How Greed and 'Will to Power' is My Main Motivation

Picture of Nietzsche the Thinker. I like this one better than his other photos.

Analyzing why I like playing video games allowed me to understand many interesting traits of my characters.

People play video games because they allow you to easily satisfy desires that are hard to satisfy in real life.

For example, you cannot easily kill whoever you want and steal whatever you want IRL.

Video games heavily compensate for that. Some are clear slaughter and kleptomania galore. Sure, they have some story and explanation why you are doing some sort of good thing too and not just kill and steal. Like demons are invading and you have to stop them, then also take their possessions as spoils of war.

Some games strike balance between these things. Others heavily lean into one direction. While I do enjoy games that are mostly about killing, such as Quake and Doom. However, what I like more are games about stealing. 

Diablo and WoW are games that are heavily driven by loot mechanics. Almost every monster you kill has something valuable on them that you can take, in addition to their money. Item system is large, diverse, thorough and complicated. Chasing bigger better and even stronger items to equip to make you even stronger and more powerful is basically all players do in these games. They and I love it.

Some games like Heroes of Might and Magic, kind of tone down killing, but when it comes to acquiring items, they go all the way. In fact, in these games a lot of items simply lay on the ground, and you can just take them freely like some fruits from a wild tree. Some characters there just straight give stuff to you for free.

I like games about acquiring stuff somewhat more than about killing.

Will to Power

However, there is another, even more deep, underlying motivation that drives me and other people to play video games.

That is a feeling of being powerful. That is why WoW players grind for gear and Diablo players collect runes for powerful rune words.

With more powerful items you will be stronger and will be able to smite monsters, that used to give you trouble, like puny insects.

That desire to wield power and keep getting more and more powerful is the underlying motivation that drives every single video game player to playing their game of choice. 

Getting even Higher

However, there is one more motivation that is even deeper that the rest and even more fundamental to it all. The motivation that lies at the bottom of the abyss Nietzsche talked about. Final form of Will to Power.

The motivation that brings you to Europa Universalis, where one can take a small country and take it to the size of the global empire the world has never seen. You can literally rule anything and everything on the globe. 

Historical setting helps the immersion too as you can compare yourself favorably to leaders of these times and see how what they managed to accomplish in this timeframe pales in comparison of how you took something like Kingdom of Ryukyu and conquered the entire world with it. Cardinal Richelieu and Frederich, the Great, got nothing on me. You (me) are the supremist of all supreme beings.

This motivation is a desire to stand above other men. Getting ever and ever higher. 'I used to crawl the earth, but not I am higher. 2010s let it burn to fire.'

With this power one can become and Übermensch, a living god who can do anything. Compare to whom ordinary man is nothing more than an ape or even an insect.

Me

My greed and ambitions are of course as insatiable. Even if I control the entire Universe, I will want to find a parallel Universe and take control of it as well.

However, acquiring more power and more stuff does make me happy. So, this is what I want to do.

Hawing to do with little and not being able to get what I want always annoyed me. I absolutely hate austerity and shortages. Hate is so much I would kill myself to avoid it.

Getting more and more and more and more is the only thing that can possibly satisfy me.

In the same way I want my slave girl to be more and more and more and more subservient to me. I want to take her to the complete extreme of subservience. 

There is nothing else for me in this heaven and earth. I will never be satisfied with little; I will always want more and more.

The kind of people I can connect with.

For that reason, I hate people who deny my needs and greed. People who get in the way of my greed and ambition.

In contrast I like people who can facilitate my greed and ambition. Can work as some sort of enablers for me.

In fact, I possibly even divide people into these two groups. I think better of them if they are enablers, no matter what else they do. I think worse of them if they are blockers, even if the rest of the world calls them praiseworthy moral paragons.

My parents were mostly blockers and I hate them for that. There are many other blockers that I hate. 

Fedya, Kolyan, Fubu, Sameer, Tsukasa, Ibrahim and Olya were mostly enablers.

You can say that I live by avoiding blockers and deniers and seeking out enablers who can enable me to fulfill my ambitions and desires.