1613: A Distinct Lack of National Pride

It’s that time again, that time that comes around every few years, when I’m supposed to care about football. The World Cup.

I do not care about football. I would go so far as to say that I actively despise football. There was a brief moment in my childhood where I sort of liked it — I played for my Cub Scout pack team, who were legendarily awful (worst result, 20-0 to them; best result, 1-1) and I used to talk about playing football with my erstwhile penpal Joanna (a former classmate who moved away and, unusually for the late ’80s, a girl who liked football) — but once I got to secondary school and we started to be obliged to play football in P.E. lessons, my hatred of it started to grow.

And it is hatred. Irrational, burning hatred. I’m not quite sure of the exact source of my irrational, burning hatred for “the beautiful game”, but it sure is there, and despite several attempts over the years to overcome said irrational, burning hatred I just cannot get over it at all. I hate football. I hate everything about it.

Perhaps it was the fact that football lessons in school were an opportunity for the “cool” kids to shine and be praised, whereas it made me feel utterly useless. Whereas — and I don’t wish to sound like I’m blowing my own trumpet here, but I’m aware I sort of am — I was fairly academically gifted compared to my peers at my secondary school, I was not at all gifted in any way when it came to any form of physical activity. Clumsiness and inaccuracy — a hangover from my childhood, where I had such difficulty with a number of things I had to have various forms of therapy and support to get over it — meant that I was a hindrance to any team I ended up on, which meant I was pretty much always the proverbial (and indeed literal) last one to get picked for teams. It was humiliating.

Or perhaps it’s the fact that when I’m around hardcore football fans — the ones who drink beer by the gallon, shout at the TV and raise the roof of whatever drinking establishment they’re frequenting any time something either good or bad happens on the pitch — I feel physically threatened. Nothing has ever actually happened to me — largely because I try and keep myself out of such situations as much as possible — but whenever I’m anywhere near a group of rowdy football fans I feel worried for my own safety. I even feel worried and scared when I hear, from my own home, drunkards staggering back from the pub late at night, singing football songs as they pass by.

Or perhaps it’s just because I resent being obliged to show an interest in something that I despise so. It’s assumed by almost everyone that you’ll be following the World Cup — it was even an informal question at a job interview I had last week (though to the asker’s credit, she did then joke that “the job is yours!” after I said that I don’t really like football; sadly, I don’t think she meant it) — and if you say that you’re not following it, or that you’re not interested, or that you think anyone who doesn’t put a comma in the statement “Come on, England!” is a barely-literate idiot (okay, perhaps that last one is a tad inflammatory, but it’s not wrong, is it?) you get a funny look of confusion at best, disgust at worst.

Either way, fuck the World Cup. I haven’t been following it at all — aside from the unavoidable, endless posts on social media during a match (I usually go and do something else at this point) — but if I understand correctly, the England team (I refuse to say “we”) is at risk of being knocked out shortly, at which point I will breathe a sigh of relief.

Why? Because there are very few things out there that make me feel more like an outsider than the inevitable national hysteria over the national team’s performance. I hate it. I despise it. And now I’m going to go and do something else to forget about it.

#oneaday Day 893: The One Thing That Would Make Me Play a Sports Game

I’m not a fan of sports, as I believe I’ve made abundantly clear on numerous occasions. Consequently, I’m not a big fan of sports-based video games either (though I am rather more tolerant of them than televised sporting events, largely because I get to interact with them and have fun with friends — but the point stands).

It doesn’t have to be that way, though. I think there’s scope for sports games to reach out to people like me and provide an accessible experience that I could enjoy — and potentially learn to be interested in the sport itself over time. I caught a glimpse of such a concept in practice today when checking out a Facebook-based game called I AM PLAYR, a rather nifty little game that casts players in the role of an individual player on an up-and-coming (and fictional) football (soccer) team. The game focuses on the life of the player’s character both on and off the pitch, splitting the player’s time between 3D training minigames, text-based matches punctuated by interactive 3D attempts on goal by the player character and full-motion video sequences with occasional moral choices to make. While the latter may sound rather late-90s CD-ROM in nature, it added a huge amount of personality to the experience and actually made me interested to play more.

