The Gunn Show - 9.9.24
On what Madden's 'Superstar' mode misses about the reality - and necessity - of trade-offs.
Hey Everyone!
Welcome back to The Gunn Show. A day late here as a function of some travel over the weekend/today, but hope you all had a fantastic Labor Day weekend and carried that momentum into the short work week.
I was able to spend the week back home in Dallas in advance of heading out to Arizona for our three week Instructional League, and flew to Charlotte to watch the Vols dominate NC State in Bank of America Stadium, home of the (once) proud Carolina Panthers. It was a collision of two worlds with having spent countless Sundays growing up making the trek east from Kingsport, TN to the Queen City to watch the Panthers play.
With both NCAA and NFL football back in full force, it is not lost on me that Tennessee is likely the best team that will inhabit the South sideline benches (where the Panthers normally sit) for the 2024-2025 season. Saturdays will be fun this year….. Sundays, not so much. Oh well. On to a tune up game in Knoxville against Kent State next week to set up what I think will be the defining game of the Tennessee schedule this year - Oklahoma on the road in Norman. Looking forward to a big one two weeks from now and the trash talk to come (looking at you, Gels).
As promised last week, back to sharing some more in depth thoughts on a topic I’ve been thinking about: how changing inputs doesn’t always give you the outputs you expect. I’ve taken to calling this the ‘Superstar Slider Fallacy’ (borrowed from the Madden NFL video game) and think it is a great example of the importance of understanding the inter-connectedness of systems, and subsequently how we need to think carefully about what trade-offs are worth making.
Let’s get to it.
- CG
Thinking - The Superstar Slider Fallacy
If you are anything like me and grew up in what I would consider the golden age of video games (circa 2000-2010), you’ve likely spent some time at one point or another playing EA Sports Madden NFL. It is one of the most iconic sports video games of all time and the longevity of its success speaks loudly to the quality of its design.
One of my favorite components of single player gameplay in Madden has always been the Superstar mode, where rather than taking control of an individual franchise you are instead tasked with taking control of an individual player. With the goal of guiding a self-created player from rookie to NFL legend, you become responsible for every aspect of his character - from his name, to his position, the team he plays for, and even specific components of his skillset.
The last piece is ultimately what Superstar mode is all about. How do you make a better performing player? Simple - you change the quality of his attributes underneath the hood. Want to make a better quarterback? Enhance his throwing accuracy and decision-making. Want a more dynamic wide receiver? Bump up his speed and explosiveness, and sprinkle in some enhanced catching abilities on top.
Since the inception of the mode, Madden has always represented the attributes of a player in the same way: ‘slider’ bars for each individual trait that range numerically from 1-99. The number on the slider contextualizes the overall quality of each individual skill, such that the higher the number the better that specific skill will perform when game time arrives. Each player is then given an overall ‘grade’ that stems from the sum combination of each individual attribute, making a pretty clear recipe for success: increase the sliders for each skill, increase the total talent of your player.
Yet while the road to greatness in Superstar mode follows a pretty clear blueprint, improving your player’s skillset doesn’t come for free - you have to earn it. To do so requires that you build up XP (experience points) by putting your player to the test by way of games, training camps, and various other events. The more objectives you complete as you play with your character, the more XP you’ll earn. And only once you have acquired a necessary level of XP can you then alter the individual attributes of your player.
One of the beautiful things about Superstar mode is how closely the process of upgrading your player mimics the acquisition of skills in real life. So much so, in fact, that we can say the two recipes are actually but one and the same: put in the work, earn insights from your experience, and then use those insights to refine and sharpen your skills. Unfortunately, the game of life doesn’t come with an XP bar hanging over each of our heads to track our progress like in Madden, but we can be confident that the same underlying principle of effort applies: the more effort you put into something, the better you tend to get at it.
And although Madden’s Superstar mode provides a great proxy for the process of growth in real life, there is one specific area in which it does not get the story quite right: when you move one slider, all of the others stay in the exact same place.
