Game Of Clicks

There's a computer game I just adore called 'Baseball Mogul'. That I like it is probably quite revealing, considering what it's all about. Where other sports games provide vicarious thrills by allowing the player to pose as an elite athlete, this one puts you in the position of the heretofore less-heralded general manager and president of a baseball club. What one does is set prices for tickets and concessions, determine levels of investment in areas like medical care and scouting, and of course draft, sign and trade the players who make up the roster from which you make a lineup, rotation and bullpen.If that sounds less than exciting, I can certainly appreciate your point of view.

Basically you spend a lot of time poring over names and figures as they change incrementally from day to day. As I said, it probably says much that I can't stop playing. I hadn't been able to for several years, as I believe it to be a PC-only game and I was for that time only using a Mac. Is it coincidental that I experienced considerable personal growth during the time I could not play the game? Even as I write this, I can hardly keep myself to this task instead of turning to that game. I don't know what it is about some simple, cheap games, but they hook you.

It's hardly perfect. There are considerable flaws in the way the game figures player development and especially injury rates. As often as players get hurt in the real world, this game has it happening several times more often, bogging the player down in what even I admit is the tedious and frustrating process of stopping every few games to bring up a player from the farm to replace an ailing starter, then stopping again to restore the status quo. Still I play on.

I almost did like this part of things better. I favored the making of the team over the playing of the games in the classic Madden football video game franchise, and even more so in the college version of the game. Going all the way back though, I preferred playing, maybe because at the time there was no provision for the other stuff. They just thought kids wanted to play the games, and I did for some time. Maybe that changed when it became apparent that I did not possess the right stuff to play in real life, but did have something more going on upstairs. If I figure that out, it's sure to take me to the next level in life.