The reason I don’t find sports games very interesting, you see, is that there’s no sense of narrative or drama. Sure, there’s an argument to be made for emergent narrative in sports games just as there is in abstract strategy games, but when I’m not interested enough in the source material I’m never going to become invested enough in the game to start thinking of things in emergent narrative terms. As such, it turns out that the very thing I needed to get me interested in playing a sports game was a story.

I AM PLAYR sees the player character following a number of off-pitch narrative threads alongside the season’s fixtures. We see the behind-the-scenes drama as the team’s lead striker who claimed he was fighting fit was actually receiving injections from the team’s therapist. We see rivalry between teammates — practical jokes, drunken nights out, ill-advised encounters with vapid glory-chasing women. We see the team’s manager trying to stay positive even as the drama unfolds within his team. And amid all this, the player character makes choices that determine how different characters react to him — including his girlfriend, who is more than a little concerned that his new-found fame will see him drifting away from her.

It’s a really neat system and made me feel far more attached to my character and the team than if they were simply a collection of stats and a polygon representation on a virtual pitch. I don’t know enough about how to play football effectively to be able to play a full match and win, so I’m grateful that the actual “sport” element of the game simply focuses on set-pieces and chances on goal, and then allows me to get back to the clubhouse intrigue.

After playing the game for a while I was struck with how rarely this sort of thing is seen. I AM PLAYR has high production values — all of the video is shot with real people on location, including some actual real footballers, for example — but there’s no reason a team couldn’t do it slightly more on the cheap with CG characters and text-based dialogue if the budget wasn’t there. So why aren’t more people doing it? I’d certainly play it, and I’m willing to bet there are plenty of people out there who have a casual interest in football (but not enough to play a full simulation of it) who would join me.

It doesn’t just have to be limited to football, either. This formula would work for pretty much any sport. You could have the motorsports game where you developed rivalries in the pit lane. The baseball game where you’re trying to follow in the footsteps of a childhood hero. The tennis game where you’re struggling to come to terms with your own anger management issues. (You cannot be… etc.)

There have been examples in the past — On The Ball from Ascon for MS-DOS computers springs immediately to mind, and apparently New Star Soccer for iOS follows a similar template — but I want to see more of this kind of game. They could be the catalyst to actually get me interested in a sport and be able to participate in a conversation come international tournament time, rather than simply wanting to snap off every England “car flag” I see.

The trouble with Arsenal, you see, is they always try and walk it in.

#oneaday Day 887: Things I Don’t Understand

Herein follows an updated (though not comprehensive) list of Things I Really Don’t Get, in no particular order.