What this feature tells us is that the designers of the game made a deliberate choice to ignore the reality of trade-offs, the process of sacrificing one benefit to gain another. Unlike real life where improvements in one area often necessitate sacrifices in another, Superstar mode sets up a ‘have your cake and eat it too’ type environment whether rather than making a trade-off to level up one skill at the expense of another, you get to have the best of both worlds; you can upgrade Skill A with the peace of mind that Skills B, C, and D will all stay in the exact same place. To borrow a phrase from finance, Superstar mode is an ‘up only’ type of gameplay where every aspect of your players always has 100% opportunity for improvement with a 0% probability of regression.
In the context of a video game, this design choice is perfectly acceptable - if not even desirable. Part of what makes these games so great, after all, is that while they are often close facsimiles to real life they are not exact replicas. Video games are virtual reality as opposed to actual reality, offering us the ability to take certain aspects of life and imagine what they might be like if we were able to change some of the rules. That is a powerful promise, and is a key part of what makes video games like Madden so enticing in the first place.
The trap here is that all too often, it is easy to forget where the line is drawn between the rules of the video game and the rules of life itself. If we wrongly assume that real life operates in the same way as our favorite game, we can very easily come to the wrong conclusions, and thus the wrong decisions.
In the case of Superstar mode, there is an enticing but dangerous line of thinking that constitutes the essence of the Superstar Slider fallacy: inputs are isolated and trade-offs don’t exist; any one slider can be moved without coming at the expense of another.
This would be a great idea, were it actually true, as a trade-off free environment would give us humans something we so desperately crave: certainty. We have a natural inclination to predict how the world works, and the more closely correlated inputs are too outputs the better we are capable of doing so. But unfortunately this is not how the world works in actuality, as one of the iron truths of life is that in order to get something you very frequently have to give up something in return. Sacrifices and trade-offs are very real, and to think any differently is a fool’s errand.
But not only are they real, but they are also very messy. More often than we’d care to admit, we seem to have a very limited understanding of how changing one thing will affect something else.
There are a number of reasons why this is true, but two in particular stand out to me.
First is the concept of nonlinearity, which teaches us that the correlations between inputs and outputs are not always 1-1. In the case of your Madden Superstar, you know with high confidence that improving one of his specific attributes will enhance his value as a player - as you move the slider up on his ability to break tackles or change direction, you know without a shadow of a doubt that his overall ‘grade’ will go up as well. But life doesn’t always work in the same way - we do our best to draw correlations between certain variables, but very rarely is the R squared 100%. More frequently there is some component of variance present, such that you might have a general idea of changing input A might change output B but the lack of a direct 1-1 relationship means you can’t say for certain what will happen.
A simple example from the baseball realm to help contextualize this concept: we know bat speed has a high correlation to exit velocities, and that exit velocities have a high correlation to batted ball value. We thus might make the following conclusion: improve bat speed → improve exit velocities → improve production. And in general for most cases, we would be right - but the correlations aren’t 1-1 between bat speed and production as variables, and thus we cannot say for certain what the outcome of increasing speed will be. There are plenty of stories of hitters training for speed and getting better results from it, but also a somewhat surprising number of the opposite side - hitters that have acquired more speed and somehow gotten worse. In sports and in life, things are often much harder to predict than we think.
There’s a logical segue here into a second and equally important concept for understanding the Madden Slider Fallacy, interdependence, which tells us that all variables within the same system will tend to have some reliance on each other. As such, changing any one variable can (and very frequently does) lead to a change in the other variables connected to it, compounding the difficulty of predicting how inputs will affect the outputs.
Interdependence between variables extends to virtually every system in real life, but as we’ve discussed so far Superstar mode instead makes the opposite assumption - it opts for an independent variable environment, where changing one attribute has no affect on any of the others. And that causes some problems if we are to use the slider model to guide decision-making and skill acquisition in real life.
