Silver Is Incompetence

Matins

There’s a heading in my journal from 9 April 2020. It’s in bold and it asks:

What would a good writer do?

Underneath, where you’d expect an answer, are two pages of sensitivity settings for Call of Duty: Mobile.

ADS: ×1.24. Sniper scope: 0.48. Tactical scope: something I’d rather not get into. I’d worked these numbers out over several evenings, with the patience of a monk copying scripture, and written them down so I’d never lose them. I’d also written the heading, presumably first, presumably meaning to write about writing.

I’ve read that page many times since. It’s the most honest thing in my journal. What would a good writer do? He’d adjust his sniper sensitivity, apparently, and then go to bed.

Lauds

I’m a managing director. I’m in my forties. I have two children, a running habit and a company with a payroll. I’ve read Marcus Aurelius. I’ve also uninstalled Mobile Legends more times than I can count.

For those of you lucky enough not to know it, Mobile Legends: Bang Bang is a game in which ten people, in two teams of five, try to destroy each other’s base from opposite corners of a small map. It’s played mostly by children. In Indonesia the word for these children is bocil, short for bocah cilik, “little kid”, and there are millions of them, and they’re very good, and they have nothing to do between three and nine in the evening.

I’m not a little kid. I play against them anyway, usually at night, usually telling myself “one match”. Nobody in the history of the game has ever played one match.

Prime

What I want to explain is the ranking system, because that’s where the trouble lives.

In Mobile Legends you start at the bottom and climb: Warrior, Elite, Master, Grandmaster, Epic, Legend and then, at the top, Mythic. Every new season the ranks partly reset and you have to climb again. It’s designed, in other words, by someone who has read the same psychology papers I have, and drew the opposite conclusion about what to do with them.

I reached Mythic. I’m not going to pretend I’m not proud of it, because I’m writing this essay, and that would be a lie, and I’ve tried to give up lying.

I was asked once why I bothered. My answer, which I wrote down because I was surprised to hear myself say it, was this:

I find silver or bronze as incompetence.

Mobile Legends doesn’t have a silver rank, or a bronze one. I brought my own. That’s how deep it goes.

Terce

Let me look at that sentence for a moment, the way you’d look at a mole that has changed shape.

I’ve written a list of principles for my life. It’s on this website, set in Bodoni with a big black band across the top, and near the end it says, in Indonesian, jangan judge. Don’t judge. Not all success comes from hard work. Not all failure comes from laziness. I believe that. I’ve hired and managed by it. When someone on my team misses a deadline, my first question is about what happened, not about their character.

And then at eleven o’clock at night, on a game for children, I look at my rank and think: silver is incompetence.

I don’t think that about anyone else, only about me, and only, apparently, in games. In real life I’m forgiving. In a game made for twelve-year-olds I behave like a Victorian headmaster with a cane.

Sext

Mobile Legends isn’t my only offence. For a while, during the pandemic, it was mechanical keyboards.

I ended up with, to use the technical term from my own notes, a “bajillion” of them. The real number is seventy-one. I know because there’s a database. It’s called Browntosaurus, it has a dinosaur emoji, and every keyboard gets a score built from aesthetics, typing feel, build quality, customisation and sound. Sound counts twice. I decided that, and I don’t remember why.

I also gave out medals, and the medals don’t agree with the scores. There are two golds. One of them went to a keyboard scoring 20, which is lower than my silver (22) and my bronze (23). The IBM Model F, from 1981, the keyboard people in this hobby talk about the way monks talk about the Gutenberg Bible, scores 24 and didn’t get a medal at all.

I can’t explain any of this. I built the system myself, with nobody watching, and I still couldn’t keep it consistent. (The whole sorry database is here.) The biggest source of stress in my 2021 annual review, above work and the pandemic, was “keyboard-related debt.”

I’d like you to read that phrase again, slowly, and then picture me at a family dinner explaining it.

It was the same machinery each time. There was something with levels that I could rank, and a voice in my head telling me that the bottom rungs are for people who aren’t trying.

None

Here’s the worst thing I’ve ever done in a game, and I wrote it down at the time, laughing.

My son Zen and I were playing Mario Party. If you don’t know Mario Party, it’s a board game on a screen, full of luck, built so that families can play together and nobody can be too good at it. Zen was winning. Zen should have won. He had played better all evening. And then, in the last turn, I landed on a space that let me steal his stars.

I took them. I won.

My notes from that night say, and I quote: Zen howling and cry. Hahaha.

I’ve read that entry many times. It’s in the same journal as the principles. Jangan judge. Hahaha.

Vespers

I know what’s going on. I’ve known for years. I even wrote it down once, with the clarity of a man who has just uninstalled something: I’m battling companies engineering the dopamine effect. There are buildings full of very smart people whose job is to make me play one more match. I’m one man with a phone, a family and a bedtime. It’s not a fair fight. Every time I delete the game, I’m declaring victory in a war I’ve already lost several times.

But the companies aren’t the whole story, and I think I’ve been hiding behind them.

The real problem is the judge. Somewhere inside me there’s a small, very strict man who looks at a silver badge and sees a moral failing. I’ve managed to keep him away from my team, my friends, my children’s homework, and the strangers who cut me off at traffic lights. I just never got him out of the house. He lives in my phone and he only judges me.

Compline

This is where an essay like this is supposed to end with a resolution. I uninstall the game, I run in the morning, I write instead of aim. A good writer would do that.

What I can tell you is smaller. I’ve uninstalled Mobile Legends again. I don’t know for how long. I’ve written this down, which is how I usually try to make things stick, and the record shows that it usually doesn’t.

But I’ve started saying something to the judge. When I see a number next to my name, any number, whether it’s a rank, a pace, a revenue figure or a weight, I try to say to myself the thing I’d say to anyone on my team.

Silver isn’t incompetence. Silver is a man who went to bed on time. Silver is a father who let his son win at Mario Party, or would have, if he were a better man.

I’m not sure I believe it yet. But I’ve set it here in the most serious typeface I could find, the one they used for Bibles, and I’m hoping some of that rubs off.