Football. (Soccer for the Americans.) Those who have known me for a long time will be well-familiar with my aversion to the supposed “beautiful game” by now, and its popularity continues to elude me even as I’m supposed to be feeling patriotic and English while Euro 2012 is going on. I just couldn’t give a toss, though. Related: I also don’t understand why those who like football complain about ITV’s coverage of it and then don’t protest about it in a form any stronger than passive-aggressive tweets. Don’t watch it if it bothers you that much. Crashing viewing figures would get their attention. (One response I received to this tonight was that they had “no choice” but to watch. This attitude is unfathomable to me when the vehement, often expletive-ridden criticisms of ITV’s coverage is taken into account.)
Carly Rae Jepsen. Who the fuck is this person and why is their song Call Me Maybe so inexplicably popular at present? I listened to it out of curiosity on Spotify the other day and discovered a bland, predictable if marginally catchy pop song — certainly nothing remarkable to elevate it above similar offerings from other cheeseballs artists such as Ke$ha et al.
Rage of Bahamut. Discussed in greater detail here.
People who park in the pick-up area at supermarkets. Is your time so valuable to you that you need to park in an area that isn’t a parking space, Mr BMW driver? (Because it inevitably is a male driver, usually in an expensive German car) There are free spaces over there. I’m sure it won’t hurt you to get out and walk for an additional five seconds.
People who comment on brand pages on Facebook. Discussed somewhat here. It seems that for some people, the “like” and “comment” buttons have some sort of irresistible magnetic force that makes these people unable to leave an inane post by a brand alone before they’ve posted “lol” or some equally asinine comment. I follow J-List on Facebook because (1) I like the pictures (2) I find the posts about Japan interesting
Radio 1 giving an on-air guided tour of a festival ground when nothing was happening there. Radio 1 had/are having (I don’t care enough to check) some sort of festival, and the other day they devoted a good ten minutes or so to someone walking around the (unoccupied) festival grounds explaining where everything was going to be. The impact was somewhat lost by radio’s inherent lack of pictures.
Jedward. Come on. Are we not over this supposed “joke” yet?
Beauty products. Women must all be fucking scientists to understand all that crap they sell in Boots. I certainly wouldn’t know when to buy a “serum” and when to buy “body butter”.
The enduring popularity of shit TV. I don’t think Take Me Out is on at the moment, but the sheer number of otherwise normal-ish people I follow on Twitter who voluntarily subjected themselves to this televisual carcrash is astonishing. Most claim they only did so in order to bitch about it on Twitter, but I can think of far less infuriating ways to spend an evening.
Instapaper, Read It Later et al. I’ve never used one of these services so I don’t really understand what they do and can’t really fathom out how they work from their descriptions. I’m something of a traditionalist in the way I read stuff on the Internet — I go to the site, I read it. If I don’t have Internet access at the time, I don’t read it. If you’re lucky I’ll subscribe to your blog by email but that’s about it – I don’t use Google Reader or anything either.
How you can play the same (non-MMORPG) multiplayer game for over 100 hours and not get bored. I got bored of the one time I tried Call of Duty multiplayer after about two or three hours tops. I got sort of into it for a little while but then realised that I wasn’t really having as much fun as I thought I should be having and that I didn’t feel like I was getting any better, either, so I stopped. The prospect of playing a multiplayer shooter enough to contemplate voluntarily paying a subscription fee for it is unfathomable to me.
How Microsoft Word still doesn’t work properly yet. Word first came out in 1983, yet here in 2012 I am still getting frustrated by the fact it occasionally and unpredictably changes fonts for no apparent reason, decides to format my entire document in bullet points when I tell it to undo my last action and is just generally a big buggy mess. Surely it can’t be that hard to get right? It’s not as if I’m even doing anything advanced; this is basic text editing that still encounters these glaring flaws on a regular (but unpredictable) basis.
How it’s possible to have a “collector’s edition” of a game that is only available via digital download. Special edition, fine. Premium edition, fine. But “collector’s edition”? No.
Why all car parks don’t take cards. I never have any cash on me because I rarely need it, so I can imagine there are plenty of other people who live their lives in a similar fashion. Payment cards are so ubiquitous now; why can’t you pay for your parking with a credit or debit card in 95% of British car parks? (I made that statistic up. But it’s certainly a lot of them.)
Fruit tea. It smells so good; it tastes so much like dirty bath water. Why must Nature be so cruel?

I think that’ll do for now. Feel free to share your own Things You Don’t Understand in the comments.

#oneaday, Day 37: Sportyballs

I don’t get sport. I never have, and I suspect I never will.

This is not through lack of trying. I used to play football (soccer, for our American readers) with my local Cub Scout pack when I was a kid. We were sponsored by a scrapyard and our best result was 1-0 to us. Our worst result was 21-0 to them. This convinced me that football (soccer) was Not My Game.

Early in my #oneaday career, I decided I was going to attempt to get into Formula 1. Cars racing around tracks is more appealing to me than sweaty men running up and down a pitch. But I found myself not caring enough to keep up to date with it. And forgetting that races were happening. And finding myself thinking there were many, many things I would rather do than sit passively in front of the TV for hours at a time. (One of which was sitting in front of the TV with a controller in my hand, which at least is a bit more “active” entertainment.)

My wife enjoyed football (soccer), so back when we were still together, I picked up a copy of FIFA 10 in an attempt to try to understand what was so appealing about it. I played it a bit, got destroyed 21-0 in an online game and was convinced for the second time in my life that football (soccer) was Not My Game.

