1. Exercise 1.2: D.O.A

Take one game that you’ve played that was D.O.A. By D.O.A., I mean “dead on arrival” (i.e., a game that’s no fun to play). Write down what you don’t like about it. What did the designers miss? How could the game be improved?

In the mid-nineties I used to enjoy playing a game called Championship Manager (CM). In the game, a single player selected a soccer team to manage (a manager is roughly equivalent to a coach in NFL or NHL terms). As the manager, the player selected the line-up for matches. The game mechanics were all controlled by the computer (i.e., players did not control the individual soccer players). After selecting the team, players were shown highlights of the game and could pause the action to make substitutions or to change tactics. The skill lay in choosing the right team to defeat a particular opponent. Championship Manager was later relaunched as Football Manager (https://www.footballmanager.com/). Football Manager has been the pre-eminent game of its kind ever since. The game is played in what I would call ‘accelerated real time’ – players cannot jump forward in time, but it does not take a ‘real’ day to play a day of Football Manager. It can and does take hours to play a full season, however.

When the latest version, FM2024 recently became available as a demo on Steam, I was excited to try it and to recapture some of that lost youth. However, I did not enjoy the game for the following reasons:

• The objectives are unclear (Fullerton, 2019, pp. 68-73), or there are simply too many. The overall objective of managing a successful team is subsumed by too many supporting objectives (maintaining squad harmony, managing a successful backroom staff, having good press relations, and so on), most of which were not engaging for me.
• There is a bewildering array of resources (Fullerton, 2019, pp. 80-85). There are 55 pro leagues in the latest version, with players from hundreds of teams available to loan or buy. It’s overwhelming.
• There is just too much going on – whereas in the original Championship Manager players’ actions were restricted to selecting a team and making tactical decisions during the game, in FM2024 the manager’s role is massively expanded. Now you are expected to take part in press conferences (selecting how to respond to press questions), manage a team of backroom staff (appoint scouts and trainers), mentor players, keep an eye on player availability, and a host of other details. I played the game for over an hour before the first actual match became available (a friendly game). I didn’t play long enough to actually begin a full season. While it is possible to delegate these tasks to subordinates, this takes a lot of gameplay time.
• The game assumes too much prior knowledge. For example, one of the tactical options (there are many) was the gegenpress, a tactical approach that has been imported into English soccer by managers from continental Europe (esp. Germany). I found myself having to look up some terms to understand what was required.
• Game play is tedious. Because of the plethora of options, I found myself clicking through actions that were mandatory, but that I was not interested in. The game procedures (Fullerton, 2019, pp. 74-76) forced me to click through these actions in a linear fashion to get to the part of the game I was interested in (the actual match). My idea of a ‘turn’ in CM (the earlier version of the game) was a single match. A season could be completed in 38 turns. In FM2024 each ‘turn’ takes much longer to play, given the extra actions that managers can take.

I think the game could be improved in a number of ways:

• Enable an accelerated/simple mode where players get to delegate some actions to subordinates from the outset, instead of during gameplay.
• Allow for automation of some of the duties of the manager (perhaps using AI?) – for example if I choose a tactic for a game and it isn’t working, give me the option of automating changes to the tactics mid-game.

The main selling point of FM2024 to its many fans is the detail of the simulation – people actually feel that they are managing an elite soccer team. In this respect I think I am not the target audience, as I would prefer a simpler game with fewer distracting options. The problem was a mismatch between the premise of the game (Fullerton, 2019, p. 45) and my fantasy version of the role of a football manager. From reading online forums I can see that many (most) players enjoy the extreme detail and realism, but I did not.

In summary, when people fantasize about managing a top soccer team, they aren’t dreaming about the joys of setting a training schedule for the reserve team or hiring and firing first team scouts. While some players really enjoy the enormous level of detail in FM, it’s the one thing that turns me off the game.

Discussion

In Rules of Play, Tekinbaş and Zimmerman reference Huizinga’s idea of the magic circle (Huizinga, 1949), saying that it “frames a distinct space of meaning that is separate from, but still references, the real world” (Tekinbaş & Zimmerman 2003, Chapter 9). FM2024 goes somewhat beyond this and tries to simulate almost all aspects of the real world. The complexity of the rules and procedures does not necessarily have a bearing on whether the player accepts the premise of the game and enters the Circle: the simpler Championship Manager was, for me, more fun to play. Then there is the issue of the challenge: As Schell (2015) points out, “Bad games have little challenge or too much challenge” (ibid., p. 42): I think FM2024 erred on the side of having too much.

---

References

Fullerton, T., & Taylor & Francis eBooks EBA. (2019). Game design workshop: A playcentric approach to creating innovative games (Fourth ed.). Taylor & Francis, CRC Press.

Huizinga, J. (1949). Homo ludens: A study of the play-element in culture. Routledge & K. Paul.

Schell, J. (2015). The art of game design: A book of lenses, second edition (2nd ed.). A K Peters/CRC Press. https://doi.org/10.1201/b17723

Tekinbaş, K. S., & Zimmerman, E. (2003). Rules of play: Game design fundamentals. MIT Press.