Undertale Helped Me Understand CEOs

There’s been a certain human behavior that I’ve never really been able to understand, or even visualize, for a lot of my life: that of a great many corporate CEOs (and various associated executive leaders they surround themselves with).  Well, I suppose it's more just the ultra-rich as a whole, but it's the heads of corporations who most notably engage in this behavior, so for the sake of ease, we'll just refer to them all as CEOs in this rant.  Anyway, 1 of their behaviors has always confused me.  Specifically, the all-consuming greed that drives them to harm or even destroy the lives of others.

Oh, now, come on, don’t look at me like that.  I’m not naive.  The concept of greed isn’t some ghastly unknown to me.  I’m as familiar with, and able to grasp the concept of, avarice as the next average person.  The desire to accumulate more of something (typically money) is a thought pretty much each and every one of us is familiar with, and I’m no exception to that.  Hell, I’m not sure you can exist in a capitalistic society without a functional understanding of greed, as it’s the fundamental fuel and backbone of the entire damnable system.  And before you go labeling me a Socialist or a Communist, let me point out that I don’t believe greed is any less prevalent in those systems--it (and the desire for power) is just the wrench that inevitably gets stuck in their works and destroys them, rather than the oil that greases their gears.  Greed is an inherent part of our nature as human beings.  One that we absolutely should try to overcome and rise above, mind you, but to act like it’s not naturally there is silly, and to not understand it pretty well is nearly impossible.

But there’s greed, and then there’s what CEOs feel.  Like...okay, regular greed, the kind that we all know and are familiar with?  There’s a purpose to it.  Usually not a good one, but a purpose nonetheless.  You desire more of something (typically money) because of its potential use for you.  Maybe you’re begging for bucks because you’re destitute and in need of what money can buy you--that’s a purpose (and 1 of the few morally acceptable ones).  Maybe you’re craving more capital because it might mean some more luxuries in your life--that’s a purpose.  Maybe you're avaricious for acquisition because it might mean being able to show off your wealth to others, gain their admiration or jealousy--that’s a purpose.  Maybe you’re covetous for cash because you want the ease and power it brings, the favors you can buy with it, putting you above the laws that restrain normal people--that’s a purpose.  Maybe you desire more dough because you want the security of knowing that if hard times hit, you’ll have something to fall back on--that’s a purpose.  Maybe you lust for lucre because you want to create a legacy to pass on to your inheritors, and make sure they’re comfortable, secure, or even affluent--that’s a purpose.

But there can come a point where further greed no longer serves any purpose.  Let’s take Activision-Blizzard’s CEO, Bobby Kotick, as an example, here.*  Mr. Kotick, as of the moment I type this, has a net worth of $600,000,000.  His annual income, in 2019 (the most recent "normal" financial year, I reckon), was $30,000,000.

Think, for a moment, about anything and everything you can conceive needing, wanting, setting aside for financial safety, and leaving to your family.  Consider how much money it would take for you to impress anyone and everyone you’ve ever known with passing familiarity.  Contemplate every luxury that you could own and make enough use out of to actually enjoy.**  If we for a moment buy into the idea that possessions, comfort, adulation, and wealth can buy happiness, try to conceive everything it would take to bring you as much enjoyment as you could ever want, for the rest of your life, with enough extra to provide very well for your family after your passing.

All done with the thought exercise?  Well, you’ve racked up quite a charge on your mental American Express, but I can almost guarantee you that you have not gone over budget for Bobby Kotick’s salary for a single year, and it’s all but certain that you haven’t broken what he makes in 2.

Okay, but so what?  So the guy makes a truly exorbitant amount of money.  He’s earned it, right?  Well, I mean, not really, in fact not at all, actually, he’s just the one telling the company what to do while the employees do 100% of the actual work involved in making that money, but hey, that’s the system.  The point is, what’s so mind-boggling here?  He’s made it to the absolute top, he won the game of life.  There is nothing left in the game of capitalism for him to strive for, because he’s already able to do and acquire absolutely anything he wants and can effectively enjoy or benefit from.  The fact that he’s in a position where the money keeps accumulating even beyond his ability to find ways to enjoy it is sickening, but irrelevant; it’s just a passive fact.

Well, what defied my comprehension for so long is the fact that Bobby-boy wants more.

Yeah.  Having already accumulated more money than could ever be entirely spent on things that he could take enjoyment from for the rest of his life, with the guarantee of dozens of lifetimes’ worth of money coming to him every year, Mr. Kotick continues to make bids for more.  In the last year alone, he demanded--and was given--a bonus of $155,000,000.  Yes--while already possessing more money than he could meaningfully spend on anything, Bobby Kotick petitioned to be handed over 1/5th of his entire net worth, out of the blue.

And this money didn’t come from nowhere.  It didn’t just happen to be lying around, waiting to be claimed.  In the past few years, Kotick’s company has laid off over a thousand employees, hundreds of which were canned just this same year as Bobby’s bonus.  Not to mention that a significant number of Activision-Blizzard’s rank-and-file employees are paid so little that they can’t afford the lunches sold at their own cafeteria.  The money used to foot Bobby’s bonus came at the expense of thousands of other people’s comfort, health, and livelihoods.  Bobby isn’t just greedy beyond comprehension in a vacuum--he’s actively and knowingly worsening the lives of others to satisfy his avarice.

And THAT’S what I could never really, truly grasp until recently.  It’s always just been too beyond my imagination to really understand.  How can a human being at a CEO’s level still reach covetously for more?  Once you have so much wealth that the wealth becomes meaningless, because you’ve already passed the point of being able to buy anything you could ever, ever need or personally enjoy, then what motivation can there possibly be to desperately seek more of it?  And especially confusing--why go out of your way to harm others in that pursuit?  To a man for whom all doors are already forever open, a key can exist as no more than a faintly understood, intangible concept, so why would that man go out of his way to grab other people’s house keys right out of their pockets?