I find myself perpetually bewildered by people who discuss the sports team they support as if they have anything to do with it. “We bought that striker person for a bajillion pounds,” they say, substituting “that striker person” and “a bajillion pounds” with an actual player’s name and an actual amount of money respectively. “We had an amazing result,” “We’re top of the league”. I just don’t get it. I don’t even show that much loyalty to my RPG characters. They’re still “they” to me.

And today, apparently, is something to do with a superb owl. (Thank you to whoever posted that joke in my Twitter feed while I was writing this.) There seems to be an assumption that everyone will be supporting either the Packers or the Steelers, which may be true if you’re an American, but I have no idea who either of those teams are or where they’re from. I could Google them, but to be honest, I really couldn’t care less.

I guess it’s just a different form of nerdery; one that is more “accepted” (for want of a better word—perhaps “embraced” is more appropriate) by society at large than video gamery and gadget-joy. I can talk for hours about my character builds in Final Fantasy XII and the makeup of my team of Personae from Persona 4 but I wouldn’t know where to begin if someone started a conversation on the batting average innings goal difference of the Packersteelers bowling out for a duck’s ludicrous display.

Each to their own, I guess. Just don’t expect me to even try a little bit to join in with such a conversation. I’ll see you at the bar.

#oneaday, Day 123: Kiss My Ass, World Cup

So there’s some sort of football tournament soon. Those of you who know me well will be aware that I have tried and failed several times to be the slightest bit interested in football. People I tell this to normally respond with “Oh, well, there’s the World Cup coming up. Everyone enjoys that. Even people who don’t like football.”

Well I beg to differ. I don’t like football and therefore the World Cup or similar tournaments are a vision of Hell on Earth for me. It seems for weeks at a time the entire nation except me goes absolutely insane and shows levels of supposed “patriotism” that they’d never normally show, only to get all grumpy and depressed when the England team inevitably comes to a crushingly embarrassing defeat at the hands of someone that the pundits say we “should have beaten”. Well no shit. Of course we “should have” beaten them. That’s how you win the tournament.

Anyway, fuck the World Cup, and here’s why:

That horrible shouty-singy-chanting that drunken men do, inevitably in the middle of the night outside my window when I’m trying to sleep.

As a musician and someone who actually recognises good singing when he hears it, there is no sound more loathsome to me than the sound of football chanting, except possibly that horrible sound that polystyrene makes when you scrape it against something – ugh, it gives me goosebumps (in a bad way) just thinking about it. But yes. Hearing some drunken twats shouting “EN-GUH-LUHND” in a discordant manner is not musical. Nor does it make me particularly inclined to think that Enguhluhnd is a place to be especially proud of.

Not only that, but these chants are often “sung” with such aggression that I find them genuinely threatening. I guess that’s the point – to try and intimidate rival fans and the opposing team – but I don’t particularly like it when I have to walk past or near people who are doing it. It gives me a sensation remarkably akin to panic. I fear for my own safety. I’ve never had any problems with football fans (normally because I stay the hell away from them) but the point is, I don’t feel safe around shouting people as a general life rule.

The racists come out to play.

Police are going around to all pubs andclubs saying we cant wear our england tops for the footie and we havetotake our england flags down as it is offending ppl that aren’t fromengland !!now im NOT RACIST..BUT this is taking the piss!! THIS ISENGLAND & we need to make a stand!!! would u remove ur turban if itoffended me??? we need to stick together repost this as ur status andmake ur stand!!!! ENGLAND !

Seen this on Facebook recently? Leaving the appalling spelling, punctuation and grammar aside for a moment, it’s also not true. The England flag only ever comes out for football tournaments and people get very precious about it. Particularly racists. As a result, they make up bullshit like the quote above which quickly spreads itself around Facebook as one of those interminable copy-and-paste-this-as-your-status-if-you-don’t-have-a-mind-of-your-own-and-anything-interesting-to-say pieces of nonsense. It always comes back to the same few lines, too. “fuk of bak where u come frm” [sic], “wud u remove ur [turban/burka/sari] if it ofendid me” [sic] and numerous others. I’m sure you’ve seen them before.

