Gacha Thinking
I have a confession; I’m a writer who hasn’t written anything in years. It’s been a long time since I’ve even wanted to write anything. It’s easy to blame life’s many chaotic needs and whims, but the honest truth is I haven’t really had the inspiration to write. A colossal, on-going battle with my physical and mental health has contributed much to this period of stagnation, but the truth is, I just didn’t want to write.
So now the obvious question is, why today? Well, it’s November 2nd, and this was the year I decided I was going to get back into writing. I made plans to do this hip thing from a decade or two ago called NaNoWriMo and was going to do it all official. Searched for it…and then spent some time reading up on, well, iykyk.
It was a minor setback. Honestly, not even a setback. I don’t need a website or a community to write. But it was all the self-doubt needed. I felt that cold ache of meaninglessness and futility seeping into the pores of my mind. I felt myself curling up in the comfort of that familiar but useless comfort of apathy and for the first time in awhile, I actually felt repulsed. I didn’t want to quit. I just didn’t know how to overcome the years of rust and neglect in which my mind was now caked. I needed a plan.
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Plans have never been my strong suit. Not because I don’t like a good plan; I mean who doesn’t like when a plan comes together? See, my problem with plans is that I don’t deal well with interruptions and chaos within my plans. This is rather funny to me, even as I type this and have known this about myself for years, now, because as a DM for my friend/D&D group for many years, I often found myself having to be very quick on my feet with my mind as my players would often find ways to disrupt the adventure by doing something I hadn’t forseen at all (such as the time my players abandoned the main story because a dwarf in the party found a special axe and decided he had to drop everything to return it to his ancestral home and the rest of the party felt that helping him with this was the better course of action).
So that leads me to the title: Gacha Thinking. If you are into mobile games at all, you know there’s several genres within mobile games and one such type is called gacha. If you’re unfamiliar with the term or the genre, it was a type of toy machine popular in Japan in the 1960s called gachapon. You’d put in your money and you’d get a capsule every time; the only question is, would your capsule contain one of the common toys or did it contain one of the rare toys that were more valuable? Now we have mobile games that have weaponized-err…utilized that gambling-adjacent thrill by letting you summon monsters to use in battles, but the monsters are random. Once in a while, you get that really rare, really awesome monster, but most of them are the ho-hum boring variety. If you’re familiar with Pokemon, imagine every time you encounter a pokemon, it *COULD* be a Dragonite or even a Mewtwo, but it’s probably just a Weedle or a Rattata.
One common theme to almost all of these gacha games is the idea of slow, steady progression. Just recently I found myself making tweaks in one of my accounts to some monsters; change the gear, give them some additional perks, etc. Now I’ve managed to clear a lot more content than I was able to previously. But it took time. It’s been a few months since the last time I was able to progress. But that’s the way these gacha games are. You summon the monsters, you farm the gear, and eventually you improve the teams and you improve their gear, and now you’re able to complete harder content. It’s a slow, laborious grind that pays off with a feeling of sublime achievement. Don’t get me wrong, it is: I’ve spent many hours repeating runs and farming gear, trying to improve on what I already have. But there’s something satisfying about using a combination of luck and skill to make steady improvements and progress.
So now, as I find it hard to get back into writing, I’m recalling my recent improvements and now I’m going to try to implement that same mindset to my writing: Gacha Thinking. Just like I can’t defeat the hardest content of any of these gacha games within the first few days or weeks (months, in many cases!), I also cannot complete a novel in one sitting. I need to use my Gacha Thinking and realize that it’s all about the small bits of progress. Lots of grinding in an effort to attain any improvement, no matter how small. Because in the end, luck only gets us so far; it’s all about how we gear up and play that determines if we have fun or not.
J.L. Ford
