If you asked me as an adult if I liked sports, I’d probably say no.
If you asked me as an adult if I was going to buy the new Mario Strikers and just about every other Mario sports game, I’d say yes.
There is something I’ve been trying to untangle for a little while.
As I write this, the Super Bowl is starting in a few hours. If you don’t watch the Super Bowl, it’s a little bit like The Game Awards in that there seems to be way more interest in the commercials than there is in the actual game being talked about. But it’s an event that a lot of people, even those who hate sports, watch religiously because it’s a massive cultural event like a natural disaster or a Spider-Man movie.
Unfortunately, I didn’t like sports when I was a kid. As much as my father wanted me to be into them, it just never happened. And to be clear, he wasn’t disappointed that I didn’t play sports. He was disappointed that I made fun of him for liking sports. I was a child. If he was going to force me to go to a the Miami Dolphins game, then I was going to bring a copy of a romance novel to fuck with him. That’s our relationship.
That’s all to say, my dislike of sports never really came from some sort of external conflict. Jocks never harassed me. Any gym teacher I had in high school was paid too little to even try to yell at us. There was really nothing that was making me dislike sports outside of the fact that I found them boring and, honestly, it was hot outside. There’s a reason the only sport I sometimes still see live is hockey: I literally enjoy one sport because it’s cold.
I have to admit to myself that I don’t have a problem with sports. I’m not better than them. I’m not above them. In fact, the reason I don’t enjoy sports isn’t the sports, it’s the theme. Video and board games have taught me that I’ll batter the fuck up if a robot or an alien is pitching.
To some extent, video game sports have always been my only way of understanding how to enjoy them. As a child who grew up wearing an XXL ‘Make 7 Up Yours’ shirt, you can assume that I wasn’t a fan of physical activity. I also grew up in South Florida, a place in which the moisture and the sun conspire to hate you. To their credit, my parents also didn’t force me to play sports. They just looked long and hard into the distance as their son brought home a Mathlete shirt.
But the moment you turn football into Blood Bowl, I’m in. Sure, sure, sure you could say that the rules are abstracted differently, therefore what appears to be American football is in fact a version of American football that’s highly different! Shut up. Stop it. Listen to yourself. Blood Bowl is just American football with an orc saying, “Zug zug” or some shit. Also, don’t correct me on which franchise has an orc saying, “Zug zug,” because I both know and do not care.
That little fine line of fictionalization makes sports more fun for me. Same goes for the old Mutant League Football and Mutant League Hockey games. They’re sports, but they’re cartoony sports with super powers and random events. Even games like NFL Blitz and NBA Jam add special effects and wackiness to ‘enhance’ the experience of the game.
Granted, all of this is because of personal taste. I’m also not into esports for a similar reason: I just feel like I’m watching people I don’t know having fun. They’re having fun at the highest level possible, and they’re having the type of fun that takes years - if not decades - of training to achieve. But it’s still someone else having fun while I watch.
Then there’s the sheer amount of knowledge I’d need to know to enjoy a lot of professional sports. I’m 37, and I just don’t have the time to learn which teams and clubs hate each other due to championships and tournaments that happened decades ago. At this point, most of my sports knowledge comes from NBA Jam, NFL Blitz, and living with a dad obsessed with Dan Marino. Plus, real sports tend to have more complicated rules than ones in which an anime woman power blasts a golf ball into a hole across the course.
I’m not saying regular sports are boring, I’m saying regular sports are boring to me. When game companies add a layer of fantasy or sci fi paint, what I’m getting is the actual pure form of why the sport itself is fun. When you strip away the stories I don’t know and the people I don’t care about, and add a theme I do - no matter how thinly done! - I can enjoy what are actually fun games with actually fun rules.
The same goes for entirely fictional sports like Blitzball in Final Fantasy 10 or all of Rocket League. I one hundred percent guarantee that if Blitzball was played by regular athletes in regular uniforms in regular countries, I wouldn’t give the slightest of shits about it. But because it’s a fantasy sport played by the guy who voiced Bender on Futurama, I was in.
This should be more of a lesson to me than anything else. I should give sports a chance. I don’t hate them. I don’t think they’re dumb. I don’t say ‘sports ball’, mostly because it’s not 1999 anymore and we can throw some new jokes out there every so often. But I still struggle to take them seriously or watch without adding experience points and magic spells.
As much as my destiny was and probably still is to never be excited about humans playing sports live, video games have at least helped me admit that sports themselves are fun. They’re more complicated than they seem. They require more thought than they seem. And they’re more interesting than they seem. I just needed a layer of polish that I understood to get there. It seems obvious, but imagine the relationship I’d have with my dad if he figured that shit out early.
All I’m saying is, as big as the audience for the World Cup is, it could probably be even bigger if they added blue shells.