Why we play text sims the way we do

[Buccaneer]

I continue to be fascinated by the differences in how we view and play our favorite sports text sims. I believe, for many, it comes from how we used to act out our sports fantasies as a kid – esp. for those that did things without computers or consoles. When the new crop of sports text sims came along, we continue to play them in our favorite way. A few examples:

“Stats Geeks” There are those that poured over every statistic of a player and through ASBA (if I got that acronym correct), able to play what-if games for the purpose of generating even more statistics to pour over.

“Positional Geeks” There are those that were/are more interested in the attributes of a player and how such a player would fit into the lineup. These would be the lineup or roster shufflers, whether on paper or on the playground, and constantly analyzing matchups and gameplans.

“GM Geeks” These would the ones not so much interested in the stats or positions but in the teams and the league as a whole. Players are judge simply whether they are good (or famous) or not and whether his team is good or not.

“Roleplay Geeks” These would be those focusing on a single player or so and acting out what the player did, esp. in following a career from beginning to end.

I’m sure there are more generalities but these are the obvious ones I am aware of. How this relates to what we do now is in how we play and expect to play our favorite sports in a text-mode. These show up in our expectations and likes/dislikes when playing games like OOTP, CM, FOF, TCY and others. For me, as an example, I am strongly a “GM Geek”. When I was a kid, I would create dozens of custom teams and leagues (or even shuffle real ones around), create names and logos and then quickly play them out. I would also create custom teams with favorite players and play what-if games. Stats never interested me that much and still doesn’t. This probably explains why I can play OOTP (and potentially TPF) but cannot play FOF (or potentially FOB). For others like “Roleplay Geeks”, I imagine ITP would be of interest, as well as going from TCY to FOF. “Positional Geeks” can get into matching player attributes with gameplans in FOF, while “Stats Geeks” just want loads of sensible data to analyze and make decisions off of. CM4, I suspect, can cover all of these well (assuming soccer is of interest) and the reason for its popularity. I’m sure there are other anecdotal points but that’s all I can think of for now.

[KevinNU7]

Originally posted by Buccaneer
“GM Geeks” These would the ones not so much interested in the stats or positions but in the teams and the league as a whole. Players are judge simply whether they are good (or famous) or not and whether his team is good or not. I'm definelty a GM Geek. I bought NCAA 2004 played 4 straight games and haven't played a game in over a month. All I do now and sim/fix lineups/& recruit. I'm already in season 2027.

[cuervo72]

Hmm, I think I have elements of all of them. As a kid, I would create teams, diagram their helmets and uniform colors, put them in a fake league, etc (I looked for the papers I had these on just this weekend to use the teams in FOF4, but I think I threw them out not long ago, at least what I had. I believe many of them were lost a while ago).

Then along came MicroLeague Baseball. A friend played the 1986 season, and then invited a couple of us to join a league in '87. We had a full draft, which I created a sheet for, with all of the pics color coded. Played a whole season (each game took about a half hour) against the real teams and had standings for our own. It was interesting to see how players fared in relation to their RL stats, but it was also fun making blockbuster deals. I think I tried to analyze the stats more than a couple of owners, who went for names, while I went for average, low K for batters and high K and low ERA for pitchers (boy did I have a high average lineup - Gwynn, Trammell, Molitor, Seitzer). Created a 1978 Greats team and an all-time losers team (hello Terry Felten and Luis Pujols!). Created "celebrity" teams. Wanted to sim the 1962 NL, but didn't have the time (and my disk drive began to fail).

Today I think I might lean more towards GM than coaching, especially for football. I really need to get OOTP and TCY...I like the idea of player development and the building of a compelte program.

[Bee]

Then there's the "Geeks that classify other Geeks". :D

[GrantDawg]

I guess I'm a positional guy. I'd actually call it more of a "coach." I like making the decisions on who plays where, how much, and see how players develop. I like calling plays (more offense than defense) and trying to utilize my talent to its best advantage. If I have lots of good receivers but mediocre backs, it is time to play wide open football. If my team has big bruising backs but no depth at wide-out, smashmouth city (I actually prefer the former to the later, but whatever I have that is what I use).

I do enjoy the GM role, but I would love if a game allowed you to just give your preferences and let the GM make player decisions. Well, except the draft. I do like having more to say on the draft.

[Fritz]

I like to sit in a pleather chair, naked, in a puddle of baby oil, and play. On a credenza next to me I have a full set of players made from soft cat food that I move about. The home team is chicken and the away team is whatever else I have - frequently salmon. Often, I make them talk to each other in a falsetto voice. The coaches are large plastic dinosaurs. When players get injured I bite off the afflicted portion of their body (yummy! When fof2 came out I gained 18 pounds in 3 weeks!!!!). The losing team gets fed to fluffy.

