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Thinking I do with words - Sports and their equivalent video games

With the Pinty’s Grand Slam of Curling being the big event in the city last week, it gave me an opportunity to reflect on why I enjoy curling. While I’ve never actually been any good at curling, I have always liked the sport.
Devin

With the Pinty’s Grand Slam of Curling being the big event in the city last week, it gave me an opportunity to reflect on why I enjoy curling. While I’ve never actually been any good at curling, I have always liked the sport. Watching it, I realized exactly why, it’s the turn-based RPG of sports.

Like the video games, curling happens in turns, it requires strategy. It’s always possible your great plan for the next turn will go awry, sometimes due to random chance, other times because your plan wasn’t actually very good, or something you could realistically pull off. It’s great fun, and can get pretty tense if you’re in a well-matched game. Also, having your main equipment being brooms is similar to how some characters in the games have weapons like frying pans.

Much like curling, I love turn-based RPGs. I like the strategy, I like thinking about what is the best move to take, I like it when a well chosen move turns the battle in my favor, like a well aimed curling rock. Both are fun to me, even if I happen to be bad at curling.

What about other games? Driving home, distracting myself from the cold, I contemplated what other sports are, game wise. This is ignoring the obvious answer, of course, which is themselves, because most sports are made into games.
Most sports are straight up action. Basketball, soccer and hockey, for example, are co-op action games, with the team working together while constantly moving towards the goal. Tennis or other solo sports are one player action, constantly moving and trying to best someone else.

Boxing and wrestling are like Dark Souls, where you’re balancing your stamina and health, dodging and finding opportunities to attack.

Football is a strategy RPG. You think about your position, where you want the players to move, and what is the best move in that situation. Then when the play happens it could all go horribly wrong depending on if you made the right call and your players can pull it off. The other side is simultaneously doing the same thing, and the winner is whoever managed to do this better.

Figure skating is a lot like rhythm games like Dance Dance Revolution or PaRappa the Rapper. You have to make certain moves to the time of the music, and if you miss one move you’ve probably already lost.

Competitive diving is Devil May Cry, where I think something is really impressive and then at the end the judges give an awful score for reasons I don’t fully understand.

Baseball is a puzzle like Peggle. Everything hinges on a bunch of reactions to one action that the player takes, but they only really have control over a small part of the game at any one time.

Cricket is like Fortnite, in that it’s popular internationally but I find it confusing and don’t understand it at all.

Golf is like those farming sims, such as Harvest Moon, Story of Seasons or Stardew Valley. It’s relaxing and calm and can be extremely absorbing when you’re actually playing it, though watching someone else play it is a great way to lay the groundwork for a nap.

This is a good way, for me, a nerd, to understand the appeal of different sports, even if the golf fans are certainly not going to agree.