The trouble is, the World Cup gets people into such a flap about the England flag that being racist about defending it suddenly becomes just peachy. Any excuse to blame the Muslims in particular is jumped on by the sort of people that support the BNP’s ideology. And that’s an ugly, ugly scene.

Pubs become a no-go area.

Sometimes you just want a quiet drink. Sometimes you want to chill out with friends. But at World Cup time, you try finding a pub that isn’t filled with 1) braying idiots and 2) a giant TV showing a match… even the ones that England aren’t involved with. It’s not easy. There are some out there, sure, but they’re not always easy to find. And should you find yourself stumbling into a pub which is showing the football at the time… well, I certainly find it a threatening environment. Light-hearted banter that “oooh, there’ll be riots if England lose” doesn’t help matters.

Forced joviality.

I hate hate hate it when people tell me what I should be excited about. I feel like a tool when I do any sort of “celebration” at the best of times, so there’s no way I’m going to make a twat of myself in front of the general public by trying to fit in with one of the communal bellows when one of the players does something that is apparently good. I feel like a fraud if I try (and I’ve tried) – so I’d rather not bother. I’d rather not be in that situation in the first place at all, thanks. But if I am forced to watch a football match, I’d much rather sit quietly with my drink and ignore what’s going on as much as possible, preferably with anyone who feels the same way.

Footballers.

Last of all, I really can’t get excited about something done by people I don’t have any interest in or even respect. I hate footballers. They’re overpaid prima donnas who can kick a ball around and get paid inordinately huge amounts of cash for it. And they are the most boring people on the planet. I can’t watch a footballer being interviewed. I have to switch over, because their droning voices and complete lack of personality make me want to summon a dimensional portal in my TV in order to let me slap them in the face until they wake up from their doziness.

“Oh, it’s jealousy,” you may say. Well damn right I’m jealous. I’d very much like to be paid hundreds of thousands of pounds a day for playing a game. But I’m not. So yes, I’m jealous. As are, I’m sure, many people out there who feel they make more valid contributions to society for a relative pittance.

So that’s why I hate World Cup time. I must confess, I don’t even actually know when it’s happening. This post was prompted by the fact that World Cup-themed adverts have started appearing on television, reminding me to grit my teeth and ride out the storm as I always do. And pray that if England do manage a successful bid to host the one in whatever year they’re trying to host it in, that I manage to emigrate or at least be temporarily out of the country while it’s on.

So, fuck the World Cup, and fuck football.

One A Day, Day 27: Sportsmanship

There was a football match in my city today. Southampton vs Portsmouth. These two are traditionally great rivals, and everyone jokes that there’ll be “rioting” after a game between the two of them, as if that’s a perfectly normal thing to expect to happen after a sporting event.

I didn’t encounter any particular problems myself, but there sure were a lot of people wandering around to and from town, plus several local shops had either put up signs refusing to serve alcohol, or closed completely, citing the football match as the reason. As I walked through town in the middle of the day, there was a constant police presence, with officers on foot walking around the pedestrian area in the middle of town, while cars and vans raced around the major roads of the city, sirens blaring.

As I saw all this I had to think to myself “why?”

I know people get attached to their sports teams. This may be for personal reasons, it may be just something you’re interested in, or it may be a sense of loyalty to where you come from (although the last one is rather rarer than it used to be, with many people choosing to follow the clubs with the most money rather than the ones nearest them). It may even be a completely arbitrary decision.

The thing I don’t get is this: what is it about supporting a team that makes people get into such a state that a police presence approaching that required for a terrorist incident is necessary?

That was a terribly clumsy sentence. But do you see my point?

Surely if you enjoy watching football you enjoy watching football. Many people I know who do like football are perfectly normal people who have never been in a fight. So why all the police? Why do I hear shouting morons passing by my window on the way to the stadium? (Incidentally, the only noise I hate as much as people chewing is drunken football chanting.)

Perhaps one of my trans-Atlantic readers could shed some light on this issue. Does this sort of thing happen with American football games? I get the impression that the “local loyalty” thing is a much bigger deal in the States.