[Eaglesfan27]

Originally posted by Fritz
I like to sit in a pleather chair, naked, in a puddle of baby oil, and play. On a credenza next to me I have a full set of players made from soft cat food that I move about. The home team is chicken and the away team is whatever else I have - frequently salmon. Often, I make them talk to each other in a falsetto voice. The coaches are large plastic dinosaurs. When players get injured I bite off the afflicted portion of their body (yummy! When fof2 came out I gained 18 pounds in 3 weeks!!!!). The losing team gets fed to fluffy.

What a classic post. Thanks for the laugh :D

[SplitPersonality1]

Originally posted by Bee
Then there's the "Geeks that classify other Geeks". :D

That would be the entire student body at MIT. :)

[Karim]

I'm definitely a GM Geek.

I like drafting, trading, player development, hiring the right coaches and scouts. I do, however, like setting up the lineups or deciding who plays, but I rarely actually make in-game decisions (CM4 excluded) and would much rather watch the outcome.

I want stats in my game. For example, a baseball game without split stats is a non-starter. Also, any career sim that doesn't keep track of every player season-by-season won't get a look from me. I also want realistic stats; no 100 HRs, 7,500 yards passing or 115 goals in one season.

The only sim I'm playing at the moment is OOTP5.

[korme]

I might just be the league geek. I love league history, building history, and history history history.

[Solecismic]

Obviously, there's a lot of stats geek in me. The amount of time I've spent with spreadsheets without coding a single line is fairly excessive. The games I was making as a kid were made out of frustration with the statistical inaccuracies built into Strat-O-Matic (don't get me started ranting about their "X" fielding charts and problems with low-walk pitchers).

There are bits of the other categories in me as well, though probably not the role-player at all.

That's got to be the best Fritz you've ever done. Hilarious. I'd put it on my testamonials page if I had one.

[Buzzbee]

I tend to flucuate between styles. At times I want the control offered by micro-managing. I want to control my rosters so that I can manipulate a players playing time, or develop rookies over aging veterans, even if the vet is better. I want to focus on a run-oriented offense so my stud RB has maximum impact. (This is my patient side)

Other times I don't want the tedium involved with having to think that much. I'd rather make a few key decisions and then sim through so that I can see how well my draft class developed. Or to find out if my Free Agent pickups and draftees are going to be good enough to get me to the playoffs this year. (This is my impatient side).

Most of the time it is a combination of the two. I take time to make what decisions I feel will have a noticeable impact and give me the best chance for success for the upcoming season, then hurry up to find out how I did.

[Buccaneer]

Originally posted by Solecismic
Obviously, there's a lot of stats geek in me. The amount of time I've spent with spreadsheets without coding a single line is fairly excessive. The games I was making as a kid were made out of frustration with the statistical inaccuracies built into Strat-O-Matic (don't get me started ranting about their "X" fielding charts and problems with low-walk pitchers).

There are bits of the other categories in me as well, though probably not the role-player at all.

That's got to be the best Fritz you've ever done. Hilarious. I'd put it on my testamonials page if I had one.

Thanks Jim, 'Strat-O-Matic' was the other name I couldn't think of.

Any chance your baseball game can include more for GM Geeks than you would normally do? ;)

[tucker342]

I'm a GM guy, and a little bit of a stats guy

[Shaun Sullivan]

I have always been a HUGE Baseball game junkie. My dad and I would play all the board games, I invented games with my Baseball cards etc... I remember playing a whole season of Statis Pro solo, with scoresheets for every game. Then I discovered Microleague, then Earl Weaver on the Amiga (Amazing in 1986), LaRussa, FPS: Baseball (which really turned me on to career play). To this day I still purchase every single Baseball video and computer game released each year. (I'll admit my guilty pleasure this year has been MVP).

But somewhere along the line I fell more in love with the GM aspect of things. FOF was a real watershed moment for me -- I was shocked at how immersed I got in my Patriots franchise. I still think Baseball is the sport most suited for the text sim geek genre, but Football is a close second.

I don't consider myself a geek, I'd rather be doing something productive with my time as opposed to sitting in front of the TV like a zombie. Of course I do watch about 150 Red Sox games a year, but I'm usually coding at the same time :)

I must be really becoming a dinosaur because I took my son up to Camden yards a few weeks ago to catch a 3 game series with the Sox and O's and I swear I was th only guy in the stands keeping score! My son thought it was cool and we put the sheets in his scrap book -- I bet we'll both look back pretty fondly when we look at that some day.

Wow, I'm getting a little mushy... Baseball, Fathers, Sons not much better.

