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Summary: I spent my childhood making narratives with video games. I created tournaments with user created storylines and continued doing this until games began having means to create your own seasons/careers/etc in the mid 90s. This allowed me to play creatively by myself and to have imaginary social relations where I often did not have comparable real life ones. 

This episode is based on a blog post I wrote back in 2008 responding to another blog post by Jane McGonigal about her trip to China to work on alternate reality games. She wrote about Summer Games and her experiences with creating narrative in 1988. In her post, she writes: During the real Olympic games that 1988 summer, I held my own Summer Games for myself on my Commodore 64. I would start up the computer game and enter 8 players. They were all made up versions of myself from different countries...the game was asynchronous multiplayer, rather than synchronous multiplayer, so I could try to do equal justice to each avatar. I would keep track of medals in my notebook, and then after all the avatars ran every event, I would see which country had won the most. 

Right around the same time I was doing the same thing with both Summer and Winter Games. I would create forms using Bank Street Writer with different countries and names.  I created brief backgrounds for each character and had them compete against each other for glory.  I did this for both Winter and Summer games and had the medal tallies combine to see which country would be champion.  I brought this over to other games like RC Pro Am for further events. As the years went on I did this in other games.  Track & Field II was a more developed game that allowed me to use more events and countries.  I remember a week long tournament I did in Nintendo World Cup where I came up with the idea that whatever team won would have their plan for world peace implemented.

The big gaming narrative moment for me however came a few years later when EA introduced their NHL series for the Sega Genesis.  The first few years not only did not include real player names (which caused me to spend hours watching ESPN and hockey games to memorize them) but did not have the season modes gamers are familiar with these days.  I spent the entire thirty game season making my own schedules (I forget the formula, but I think I just made sure the number of home games was even and then randomized who each team played) with all the team represented  (I played a handful of games each day after school) and then a playoff tournament.  I created my own schedules and kept detailed scoring notes and standings on the computer. The Islanders won the first year and the Blues won the second year. 

I also did this in other games like Baseball Stars (still the best Baseball game ever), Super NES Play Action Football (where I spent an entire fall doing a tournament of all the college teams, since the real NCAA didn’t seem keen on it even back then) and some others.  Baseball Stars was especially fun because not only could you create your own teams but you could create players.  There was a way to add female players to the teams.  I always made the girl I had a crush on all through middle school the star of my team.

I created my own leagues and narratives in real life play as well as a child too. I would do a tournament in my front yard with all NBA teams playing single elimination until eight winners came out, who then went through a group stage to send four to a final stage. The Bulls always seemed to win the whole thing, which made me get bored of it when I began planning the third year. 

I did a year for the NFL too, but after telling a friend about it, he told people at school, who then made fun of me for it. That was right around when the NHL series began, so I went back inside into my own narrative world. Madden football came along and I did the same for them too. I remember going back one summer and doing a season of Super Tecmo Bowl too with a newspaper I created by myself on our computer. 

My favorites were games like Baseball Stars where I could make my own players. Baseball Stars allowed me to have idealized friendships and imagine what it would be like to have more people like me and want to be around me. I could also add girls I had crushes on, which tempered the lack of interest any of them had on me. When alone with me, a few of my friends thought it was really cool I put them on my team, but others said this just proved what a dork I was. 

Winter and Summer Games have not held up so well. They were hard to play even back then. Often, when I did something to get a gold medal, I wasn't exactly sure how I even did it. Those early NHL games are still so fun. Modern sports games are often so sterile or obsessed with “Ultimate Game” nonsense that the actual play is subpar. The Tecmo Bowl games are fun and very difficult as the weeks of the season go on. I love how there is a large community out there still invested in it. The NHL series also has a wonderful fan community. Playing those games from the early 90s to the beginning of the millenium, when the series began to falter, every day after school was some of the best times of my life. 

Baseball Stars is probably still my favorite baseball game. It plays so smoothly and the ability to customize it is still fulfilling. Being able to add women to your team was quite progressive for the time even though the full time of women in the game are not good (but give you the most $ for beating them). One day we will do a podcast about my favorite baseball games like Baseball Stars, Micro League Baseball, RBI Baseball, and MVP 2005. 

Again, the Giraffe Feels podcast is written, edited, produced, and performed by William Wend. You can follow me on Twitter @wpwend. Giraffefeelspod is the user name to follow on Instagram, Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter. We have a Youtube page that is linked on the website.

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