Lets extend the bat speed example from above to see why. Through the lens of interdependence, we can start to understand where some of the non 1-1 correlation between speed and performance comes from. Bat speed is without a doubt one of the most critical pieces to the puzzle of hitting, but at the end of the day it is still just that - a piece to the puzzle. There are a wide variety of other variables that also constitute the skill of hitting, things like how much contact you make, how good your approach is, or the quality of your movement patterns and swing. Each of these are ‘attributes’ of a hitter, and while it is tempting to think of each as isolated skills experience will quickly teach you that they are all more connected than you might think. Speed and swing quality as a pair of traits are a great example of this - you can train yourself to move a bat faster, but how you do that will have implications for the overall quality of your swing. The goal thus should be to do it in a responsible way, so that you gain speed while preserving (or even improving!) upon the quality of a hitter’s swing. Sacrificing quality of movement to sell out for more speed is a dangerous recipe, and helps explain why the equation is not as simple as ‘more speed = better performance.’
Tying the above pieces of non-linearity and interdependence together, we can thus make a few tweaks to how Madden’s Superstar mode represents the concept of skill improvement that better aligns the process to the way the real world works:
(1) Account for interdependence by assuming that anytime you move the slider on a single attribute up (say, by raising weight/physicality), there will be some associated change to another variable (such as a decrease in speed or agility).
(2) Account for non-linearity by recognizing that improving one attribute might not have a 1-1 ratio to improvements in the total all-around skillset.
With these pieces in mind, the goal of skill development and enhancement in life thus becomes to understand as best you can how all of the variables in the equation fit together.
Each of us plays our own version of Superstar mode on a daily basis, trying to level up as best we can to accomplish the things we wish. Whether our physical health, emotional wellbeing, skillset at work or what have you, we all have sliders that we are trying to move the needle on. And so when assessing any of these aspects of life that you would like to improve, it becomes critically important to recognize how the pieces will move in conjunction with each other. Trade offs and correlations are integral components to the game of life, and in order to make the most informed decisions we must be cognizant of which sacrifices are worth making in order to get what we want. Because at the end of the day, everything is context dependent on your goals as an individual. Want to maximize your physical health? Might be worth skipping out on that beer after work. But if you want to enhance your emotional connection with friends, that same beer might actually be exactly what you need. Different priorities should necessitate different decisions, and thus determine the trade-offs that we should make.
The ultimate point is the following - don’t fall prey to the Superstar Slider Fallacy and the inclination that inputs can be changed in isolation. Make peace with the reality that trade-offs are a necessity to life so that you can move forward with confidence in the decisions that you’ve made, all while being willing to surrender the outcome at the same time
Because after all, many things defy prediction and life is full of surprises. And thank goodness for that, as it wouldn’t be nearly as much fun without them.
Reading
Science Fiction Prototypes, Pent Up Data, and Product Leader Expectations - Scott Belsky (~11 min) - Scott writes one of my favorite under the radar newsletters out there, which centers around the implications advances in new technologies will have on the world. This was an especially good edition with a mix of insights such as how science fiction serves as a whiteboard for future ideas being brought to reality, why AI is poised to unlock value when given mountains of personalized data, and some insights he has picked up on leadership from leading and investing in product managers.
Founder Mode - Paul Graham (~5 min) - A short read from the founder of Y Combinator that gives an alternative perspective to the “manager mode” style of leadership companies are typically recommended to adopt as they scale. Inspired by a speech from Brian Chesky, founder of Air BnB, Graham comments on the feedback he’s heard from a surprising amount of founders - that the optimistic advice of “hire good people and give them room to do their jobs” falls short more times than you’d expect. By creating too much latitude and removing the unique skills of the founder from the equation, Graham argues that ‘manager mode’ actually sets businesses up for failure by removing the key variable that made them success in the first place: the people that started it.
