Sports: The Comparisons

I love my Sunday gaming group to death, but it’s established that I can’t watch sports with them. I turned off the Super Bowl one year because they were MST3K’ing it. One of them rooted against the Giants, because a World Series win would mean traffic during the parade.

So for them, and any other gamers who don’t understand why we spend so much time discussing who will football the hardest, here’s why sports is great on a societal level. I’ve even written it out in geek-friendly metaphors, because I live in the center of the Venn diagram of Sports Fan + Total Nerd. My friends, just imagine that…


… Every single person in my city cheers for the Browncoats. That guy on the bus has an opinion on whether Wayne Coyne is getting too old to play with The Flaming Lips. During the postseason, every day is PAX, and everyone is cosplaying.

… Your grandma watched STK win. Your dad taught you how to zergling rush. Your mom gave you orange slices while you were writing your first fanfic, and your uncle helped you edit it.

… The boss talks about going into teamfight mode when he schedules overtime. Everyone can sympathize when the wife throws away PC Gaming’s swimsuit issue. Simon and Garfunkel sang “Where have you gone, Peter Molyneux, our nation turns its lonely eyes to you?”


This is what it’s like to be a sports fan in a nation of sports fans. Sports is great because we've all agreed to care so much about something that doesn't matter.


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(No, I don’t think sports are a necessary part of everyone’s lives. What I’m doing here is poking fun a little, but also showing how having an entire society agree to care about something makes it easier to reach out to people, making common ground to break the ice. I wrote a blog post once with a similar premise.)

(It doesn’t matter that it’s sports, necessarily. It could just as easily be anything else, but our society decided it should be sports. You can see similar effects within a fandom, or when a television event like the Red Wedding or the Breaking Bad finale happens. The only difference between sports and those is that so many people have already bought into sports.)

Bleem!, the Ruin of Hopes and Dreams

Once, long ago, Bleem! was my gaming platform.

When I was growing up, a console on the TV was verboten: My parents reasoned that someone would need the TV, and my dad was game-savvy enough to know it would suck to get kicked off mid-session. We kept an eye out for a small, cheap PC monitor with VGA ports for a console, but never found one.

Instead, the PC became my gaming platform... though not for PC games. I started emulating, primarily ZSNES. Looking back at it, it's amazing how janky some of the emulation was. I played through most of Super Mario RPG without being able to use the controls to throw more fireballs. I mapped out most of the future-world dome in Chrono Trigger, because the fog layer blocked off everything else. Granted, a cousin of mine helped me fix that (for which he is forever a god), but I was stuck for months.

All of those errors pale before Bleem!, though. Frankly, the fact that Bleem! never made me destroy my computer is amazing.

Bleem! was a Playstation emulator for PCs, sold in stores, back when the Playstation was still pretty new. This was my current-gen gaming system. And to put in perspective how much of a treat it was, when I first bought Bleem!, it didn't even run on our main PC. The only computer that could run it was my dad's work laptop, which he only brought home occasionally.

So imagine a Friday. Your dad comes home, smiling as he hands you the laptop, you start up Bleem!, you pop in Star Ocean II, you play for an hour and a half... and it doesn't save. Saving just didn't work in Bleem! for this game. I played through the first hour of that game like five times, and I had wild plans to leave the laptop running between sessions. (... for all 60 hours? This was a JRPG in the late 90s, after all.)

Chrono Cross had the same issue, which was a heartbreaker. I was a huge Chrono Trigger fan after I finally got the emulator to work. Chrono Trigger may be the first JRPG, other than Pokémon, that I actually beat, and I got hooked on a fanfic that carried on the plot. Chrono Cross was even the first game I really disagreed with my parents on -- me, quiet and rule-abiding Matthew, playing a game with 3D attacks. The violence of it all! And yet, saving was broken in Bleem!, so that was that.

The worst, though, was definitely Lunar. Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete was my favorite game until I played FFVII, two or three years later. It established my taste for anime cut scenes, it had a grand plot with love and destiny, the songs are still stuck in my head, and it had a flying cat. Seriously, the localization team actually shelled out to make cut scene songs good in English! And the saves worked.

You know what didn't work, though? At the very end of a 40+ hour JRPG? After the Big Bad walked up the staircase of the Goddess tower, challenging you to follow him? The second to last battle.

(Closing thought: Does anyone else remember, back when we were only allowed to game for an hour a day, waking up early so you could play first thing in the morning? I remember Escape Velocity: Override sessions that started Friday night, then finished with an hour on Saturday morning.)