Sports Gaming

I have a love/hate relationship with sports games, lately swinging back toward the "love" side of the equation, but only after taking literal decades off away from them to recover from significant burnout and possibly a nervous breakdown. I'm semi-serious about that. I did most of my sports gaming in my twenties, when a fanatical love of sports, a mania for games, a need to triumph at something, and a desire to break down game systems combined in me to form a pretty potent brew. Those weren't my best days, to be sure, but man, did I do a lot of sports gaming.

My first exposure was with Strat-O-Matic ... it must have been their excellent football game, played face-to-face when I lived in Phoenix back in 1980-81. That's when I would have bonded (finally) with the Raiders, although I remember being kind of torn over who to root for in that snowy playoff game between Oakland and Cleveland. I had conceived a love of the Browns because of their "Cardiac Kids" offense, as well as a natural love of the underdog; fortunately I sided with the Raiders that day and never looked back. That might have been the last time the Browns were decent, come to think of it.

Anyway, I loved Strat football. I loved how the defense worked, where you would stunt players into zones in addition to making your play call, and the offense had just enough detail to make playcalling meaningful. The games were the right length and they generated great stats. I can't remember if the little league we had going ever reached a conclusion, but I did bring the game back with me from Phoenix, keeping up with the new card sets, playing several games with Rita back in the day (she used to kill me by deliberately running Joe Montana around the end), and later running some straight-teams leagues and even an abortive draft league when I was managing the Last Grenadier game shop in Northridge later in the decade. For all that I was competitive in the game I don't remember details of the leagues, but I do remember to this day losing a game in overtime when my guy fielded a punt on his own two yard line, and then returned it for minus-three yards ...

We also had a couple baseball leagues back then, an all-star league run by John Cummings (whom I would dearly like to find again after all these years), and a draft league where we picked teams off the pile and built the best squad we could. My team was the Pacific City Americans, composed of the Tigers, Bluejays, Indians, and some other American League team that I can't recall. I really loved that team -- it introduced this Dodgers fan to American League baseball, and at a very good time, as the core of my Americans would be composed of a Tigers team that would win a championship in 1984, and a Bluejays team that came very close a couple times in that decade (and when they eventually broke through and Joe Carter hit that homerun to win the title, I felt like I had been there since the beginning with the unknown Jays ... I mean, after all these years, names like Jesse Barfield, Rance Mullinex, and Dane Iorg are still conjured unbidden -- that game, and that team, made an impression on me).

Where Strat started to get toxic was when we migrated to play-by-mail formats. I'd dabbled a bit with Strat's basketball title in a play-by-mail league (and would later join Gary Graber's wonderful SBA, where my New England Musketeers would win a couple titles over the course of a six or seven year run). To expand our baseball league we shifted to a play-by-mail format, and the emphasis changed a bit from playing individual games to running seasons and competing for titles. The details are blurry, but I must have played hundreds of games of baseball in several leagues, eventually moving onto my Apple (in a semi-manual fashion that was pretty cool, as it used physical cards from the Strat set while automating stat keeping, dice rolling, and chart lookups). Over time, the leagues became more competitive, more complicated, and steadily less fun, as deadlines would sometimes require that I grind through games when I'd rather be doing something else. The more games I played, the less they seemed to matter. That I was usually the commissioner and had to bust balls to get other guys to turn their results in on time didn't help.

I did win a couple championships with my baseball teams, after an appropriate bit of heatbreak, and I do remember literally tossing my cards in the air when my beloved Americans finally got over the hump and beat Vic Kalustian's team in our draft league. I took a lot of pride in those games, framing my winning team cards and hanging them on the walls ...

But the game that broke my heart and nearly gave me a nervous breakdown was Strat-O-Matic Hockey. Growing up in L.A., hockey might as well have been played on the moon, but in my early twenties I conceived a liking for the game, and Strat taught me a lot about the NHL and its teams (and I would later go on to play hockey as an adult, cementing a love for the sport that lasts to this day, only helped by the fact that hockey is just about the only sport my kids are interested in watching with me). But the Strat hockey game really wasn't deserving of the devotion I gave to it. It was clearly the worst of Strat's games, lacking the interactivity of the football game, the pace of the baseball game, or the very good statistical appraisal of their basketball game. It was pretty much just a card-flipping stats generator, and unlike the baseball and basketball games (which translated very well to draft leagues), the hockey game was dependent on team performance for things like offense and defense ratings, and proved a very brittle design when you created "all-star" teams in a draft league. We had several draft leagues way back when, and all of them were sloppy and broken to some degree, and it seemed like all of them were sloppy at my expense.

I remember we played a 40-game season, I think in a six-team league. Tom Keefer had Jari Kurri on his Philadelphia Pliers team, and Kurri scored fully half of his season's goals against my hapless Hot Tubs. It drove me nuts -- Jari just couldn't miss when he played my guys, seemingly every shot was a "goalie rating," and my goalies couldn't stop the guy if they'd walled up the goal mouth with bricks and mortar. There's a real slot-machine quality to Strat-O-Matic hockey, where you always seem to come up just short of success, thanks to the relatively scarce scoring opportunities driven by split results. You continually think you missed by just THAT much, and when it happens again and again from season to season, in multiple leagues, and with several teams, well, you start to feel snake-bit.

