No, wait. Saying that would merely be poetic, but not technically accurate... I'm like 80% water and stuff.
Seth Godin talks about hunters and farmers. There’s a reason I stopped reading his blog, because he just says shit without thinking about it, or proving it, or providing evidence. He tends to make an analogy and goes about tautologically “proving” it by providing examples which fit the analogy.
In this particular analogy, he divides people into hunters and farmers (completely disregarding the idea that all of our ancestors are actually farmers, and all of their ancestors are actually hunters). The pretend hunters are people who are... easily distracted? and the farmers are risk averse? I’m not sure. He basically goes on talking about features of farming and hunting, at least at a surface level:
Hunters want a high-stakes mission, farmers want to avoid epic failure.
See, that makes sense by looking at your stereotypical hunter and farmer. What he fails to notice is that even though modern day farming is very risk averse, that’s because farming in itself is a very high risk activity (though systemically more robust than hunting). Secondly, farmers today may look like they don’t make innovative leaps, but that’s because Seth’s not a farmer, and he fails to see the extents to which farming is going to innovate and generally be bold. He also fails to realise that when farming was starting out, you would’ve seen a hunter go pick up a rabbit and the farmer sticking some seeds into the ground, expecting returns in 6 months. That farmer has higher stakes than the hunter.
Let me see if I can do the same thing: People are like Fruit and Vegetables. The Fruits are sweet, but the vegetables are better for you. You can crush fruit people easily, but you can’t crush vegetable people without some difficulty. And so on and so forth.
I like the rather more descriptive and illuminating picture of risk and dealing with risk, as presented in the Gamasutra article about Games that make you hurt yourself to win. They talk about Muramasa as the example game which makes you hurt yourself to win. After playing Thexder Neo, I recalled Thexder being the same sort of game.
In Thexder (and Neo), you have an energy bar. You can shoot a laser, which costs energy, you can put up a shield, which costs energy, or you can get hurt by an enemy, which costs you energy unless you’ve put up a shield. If you run out of energy, you die.
So, tell me Seth, if you survive in Thexder, are you a hunter or a farmer?