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.)