PERSONAL I Can Feel It...
Around this time, every year, I can physically feel football season coming. I know that sounds lame and ridiculous... but it's real to me. I can almost smell the leaves falling off the trees, I can feel my body longing for the cold (and, as a result, sweating more profusely)... and I don't want to watch anything that isn't football related. It's the time of year that ESPN Classic ropes me in by re-playing old college football games. I found myself watching FSU/NCSU from 2001 today (Phillip Rivers and the Wolfpack beat Florida State... I hope Phillip Rivers doesn't win his next game [pre-season against my Packers]) and "Wide Right 1" a few days ago.
It is also the time of year that I get obsessively involved in NCAA Football for the XBox (or, hopefully soon, the XBox 360 or Nintendo Wii). I'm reading an interesting book about popular culture called "Everything Bad is Good for You" (or something like that) and the author talks about how pop culture (like video games) is actually making us more intelligent. His point is that complicated games (his example is a dice-based baseball, my example being the EA Sports Football franchises) have actually heightened our intellectual involvement in aforementioned sports through math and statistics (and a uber sense of realism. So real, in fact, that I can recognize defenses, blitz packages and stunts, zone coverage, and even the occasional odd offensive formation far before my father--who has watched football HIS whole life--can). The author goes on to say that pop culture in general is making our culture more demanding of versatile, intellectual, and interactive media. For years, I've hidden the hundreds of hand-written pages that I keep on video game players' ratings, statistics, and--in the pro games--salary. I have literally spent hundreds of man-hours figuring out who I can/could/should trade for whom... what positions on my team are the weakest... and where I need to draft or recruit for the future over the span of these games (roughly the past five or six years). After reading this book (and seeing the complicated schemes the author came up with just to realistically justify his dice-based baseball game), I no longer feel shame from my pursuits. I can say (almost with a straight face) that what I was doing was recognizing flaws in the system (previous NFL and NBA video games didn't necessarily care who you traded for whom... meaning you could really make un-fair trades and create a super-team) and trying to figure out my own fair way of judging and comparing talent. Even recently with NCAA Football 2006 (last year's offering), I kept very detailed records of all my players over five or six seasons on their ratings, how their ratings increase, how they were recruited, and when they left (as well as a few other categories).
What is my point? I suppose it's only a late-night rambling... trying to sort out what to do with these year's game: NCAA Football 2007. I've rented it for the XBox... but still have it in my mind that I'm going to buy it when I buy my NextGen console. So, should I even worry about keeping statistics for a game I'm not going to keep? Should I even play the game for XBox at all... considering I'll probably spend dozens of hours with the NextGen version whenever I can afford to get the console and game? Am I seriously wasting vast portions of my life while other people I know are getting married, buying houses, and starting families complete with children and everything (i.e. real people stuff)? Are you secretly looking down on me for being "simple... cute and incredibly sexy, but simple"?