Tuesday, June 24, 2014

To HS or not to HS (and other things)

This post will be relatively more personal than the rest and I don't really have a plan for it but let's see where it goes.

I'm about to move to Mumbai in a few days time and since I had a minor surgery in my leg, I can't wear footwear and thus I'm mostly limited to my house and nearby places. I've been playing a LOT of Hearthstone, the CCG (Collectible Card Game) from Blizzard and it's a pretty interesting game and there'll be a future post on the relationship between financial careers and HS (Hearthstone). I've also been playing quite a bit of guitar, and I finished Season 4 of GoT a couple days after the last episode came out.

So here I am, a guy who can do relatively large number of things for my entertainment (not going to mention all of it)- things which obviously help me socialise, think deeper and mostly just get rid of boredom. This might seem obvious, but all of my skills in doing any of these things (I've become pretty good at HS by the way) will not help me get the basic necessities in life. I don't really have problems feeding myself or getting a place to live, so it's not too much of an issue, but it's more of an issue for me than it is for a richer guy. From childhood, I've always found it easier to connect with kids who are considerably richer than I am, thanks to the slightly high level interests that I've developed- things like gaming and music and movies and football and so on and in an in depth way as well. An average guy with my level of monies would probably focus more on knowing the city more or finding out places where things are cheap etc., watching some local movies and watching IPL- to be honest I don't even know for sure, but I do know that the interests would differ by quite a bit.

Hence the question of morality- is it justified for a poor dude to have high level interests, if he is unable to make money out of these interests? The HS community itself has several interesting people- most of them players of course. A guy called Trump (TrumpSC on all major social media places) is kind of humble and really dedicated to playing HS. He does have other interests like playing Poker, but he's pretty dedicated to HS and he makes quite a bit of money. The average twitch stream of around 2 hours gets him around 700-800$ through jsut donations by viewers (My guess) and add to that the money from youtube views and twitch views and winnings from tournaments and appearances in tourneys etc. and you get a decent amount of money- definitely comparable to a day job(he's a management/finance graduate) and he obviously has a lot of flexibility and the added bonus that he loves his work. The average HS professional is however more like Kripparrian (his id on all major networks is the same) who is a bit of an asshole but in a nice way, rich enough to not need the money out of HS, but makes a decent amount anyway. Krip plays a wide variety of games like WoW and Diablo 3 and his networking skills enable him to be invited to host most important HS tournaments across the world- which don't pay much, but he doesn't really need the money anyway. The question of morality is irrelevant to both of them because Trump makes enough money out of it and Krip doesn't really need it anyway. Thus, is it OK for the average dude to 'waste' hours developing such obscure interests when he can just watch a few bollywood movies and learn some item numbers, watch some IPL etc. in order to be socially relevant.

I guess it's not really about being socially relevant. People do these things mostly out of their interest and if it becomes socially relevant, then- great! DOTA for instance I started playing for fun, but I made at least a couple dozen friends with the only real connection being DOTA. Secondly and more importantly, there should always be a limit to these side interests, especially the obscure ones. It's OK for a guy to skip work if India was playing in the Cricket World Cup final the previous night, since most colleagues might doe the same in India. But it's not OK to skip work because the last episode of a GoT season came out late night the previous night- I hope you get the drift. Also, as long as these interests don't majorly affect your actual job (or studies if you're not working right now), it doesn't really matter too much. Instead of doing A or B you can always do A and B. I myself am too lazy for this of course and I therefore would always do things the 'or' way- especially when I'm in Trivandrum. But, as work starts, hope to do more work and less play! Alright, back to some more Hearthstone.

Kripp's channel- https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCeBMccz-PDZf6OB4aV6a3eA
Trump- https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCsQnAt5I56M-qx4OgCoVmeA

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