of summoning, so at least there’s proof that I’m not a total gambling addict.

Very ominous title, I know. But I promise, this isn’t anything bad, it’s just really embarrassing on my part, but this blog is due and I might as well put this out into the world. 

 

Back in middle school, around the end of 6th grade and the start of 7th grade, all of my classmates were obsessed with this one website, Quora. I had never heard of this website before, but I was curious to find out, and so after a quick google search in the middle of class, I was logged into Quora.

 

For those of you who don’t know, Quora is basically just an online question and answer site, only really used by the vast majority of people when looking something very obscure up. However, a bored, kind of sheltered asian child in 7th grade does not belong in the same cohort as the vast majority of people, and so I went in deep. 

 

7th grade me had never used social media before, and so the dopamine hit that I got seeing numbers like upvote and follower count go up (even though it was just my friends giving me support) was unmatched. So, me being the muppet that I was, decided to keep chasing that high. I kept answering questions, trying to rack up social media points only to be disappointed when I would get 1 upvote (from myself) on an answer after an entire week. So I decided to go study the Quora meta. 

 

All the popular answers I saw on the for you page were long, they told interesting stories, they had pictures and humor and creativity. Again, I was a sheltered 12 year old so I didn’t exactly have a lot of stories to tell, much less the writing capability to make my meager stories interesting. What made this even more frustrating was that my classmates, who were also all over Quora, did have the rhetoric and wealth of stories to tell that garnered lots of attention. A friend of mine had an absurdly viral post (I’m talking like a hundred thousand upvotes), another classmate got followed by huge personalities on Quora at the time, others would only use Quora once or twice a month but gain huge numbers regardless. 

 

I was jealous.

 

I wanted the same clout as my classmates. I wanted to prove that I could write just as good as them. I didn’t want to feel inferior, and so I decided to change up my approach. 

The issue with what I was writing was that I was writing two or three sentence answers with awful grammar and zero pictures(I wrote an answer about this, you don’t need to read it). If you look at any popular Quora answer, all of those things that I mentioned are nonexistent traits unless the person writing the answer already has a big following. So once I implemented those changes, 1 or 2 upvotes turned to 10 or 12, but 10 or 12 wasn’t the hundred or even thousand that I was looking for. So I made an even more fundamental change: what I was writing about.

 

Instead of trying to come up with a story or attempt to make a funny response, I decided to instead focus in on what I knew a lot about at the time: anime, specifically Naruto. Essentially, I dedicated myself and my account into answering as many Naruto questions as I could in hope of monopolizing the Naruto question and answer market.

I would write at least one or two answers a day, some being easily 1000+ words filled with pictures and hyperlinks and everything else that I could think of. The opportunity cost of this time was a pretty significant slide in my grades, which my parents were very unhappy about but I didn’t care. I needed that clout.

 

Thankfully, my time wasn’t completely wasted. My numbers would slowly go up, a dozen followers turned into a hundred. A thousand views turned into a hundred thousand, which turned into millions. My average upvote count went from 10 to twenty to thirty and so on. I even had a couple of answers break out of the usual anime sphere and go on to gain a couple thousand upvotes. I was on the leaderboards for most viewed anime writers. The cherry on top of it all was when I received a random DM on Quora, only for me to open it up and find out that I had been designated a top writer for Quora in 2018.

I had achieved everything I had set out to do and more. The only issue was that it came at the cost of a lot of time. As I said before my grades slipped, but there was also more than that. I was forsaking going out and doing other (probably more important) activities. Extracurriculars, hanging out with my friends, studying, etc. So by the end of 7th grade, I decided that in the best interests of myself, I would stop writing on Quora. I deactivated my account, and moved on with my life. But looking back (past my very cringy answers), I had a lot of fun. I experimented with my writing styles and learned a lot about how to actually write something decently coherent. I haven’t gone back to write anything on Quora at all, but I have used it to do some research on colleges, so I guess that’s useful.

 

Also, I’m realizing right now that these blog posts are awfully similar to Quora answers, so there’s food for thought.