Spurious Logic

Change of pace

I first played Championship Manager 02/03 when it came as a demo cd with a newspaper. I think I played as Chelsea in my first ever game and bought Lillian Thuram. He then went on to be the best player in the team for the next 6 months. So began my obsession with finding good players and their transformative effect on teams.

Just like real life there's a debate as to which is more important. Good players or the right tactics. Without good players you can't implement your tactics properly, but with inappropriate tactics good players under perform. Not forgetting of course the impact of random chance which can elevate your sloggers to 1970's era Brazil levels of brilliance for just a moment or can cause your superstars to lose heart and totally fall apart after a single fluky goal.

Since the Lillian Thuram transfer, I've concentrated on finding players. I overspent on scouting trips, I combed the EUROPA VASE trophy early rounds for little known eastern europeans. I once bought Ragnar Klavan (an actual player) as a left back at around £10,000 and with his finishing of 17 he converted to a striker, took us to the Premiership and was sold off for 5 million or so. Every player for Championship/Football manager has a stock of these transfer stories.

I have played with FM Genie Scout which is a direct database access program to identify the very best players. Suddenly you've got a team of teenagers in the lower leagues with the potential to win the champions league. And most were bought for less than 20K. This is fun, and I will play this way again (yes, I know it's cheating but it's not like I brag about it) but you do tend to miss the tension.

The tight, hard fought draws which require fine tuning of tactics or personnel to negotiate. It's nice to sweep all before you but is it still a game if there's no challenge? Just a "keep on pressing continue" style of play until you win everything? It gets to the point where you're speeding through seasons, only vaguely aware of your opponents because you know you can beat them. All you're looking at is the inexorable rise of your league position.

You lose any sense of friction, any sense that your input has any effect. After all you'll win no matter what tactics you use. You lose any sense of competition, rivalry and effort. The only effort is keeping your potential superstars united and off the radar of the larger clubs until you can get their full value. Is it actually football (simulation) if you're not miserable, desperate and tense once and a while?

That's what makes a game like Football Manager interesting. Well, technically it's not actually a game. A game has a clearly defined set of resources, rules and victory conditions. Football Manager has the resources (the club) and the rules (game structure) but it never ends. It is a simulation. I'm sure there's a development flag which allows you to set a gameworld running automatically with no human intervention and it would run indefinitely (until it hit an out of memory error or the heat death of the universe).

Players (users?) take what they want from this world. Some want to manage their own favourite team ("because that idiot of a manager doesn't know what he's doing" or "to get to know them better") while some just like to take over the behemoths of the world scene and play with only the best players at the top level (looking to achieve or maintain the highest of standerds) . Other schlups pick the bottom most(or at least lower league), poorest team and do their best to get them promoted, looking for validation in developing something from nothing.

Some players avoid buying new players altogether, preferring to work only with what they have. Honing tactics and working on morale. Others develop sprawling squads of 30~40 players. Switching in and out as each match comes around.

And through all of this there is no back story. No narrative. No end point and no conclusion. Nothing except what the player projects onto the gameworld.

So far with my little story of Moratalla I've been speeding along. I'm too used to the high speed of games flying by, not paying attention to the upcoming games. Which games have history, which coaches I've needled, which players I've denigrated. Instead I've been concentrating my own players, my own tactics and neglected the greater world in which they are situated.

I have to say that one of the reasons for this is that because 1) they were promoted from an non-existent league for the first time last year, the club has no history at all. Even if I come dead last this year, it'll still be a record high for the club. 2)as all the persons (players, managers, coaches etc...) in the game are set to be fake, they don't have any history either. No heros and no villians. All my players are listed as having joined the club this year. As is every other player in the game (I think, I'd have to check). I'd love to emulate the Pro Vercelli diatribe against Inter with my own boogey man, it will take time for this new world to develop it's own history.

In terms of writing, I'm finding that as I play the game I have a draft of the post open and I update it as significant events occur or ideas pop into my head. Then afterwards I go back and look for the narrative thread between them all. So far, I feel that  this has only been partially successful. I'm concentrating so much on the players, tactics and results that there's no story being brought through.

I'm still going back and updating older posts as I reread them but that's probably cheating. I'd like to put some videos of the various game in here but I'm having problems getting used to the video editing software.

I think I'm becoming a bit more confident with my writing, talking for longer and hopefully this will result in better structured updates. In the beginning I was more concerned with just getting words down. Now I'm pushing more for getting meaning down.

I feel that I'm still missing news posts and random events that give the game it's flavour. I don't know if I'm really communicating. e.g. Explaining that for the first 9 matches of the season I really wanted to give up and start again with a different, better team. The emotion from that first win after a break away goal and backs to the wall defending which followed really did feel like a triumph. A feeling repeated when we (we? the team) fought back to get a 2-2 draw. Swinging from disheartening desire to quit all the way to elation.

All this projected on a set of simulated results from a glorified database front end. There's probably some commentary fodder there about the nature of games, media and how we perceive them but I don't want to go into that now.