| |
Sports Simulations
What is a sports sim?
A replay game or simulation is a set of rules which enables the user to re-create a season of the sport in question, or a single tournament, or event, using the season's statistics as the framework for the replay.
Individual matches (or whatever) will rarely produce results which exactly mirror their real-life counterparts, but overall both teams and players will achieve figures (e.g. goals scored and conceded, league position) which are quite similar to those actually recorded, other things being equal. Of course, nothing is ever equal - an early season injury to a key player, the freak home defeat by your close championship rivals, a run of poor form by your main striker. All these can alter the course of history as far as your season's replay is concerned.
If the game design is accurate the real-life statistics will be reflected in the outcome. If it is also imaginative the replay of the season as it unravels can be as equally enthralling as the real thing from your privileged eye-in-the-sky position.
Some replay gamers require, and insist upon, a complete no-hands-on simulation, where their role is limited entirely to rolling the dice, consulting the charts, or pressing the computer keys, and recording the statistics that are 'created' by those actions. They crave a replay in a vacuum - no possible user bias allowed to contaminate the results, unloaded dice, clear and unambiguous charts. Such games can be produced, every user decision capable of being substituted by a randomly generated but 'intelligent' action controlled entirely by the game system.
Others require a definite involvement in the proceedings, the ability to influence team selection, strategy, tactics, etc., either just for their team or for all teams, reacting in their own way to that inopportune injury or the early goal conceded. Each gets his kicks (pun) in a slightly different way but in replay gaming the user's influence is in any event marginal as the game system must seek to impose the season's actual statistics above all else, the only justification for labelling it a Replay Simulation in the first place.
By definition a replay game deals with a past season, tournament or event using, as we have seen, the actual cumulative statistics produced by the many matches that make up the season. A replay game that attempted to simulate a current but incomplete season, or a future season, would require someone to guess at and input the season's statistics, and that is pretty close to heresy to a hardened replay gamer.
One thing that is allowed - and encouraged - within the hobby is the What if...? scenario, when teams, players or whatever of different eras are matched up to see just who was the greatest, the fastest, the toughest, etc. This is possible provided the games system is accurate enough, and the research that creates the team and player ratings is thorough enough and objective enough to evaluate the sheer quality of the teams of a particular era in relationship to other eras.
- text taken from http://www.roogames.co.uk/whatis.htm
| |