{Stepping down from podium} :)

Shaun

[Solecismic]

Baseball? News to me. I don't think I've talked about specifics yet. We can rule out horse racing and auto racing, since I can't say I've even seen a race on television in about 20 years.

With any game, I can only do so much, obviously. Time is always a concern. I can't spend more than about 90 hours a week working - and I can't even do that 12 months a year.

I worry that extra GM function often goes too far down the RPG road. Owner and media behavior is often so arbitrary in professional sports.

[illinifan999]

Originally posted by Solecismic
Baseball? News to me. I don't think I've talked about specifics yet. We can rule out horse racing and auto racing, since I can't say I've even seen a race on television in about 20 years.

With any game, I can only do so much, obviously. Time is always a concern. I can't spend more than about 90 hours a week working - and I can't even do that 12 months a year.

I worry that extra GM function often goes too far down the RPG road. Owner and media behavior is often so arbitrary in professional sports.

YAY! He didn't say that there was no chance for the American Outdoor Games Manager!

Think about it, buy a dog, train it, go to competitions. Buy a saw, train with it, go to competitions. The possibilities are endless!

[WussGawd]

I'm a GM Geek guy. I can get into football stats a little, but my eyes start to glaze when folks start talking about things like lefty/righty splits, etc.

[Buccaneer]

Originally posted by Solecismic
We can rule out horse racing

:(

I worry that extra GM function often goes too far down the RPG road. Owner and media behavior is often so arbitrary in professional sports.

Like in CM?

GM functions can mean many things to different gamers. Some would consider dealing with owners and the media (ala CM) is essential to running a team. Others want to do set prices for concessions or something like that. Still others want to make higher level team decisions and let the coaches (AI) manage the details. (I prefer the first and third without a doubt and not the second.) It's not RPG because when playing OOTP, I never feel that way (or even from my impression of others playing CM). It is about choosing to play at a more macro level but still having to make the critical decisions on team matters and having other criteria influence your decisions (like owners and media do in real life). Without that extra level of decison making, then all of the rules and criteria for success are made up by you.

But I would also add perhaps an off-shoot to GM Geek and that is "Commissioner Geek" which gets into league structures and expansions. To me, that's part of being a GM geek.

Imo, Jim (and I thank you for talking with us), all of your games force the player into coach mode. There is the Scout Recommend in FOF and the Assistants in TCY but from past and recent experience, you are much better off if you do those things yourself. Without playing against human opponents (thus having to depend upon AI opponents) and with careful attention to coaching details, I think one could conclude that it is not much front office in there. Obviously a balance needs to be made but it makes me sad to hear that such games are much better for Stats and Positional Geeks and not doing some of the non-stats functions for GM Geeks.

[Buccaneer]

dola

Here's the best example I can think of for a baseball game. Just have the function to import a csv database like Lahman or something and to create custom league structures. To me, that would make all of the difference in the world because I just don't like current baseball that much and would prefer to play like it's 1970. If following the FOF model, we would be playing the current season over and over. Just my .01 from a historical simmer.

[Ben E Lou]

There's some of the first three categories in me:

Stats--First of all, they have GOTTA be realistic within the realm of the modern game. Show me a game with a 3,500-yard rushing season, 100-homer season, etc., and it won't get a second look. Second, season-by-season stats are an absolute must, and I prefer a good team-by-team record book as well. Show me the numbers.

Positional/Gameplanning--In baseball, good fielders in 2B, SS and CF are a must for me, as is a decent or better arm in RF. In football, I've found that defensively I go after players who fit into my system (M2M cover DB's, run-stopping defensive linemen and MLB, pass-rushing OLB's), but offensively I taylor the system to fit the players. I definitely get more enjoyment in the whole gameplanning/strategy area from football than baseball, since I never coach/manage each individual game. (I want to see stats and results over a long career, and it just takes too long to coach game-by-game.

GM--I'd GREATLY prefer to be heavily GM-oriented, playing multiple seasons in one night. However, no text sim to date has allowed me to do that, because of unacceptable AI handling of certain aspects of my team that I therefore must handle myself:

OOTP5--Mishandles pitching rotation with regards to 5th starter usage, so I have to go in and move starters around manually. Also doesn't set lineups the way I'd want them set, so I have to redo lineups every time there's an injury to a starter.

TCY--Will start a 41/41 5th-year senior over a 35/87 sophomore just about every time. The sophomore would be better within 2-3 games of starting. I have to go in and make lineup changes because of this.

FOF4--Also loves those 41/41 vets over the 35/87 rookies.

[GrantDawg]

Ok, if I'm the OC, and Skydogs the DC, who is the HC?

[revrew]

Definitely positional. I love fiddling with formations and situational backups. I want to build a team around a player by putting the right guys in place around him.

Positional. Definitely positional. Which position, of course, is between me and my wife.