Omake: Failing to fail is not succeeding
Starfire possessed a modicum of managerial and logistical talent. She did not enjoy using those talents extensively but she was at least somewhat capable when push came to shove.
When Jinx invited her to play another game Starfire was somewhat hesitant but all the same, she wished to spend some time with her friend. When they ended up playing an amusement park management simulator of all things, Starfire was somewhat taken aback.
Amusement parks were a concept unfamiliar to Starfire. In principle, they were entertainment centers of sorts, but their brand of entertainment was meant to invoke excitement and dazzle with amazement. Starfire couldn't help but think that such "rides" would be a commercial flop on Tamaran due to their slow and boring nature, but there were other interesting attractions available in such places that she herself might've enjoyed.
Oswald mentioned a passing interest in constructing an amusement park, and when Jinx said that she'd be great at running the place the man easily agreed.
Apparently, the idea of running an amusement park captured Jinx's imagination surprisingly fiercely. Jinx studied under a stage magician for some time, a trickster that specialized in amusement rather than crime (a foreign concept to be sure), and the experience gave her a flair for the dramatic and an apparent wish to explore it through creative outlets. Starfire could easily envision her friend managing an entertainment center and forging such a place into her own kingdom.
As it were though, the details of actually managing such a place financially were quite a bore as far as the pink-haired girl was concerned.
Jinx was quick to jump into the deep end right after the tutorial, choosing to engage in the "competitive mode" of the game. Essentially, it placed her and an opponent on two separate ends of a very large map with a set amount of money. The goal of the game was to build the most profitable amusement park possible under a time limit.
The game was surprisingly difficult, mostly in that many of its underlying core mechanics did not make much sense to Starfire. She understood that the game's design couldn't emulate many aspects of real-life business management without being forced to bring complimentary elements to add context and realism to them. She did not understand however why certain elements that were meant to emulate "realism" were prioritized over others.
For example, the game allowed ideal project management, with things such as the construction process of coasters being disregarded. If such things were to be included then other considerations, such as labor and material wear and tear, would need to be brought up as well. Altogether, this seemed unreasonable for what was a game meant for children.
Still, it didn't prevent the enemy AI from utterly crushing them with its superior roller coaster-shaping skills. Starfire did not have a good sense for earthling attractions such as these and could not empathize with many of the rides created, often resulting in customers complaining about their intensity. Jinx herself didn't mitigate the problem as she seemed to enjoy designing bizarre, overly expensive rides, to the point where the screen itself glitched at times due to the constant spins and u-turns.
At some point Jinx became bored, and seeing as they were already losing she apparently just wanted to have "fun" with the game, which in reality meant building incomplete, high-speed coasters aimed upward and shooting the visitors as far away as possible, only for their carts to slam into the ground, resulting in their deaths as well as some explosion animations.
Even if those were obviously not real people and the AI wasn't complex enough for it not to matter, it was still too indulgently sadistic, not to mention impractical. The game had an internal insurance/fines system, and if a player's park resulted in deaths then they were penalized for it with lawsuits, insurance payouts, and fewer visitors overall. As it were though, it was precisely that primitive AI that allowed Jinx a massive comeback.
As it turned out, when a park visitor died the game registered their death to their most recently visited park. This would normally be a fair assumption to make, were it not for the fact that once Jinx's launched visitors crashed in the opponent's park, the game registered their most recently visited park as the opponent's and by extension, the visitors' deaths were the opponent's problem to deal with. Jinx was quick to note the pattern of decreasing income whenever she crashed one of her carts in the opponent's park, and soon enough those accidents turned into a winning methodology. After all, the game was unrealistic when it came to the acquisition of carts (in that it was both free and automatic) but it did maintain realism for other things - and Jinx was more than willing to capitalize.
From that point on the game shifted massively, with it no longer being a complex amusement park management simulator but rather a relatively simple tactical artillery game. Due to being so successful, the opponent's park was very large, which just made it a bigger target. By selling and downsizing their park, Jinx was able to fill it with a few densely packed rides with a quick turnover rate despite the low number of visitors, allowing her to shoot large swaths of people over to the opponent's side on the other side of the map in rapid succession. Soon enough the time limit expired, and while Jinx's park resulted in a net loss, the opponent was many millions in debt, making Jinx and Starfire the winners.
That isn't to say that Starfire enjoyed her victory "Losing money on a venture would normally be deemed a waste. Nothing of value was accomplished during our session," she noted. Jinx was quick to disagree.
"On the contrary. We won." She retorted "Business isn't about being good, it's about being 'better' or 'the best', and if the competition sucks more than us then we still win." She stretched back in her seat, looking oddly thoughtful, "Besides, these companies got parent companies. Imagine that that doof Wayne starts a park and lets the computer run it like in the game. If we represent Lexcorp then the company lost some money, but we can probably sell and downsize a bit and manage, but Wayne lost a whole lot more so he won't be able to compete with us in other things." Jinx nodded to herself, looking pleased at her reasoning.
The worst part of it was that Starfire couldn't refute these claims. In principle, money was being moved around but nothing concrete, valuable, was created or lost. It was the same as paying a person to dig a hole one day and to cover it the next. Money was being moved around but nothing was actually accomplished.
All the same, Jinx's analysis was spot on. Being good at what you did was never a requirement for success, it was always about being better than anyone in front of you, and by that metric Jinx was indeed better than the AI. It was also true that in a larger sphere of ventures, the owner of the AI park would suffer far more damages than the owner of theirs.
"Don't you want to feel proud of the things that you do and accomplish?" Starfire asked quietly, an unusual somber air around her.
"If it's stuff that I care about then sure, but sometimes I just wanna win, and sometimes it's just not enough that I succeed, others need to fail too, you know? To really drive it home." Starfire didn't know, and that mindset of her friend was worrying.
It was just a game and Jinx was merely indulging herself in some chaotic behavior. Starfire did not believe that it reflected Jinx's character, after all, many people enjoyed violent games even though they were not violent themselves, and that particular exploit was a very clever one and not something that she herself could've discovered. Her friend was a truly gifted person, with her ability to think outside of the box being a rare boon indeed. Her ability to challenge Starfire's biases was a valuable quality for a friend of have as well.
Starfire hoped that Jinx would find a better outlet for her creativity, however. But then again, abusing the logic of AI systems and algorithms was a rare and profitable skill, so maybe her friend was training herself with that goal in mind, to keep her options open and her skillset varied.
Regardless though, Jinx was clearly not someone to be underestimated.
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This story is actually based on real events. Specifically, my cousin and I used to play Roller Coaster Tycoon, and at some point we discovered the same kind of exploit Jinx did by doing the same things described in the Omake and we dominated the competitive mode of the game from that point on.
As usual, this could use editing and such, but I'm too lazy for it.
