Lately I have been filling my free time by playing a football video game and I have found that the college video game highlights my tendencies while the professional one exploits them. One of my first problems is believing games are meant to be won. Losing in either upsets me a great deal and due to bugs and other issues losses can come in seemingly nonsensical ways. But that isn’t where I ruin things.
College football is what Americans want sports to be. Rivalries and dynasties and logical progression to being a premier team. In college sports there isn’t rebuilding like in other sports. Bad teams aren’t rewarded with better draft picks or larger pools of international signing money. Unless the bad teams work to improve they will never be anything but a bad team. Meanwhile there are a handful of great teams that suck up all the best recruits and the bad teams really have no chance to ever land a top player unless one is glaringly overlooked or just happens to really want to play at their school for reasons.
For myself this logical pattern is appealing. I take over as the virtual coach of my favorite team and start winning games, and through that increased winning I start getting better recruits, and it continues until I build the team into a dynasty. There is no salary cap to manage and the team rotates in a logical and fun way every season. The small changes are enjoyable because the team isn’t getting worse, it is getting different. Like one season your best player is a wide receiver then the next a running back and the next a defensive lineman. It changes is fun ways.
Now to the pro game where getting better equals getting worse. So for the first time in my life in the Madden series of video games I took over a Washington team with a realistic chance to play in the Super Bowl. It wasn’t goofy player manipulation that made them good. In fact once I got to the playoffs I simulated to the Super Bowl and was surprised to be in it.
Now to my bad tendencies. After finally winning the Super Bowl in my third season I decided I needed better draft picks. I looked at my roster and found a few players I could trade. One was my right tackle that I had signed to a long term deal. He was expensive and his back-up wasn’t much of a drop-off and a lot cheaper. So I traded him. What I didn’t know was by doing so I immediately owed him all the remaining guaranteed money on his contract and the game didn’t tell me.
So, while I ended up with better draft picks I completely lost the ability to sign any free agents that season, and had to trade several other players in order to pay the penalty. Now in dong so I was able to make the team both younger and cheaper and ended up repeating as Super Bowl champs, but it was a lot of running in circles to stand in place type of thing. I could have simply done nothing and run it back with the same squad, but I had to start messing.
In college football the roster is naturally shaken up every season. In the NFL consistency is key. My tendency is to like to shake things up, and for professional football video games, that is bad.
David Huzzard Writes 