It got to be so bad that I became a genuine crank for the game, starting several teams and leagues, and dropping out of the same when my blood pressure started to boil. Each new team was going to correct the problems of the past, but the Hot Tubs, the Silver Seven, and the Otters were all the same -- losers, whether I stacked up on defense or went for snipers or whatever. No matter what I did I just couldn't break the back of that game, and after one agonizing single-goal loss too many (where I frisbeed my clipboard across the room so hard it stuck into a wall), I decided it just wasn't worth it, and pretty much walked away from sports games entirely.

Until a couple years ago.

I found myself thinking about sports games again, but this time entirely as a solitaire experience. I wanted to avoid the competition and deadlines of a draft league at all costs ... I really liked the idea of leagues or replay tounaments that I could completely control without having to rely on anyone else (or disappoint anyone else). I was also looking for a game that would play out with some color and some narrative. It was no longer important that a game play in twenty minutes. I could take an hour with a game if I wanted ... there were no deadlines ... everything would be by hand, and the play would be the thing.

So I bought into Replay Baseball, and found I quite liked it. It was slower and a little more awkward than Strat, but I really liked the way fielding was handled, and I also liked how the pitcher and batter cards were involved in every play (instead of the 50/50 split of Strat). The game was novel, and colorful, and I threw myself into a 1970s Diamond Decades replay tournament that saw the 1970 Baltimore Orioles go 14-0 against the American League side of the field. I found myself deeply in love with the game, planning to buy deadball era teams or Negro League teams going forward, but then after playing into the second round of the National League side of the replay I suddenly stopped dead, and but for a single game played last year I don't think I've touched the game in two years now.

What went wrong? Nothing, really. I went into crunch on Darkwatch and just didn't have time for the game, plus the real life baseball season ended and the replay seemed to lose urgency. And it was ... great! Because no one was depending on me, and in my mind that replay is still active. I'll get back to it sometime, maybe this coming baseball season. And if it is fun I'll keep playing, and if it isn't I'll put it back on the shelf until it is. Through this game I had rediscovered my love for sports gaming.

So when I decided to start following the Anaheim Ducks earlier this year (our only local team after the ECHL San Diego Gulls folded their tent), I decided to buy back into Strat Hockey to learn more about the league, which I hadn't followed in several years. I didn't expect much of the game, knowing it was the worst in Strat's line-up, but I did want a painless way to look at the players and see their general strengths and weaknesses. I set up an overly-ambitious single elimination tournament involving every team in the box, and played the game for the first time in twenty years ...

,,, and found that I liked it, a lot. Without an emotional stake in the outcome of the game, I could better appreciate it's narrative qualities. It was still a little thin on detail but a reasonable picture of an NHL contest emerged from the game, and it didn't hurt that the games I was playing were tight affairs, low-scoring, with a couple big upsets (the most notable being a truly awful St. Louis team somehow beating #3 seed Dallas in a 1-0 shootout ... these being the 2005/6 cards, by the way). Playing with historical teams allowed the system to function in ways our crazy draft leagues never permitted, and now instead of being driven by wild swings of fortune in games ruled by breakaways and takeaways, the games were grinding, close-run matches where 2/1 defensemen banging it in from the point could determine the outcome of the match.

So in my first burst of enthusiasm I got the game on the table four times in October and November of 2006, but then it just ... stopped, and that was OK, but it did nag at me a bit because I had a sense my team set was going stale. But the Ducks hit a hard patch and I was traveling a lot over the holidays so I just didn't get back to the game.

Until tonight. After a break of three months I finally got my replay going again. And it is probably doomed, this was only the fifth game out of fourteen scheduled for the first round alone, but it was a great game, with my Ducks moving to the second round by smothering a very dangerous Florida team, 2-0. The Ducks forecheck helped them outshoot the Panthers 33-17, and the game was fun for all the things that don't show up in the stats ... for the Anaheim checking line playing out of their minds and totally shutting down the Florida scoring line, for Selanne scoring on a breakaway on the last card of the first period (where the Ducks had outworked the Panthers for twenty minutes, but nearly had nothing to show for it), to Giguere having one of those signature games where he doesn't seem to be doing anything spectacular and suddenly you realize he's working a shutout.

In short, it felt just like an NHL game, a remarkable accomplishment for such a simple game design. I know I'm bringing a lot into this game by putting narrative on top of the game system, but that's OK, it adds to the fun. And the only purpose of a solo project like this is to while away some time, enjoying the system, watching the story evolve, and maybe learn something about the teams in the process (and I've learned a bit, I can certainly see how the Ducks took a major step by adding Chris Pronger to their blue line this year).

So the game has satisfied and I have become a Ducks fan (something that would have been unthinkable when I was following the Gretzky-era Kings during their Stanley Cup run). The Ducks have been a rewarding team to follow. They got off to an amazing start, and when they were both healthy, watching Pronger and Scott Niedermeyer wire the puck back and forth at the blue line on the the powerplay was genuniely a sight to see. The Ducks have been inconsistent lately and it is going to be a tough time in the playoffs but I'm committed now and enjoying both the league and this game a great deal.

And if it suddenly goes on the shelf I won't feel like I'm letting anyone down ... and my replay league won't be dead until I say it is. Which means it will probably go on forever.

And after all this blabbering about sports games I realize I didn't write a single word about the F1 auto race gaming I did way back when ... talk about a genuine obsession. Wow.