It’s always confused me, because even by the low standards of human behavior, it’s completely illogical.  Bobby Kotick and his like are exerting themselves in pursuit of acquiring something that, relative to them, has no value.  And while I wouldn’t be so naive as to believe that Kotick or any of his peers have even the slightest capacity to feel empathy--in our world, you don’t often get to the top of an economic or political venture while burdened by a functional human psyche--it equally confused me that they could care so much about accumulating what is functionally nothing to them that they’d go to the trouble of harming others for it.  I didn’t get it.  I acknowledged the reality of the behavior, but I didn’t understand how it was possible.

Until, about a year ago, I suddenly remembered Undertale’s Chara.

Undertale is 1 of the more masterful works of art in the modern age, and its beneath-the-surface antagonist Chara represents a lot of things.  Amongst them, Chara symbolizes the player him/herself--or, more accurately, an archetype of a gamer that the player has, in order to meet Chara, undertaken.  Chara is a psychopath, incapable of caring for those around him/her, whose only observable joys come from destruction...and from the increasing of his/her stats.  In fact, we don’t really even see evidence that Chara actually enjoys the murder and suffering he/she is responsible for, only that he/she is utterly determined to cause it.  The only thing we truly know for sure that Chara enjoys is the act of gaining power--and even that’s not about the power, but the fact that the number denoting the power has increased.  To quote Chara him/herself:

“Power.
Together, we eradicated the enemy and became strong.
HP.  ATK.  DEF.  GOLD.  EXP.  LV.
Every time a number increases, that feeling...
That’s me.”

It’s a chilling, and yet very accurate, indictment of a certain mentality that some gamers have toward their pastime.  I’ve seen, and I’m sure at some point you have as well, players who approach games with a narrow mentality of solely caring about what tangibly benefits their protagonist.  They make their decisions based entirely on what most benefits them, regardless of what it means for the story and the characters within it--if the game’s story presents a choice between letting an innocent child live and having no tangible reward from it, or brutally killing that child and acquiring an extra point of Strength or a slightly better weapon from the act, this particular type of player will commit infanticide every time, because that’s what’s better for them.  The fact that the benefit from this terrible act might be so small that it will never produce a noticeable effect on the rest of the playthrough is unimportant--all that matters to this kind of gamer is that a number or inventory slot informs them that they have benefited.

And sure, it’s all just a game, so it doesn’t really matter, but at the same time...if gaming is a major hobby or passion of yours, and yet you don’t care enough about it to even feel any remorse over what may happen to the people (imaginary though they may be) within the game from your actions, then isn’t that still troubling?  It unnerves me a bit, at least.

At any rate, that’s Chara, by his/her own words--the unrelenting, uncaring drive to see numbers increase.  It doesn’t matter whether those increases are needed, or important, or even something you’ll ever benefit from--you can beat Undertale without needing to kill everything in the game to accumulate as high a level and stats as you can get; you can beat just about any RPG comfortably without maxing out your stats.  All that matters for Chara, for the kind of player that Chara represents, is that tiny little shot of dopamine at seeing a stat increase, at having a little numeral tell you that you’re greater now than you were prior...even if your increase has no practical value because no obstacle could have stopped you before it.  As Chara him/herself said in the past, according to an unreleased (but by all appearances canon) piece of dialogue found here, what matters when filling a glass of water is doing so most efficiently, completely to the top and even beyond that, regardless of how thirsty you are.

And that’s how I now can understand Bobby Kotick, and all his kind.  They’re Chara.  And Chara isn’t something made up--he/she is a representation of people, a lot of people, who demonstrably only play the game to achieve the maximum and nothing less.  People who level-grind past the point that they can kill a game’s final boss in a single turn aren’t addicted to the application of that power, they’re just addicted to the pleasure of seeing the numbers representing that power rise.  But in real life, the only universal stat of any significance is your wealth--and Bobby Kotick and his peers, these real-life Charas, just like seeing that number jump up.  Regardless of whether it has any function for them.  Regardless of what other people--no more than NPCs to them--are damaged in the process.














* Please understand, though, that while Bobby makes a great, well-rounded example of what I’m talking about, he is by no means unique to those in his position and class of wealth.  If we looked at the CEO of Ubisoft, or CD Projekt Red, or EA, or Disney, or Epic Games, or Apple, or Kimberly-Clark, or Amazon, or General Motors, or almost any other given major corporation, all that would change are the figures and dates, not the actual content of their behavior.


** I think it’s important to make this distinction, here.  A lot of people like to talk about how much money a person “needs,” but Cr1t1kal once made a compelling point about why this is a bad mentality and turn of phrase to adopt.  It’s not unreasonable to want more than what you strictly need--wanting to have enough to be able to enjoy life is beyond what one strictly needs, after all, and yet it’s only right and natural that we pursue pleasures, satisfactions, and lasting fulfillment within our lives.  Only ants don’t care about anything but strict necessity.

BUT, it is also equally important to make the distinction between what you can own, and what you can own and effectively enjoy.  Owning 7 different homes, for example, is meaningless because you can only realistically enjoy the luxury of owning 2 or 3, 4 at most--any more is either a possession that will mean nothing to you because you won’t use it, or a burden because your instinct to make use of it will negatively affect your living habits as you keep jetting from 1 to the next all year round.  Cr1t1kal’s point of viewing matters beyond just “need” is reasonable, but we must also recognize that its own parameters are not limitless.