Gaming Personality vs Investing Style

Does one's gaming proclivities correlate to how one behaves as an investor? At first glance, how one gallops around Red Dead shooting O'Driscolls to steal their petty cash, whiskey and tobacco seems far, far removed from how one manages a tax-sheltered 401K account.  Are there raw personality traits underlying your gaming habits that shape the way you deal with money?  And can you take advantage of such insight to become a better investor?

To answer at least at a shallow level, I'm going to brandish that old trout, Bartle's taxonomy of player types.  This 23 year old classification of player preferences for multi-player gaming while crude is still a useful model to begin our analysis.

1. achiever - those who are motivated by mastery, leveling up, completion
2. explorer - those who delight in exploring the game world esp. glitches and breaking the game.
3. socializer - those who just wanna hang out with friends and others. Apparently socializers(90%) are the most numerous on this earth attesting to the booming MMO platforms like Fortnite and PUBG.
4. killer -  "To crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women!" A good killer thrives on friendly competition and there is a smidgeon of competitive spirit in all gamers. On the dark side are griefers killing fun for everyone with their potty mouth and obnoxious attacks. Aha! Are shorters the griefers of the stock market? It's not evil to short TSLA.

Clearly not an achiever.  200 hours without progress is fine by me since I use FO4VR as a construction sim.  To be fair my modding blocks achievements- I wasn't motivated enough to put in achievement restore mod.

Understanding Bartle's classifications can shed light on what type of games you may enjoy.  As a kid, the first thing I would do when I started a new driving game was to try to veer off the road or bash into the other cars to see what happens; I wasn't as interested in playing the game as in breaking it.  Open world single player sandbox RPGs are my favorite type of game where you can noodle around without finishing the mainline quest, never bothering being the Dragonborn or finding Ciri or Shaun(**).  But a conventional successful investing strategy(dollar cost averaging of low cost index funds) requires a grindy disciplined approach.

Only in writing this post I realize my skewed explorer personality has been detrimental to investment since I lack discipline and interest in the core.  I am prone to going down rabbit holes since I find nuggets of knowledge to be the reward. Hence I got naturally attracted to alternative investing- p2p, crypto, and closed end funds.  Although I made some money in p2p and CEFs, (yes I lost money in crypto, some had to when billions vanished), in hindsight I should have spent my energies establishing my conventional market portfolio before dabbling in the peripheries.

I can see clearly I'd be a better investor with some harmonious sprinkling of achiever dust.  But how to force one's self to go down a path of achievements if not intrinsically motivated that way?   I will have to save this for a later post as I only have a small clue. Explorers are motivated by gleaning pragmatic working knowledge or exploring hidden parts of the world which will I have to use against myself to make progress.  Suggestions are welcome.

How about social aspects? Does being more sociable about investing lead to a more profitable outcome? That blade cuts both ways depending on who you socialize with and at worst can stoke foolish FOMO leading to bad trades.  How can you participate socially for a better investment outcome? Is it better not to mix friendship and money since potential investment losses could burden a friendship? So many questions to be examined.  Unfortunately Bartle's models center on player motivation and also don't reveal much about investor risk tolerance which we will have to revisit from a different gaming angle.

Definitely I lack a killer instinct and I'm perfectly happy with subpar returns if investments are in line with my skewed morals.  Competitiveness can be a dangerous combustible ingredient in personal investments esp. when FOMO is involved as seen in the Crypto bubble last year.

I thank you for joining me this far. Now time to go play.

** Okay okay, I did find Shaun in FO4VR only because I wanted to see the Institute and the synth fabricator in Fallout 4 VR made it totally worth it.  At first it's mesmerizing to see bones, nerves and skin being 3d printed and dipped in a red viscous vat to produce a fully functioning humanoid. But you realize that production of 2 humans per minute even at 8 hours a day means 960 synths a day and all of Fallout 4 food production can't support half that number. Math is always such an immersion killer.