I speak of Dragon Warrior IV (from 1991).
And this early RPG (role playing game) is in my humble, but accurate, opinion a power education in business, marketing, selling, copywriting, and even World-Building skills. Willis will be introduced to it when he’s a little older. And I still play it myself when I want to learn a new skill or get a deeper understanding of a skill I already possess.
Reason why is, it teaches, almost by “osmosis” via playing it, skills like:
1. Thinking strategically v just tactically
2. Patience
3. Storytelling
4. Playing blackjack (a game many wealthy people play, not a coincidence)
5. World-Building
6. The dangers of not vetting strangers you let in to your own business community
7. The plight of customers/clients who are abducted by other businesses
8. The inherent flaws in farming off decision-making to so-called AI (see below)
9. Buying & reselling to make money when starting out with nothing (one of the characters you play is a family man & merchant named Taloon, who literally starts with $0, and you have to buy and sell, and use patience, to get good deals to build up his experience)
10. Disarming enemies/trolls with humor
11. The silliness & dangers of girl bossing
12. Dealing with the frustrations of being randomly attacked when going after a goal
13. The importance of building up the ‘scar tissue’ of experience to get things done correctly
14. Why people irrationally obsessed with the theory of evolution can’t be trusted
15. How to work within a team so everyone’s strengths are accentuated, and their weaknesses put aside
16. The importance of comedy in life
17. The utter time suck of going after elusive bright shiny objects vs focusing on your Mission
There are more.
But I can say without any exaggeration that playing this game has amped up my business, marketing, copywriting, and even Options trading skills. And yes, it also gave me a very early-in-life distrust of so-called AI.
How?
Because the game forces its AI on you to play the characters at a certain point.
In other words:
Your party gets attacked, and it’s idiotic AI plays all the characters except the main one, and takes the decisions (and all the fun) away from you. But, what I have been doing for years is, I used the old Game Genie to hack the game to make my own decisions with those characters, to make it all go a lot better, more smoothy, more successfully.
So-called AI is a great super calculator-like tool which it is by its own admission.
But you got people literally letting it write their ads and tell them what to do.
Or, even more amusingly, even try to start relationships with it.
I just saw a social media post about this, where the guy was literally bragging about using AI to talk to his customers to grow relationships.
I have also recently heard goo-roos are letting it write their customer testimonials too.
All of which has me thinking on something James Cameron said recently.
He has been running around saying he tried to “warn” us about so-called AI in 1984 with Terminator.
But I don’t think he has much to worry about with that.
The world is far more likely to look like Idiocracy than Terminator.
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Ben Settle
