What will my legacy be?

[ConStar]

When a person has a heart attack at a young age, as I did (39 ... hey, it's young for an MI. If you're not there yet, just wait.), perspectives tend to change a bit.

The heart attack is a few years in the past now. Unfortunately, it seems some of the damage will continue to linger for years to come, perhaps all of my remaining life. But I am still in a much better place than I was in the days after the event, where friends I hadn't seen in several years called upon me in the hospital ... some of them, I'm sure, not wanting to find themselves with regrets had I gone ahead and passed into the nether.

I reflect on this today because it's spring training in both Major League Baseball and also the league that inhabits my computer. Both MLB and my league just finished up their exhibition games for March 24, 2015. Tomorrow we'll put to bed the games of March 25, 2015. No more, no less.

In 1987, I began playing a game on the Commodore 64 called Pure-Stat baseball, released by the SubLOGIC firm, which reached its greatest acclaim by producing the true-to-life games "Flight Simulator" and especially "Flight Simulator II." So realistic was the latter that a pilot friend of our family would "train" on it at home, and taught his own son how to fly a real airplane after introducing him the concepts via that game. I still remember a scare-tactic article from one of the news magazines of the day wondering whether hijackers could learn to fly airplanes using the game.

SubLOGIC's baseball game was just as realistic. Although limited because of the Commodore technology, the game outdid MicroLeague Baseball, the standard-bearer of early strat-o-matic/rotisserie-inspired computer baseball games.

And, because of the speed (or lack thereof) of the Commodore hardware, playing more than a game a day for my favorite team (at the time, the Seattle Mariners) plus auto-playing the rest of the league was difficult. So I learned to love the one-game-a-day pace, as I had no choice but to think about the nuances of all the games I played that day.

The year was 1987. I've been through several different games since, but the concept remains the same: No matter the software I've chosen to use, I've played game-a-day baseball simulations for most of those 28 years.

A year ago now, my first child was born, a son. My old baseball glove waits patiently for his little left hand to grow to fit into it, although I secretly hope he begins throwing with that hand rather than catching with it and I have to go buy him a glove fit for a portsider instead. But assuming he doesn't, the last time I wore that glove in a competition setting, I was getting pulled from the mound after being knocked out of it by a string of hitters I couldn't retire. Perhaps my son will get better use out of it.

I'm looking at that old glove from my perch behind a computer, where I now recall and dissect the stats from each of my spring training games, wondering which relievers I'm going to take north with the parent club, worrying that a guy I'd like to keep -- but who is out of options -- will survive the waiver wire dance and take the assignment at my AAA affiliate. Although this game is artificial, it is so lifelike in its treatment of scenarios that I find myself thinking about some of these guys as if they really exist sometimes.

And that leads me back to a question I've kept boxed in for years, deep within. It popped the lock on its box after my heart attack, but it really emerged with the birth of my child: What will happen to my hobby when I'm gone, and what, if anything, is appropriate for me to share with my son when he's old enough to potentially enjoy this game?

Because, as superficial as computer simulations really are, I have played these games for twenty-eight years. It is tied, with photography, for the longest-running hobby I have. And there have been times when I couldn't afford to develop endless rolls of film, forcing that particular hobby into remission, so these games by default sit untied in first place on the list.

Part of the issue, too, is something that I've shared here before: I long ago tweaked the structure of my league. Because computer players sometimes perform long beyond their real-life counterparts, I initially added a few teams to my league so that a guy coming off a career year wasn't forced to retire in-game just because he retired in the real MLB. This practice has continued into OOTP, meaning that I now manage a MLB team in Birmingham, Ala. Also, there are more than a handful of fictional players mixed in with my "real" guys.

Had my heart attack proved fatal, it would have killed off not just me, but a small band of overachievers who have gotten me to the LCS the last couple of years. We still haven't cracked the code to get into the World Series. The real impact, of course, is that were I wake up dead, there would no longer be a Chris Kalen, no Alvaro Caraballo, no Steve Clarke. With my consciousness gone, so too would be gone the figments of my imagination. Build it and they will come? Perhaps, but if we die, they also disappear.

So as my son plays with his plastic tractor, or his fake TV remote (he's learning early) or chases our two dogs around the house, I wonder if one day I would pass to him more than just an old glove. Would I also pass to him a world in which his father once reigned as a deft manager, a world filled with a mix of real-life heroes and imagined ones? How does that particular conversation start? "Son, here's the password to a place in which I pretended I existed." If word of that conversation gets out, the next stop for me might be the 400 unit.

It's sort of funny how a game forces us to face these questions. At some point in my life, whether it ends tomorrow or it ends thirty years from now, it will end with me never getting to see some of my prospects make it to the bigs. Since I play in "real time," guys I drafted last year may not hit the field until 2019. And as silly as it is, missing out on their development would make me genuinely sad, were something sinister to happen to me.

My generation is the first to face these questions en masse, it would seem. We grew up with emerging technology; now, it is somehow a bit normal that we would worry about the legacy of our games as we might a family heirloom.

The legacy of my old glove is a part of my past that I can pass down to my son. But if he were to continue to operate his father's alternate reality -- is that also a legacy, too?

[Harry_BallSack]

Originally Posted by ConStar

When a person has a heart attack at a young age, as I did (39 ... hey, it's young for an MI. If you're not there yet, just wait.), perspectives tend to change a bit.

The heart attack is a few years in the past now. Unfortunately, it seems some of the damage will continue to linger for years to come, perhaps all of my remaining life. But I am still in a much better place than I was in the days after the event, where friends I hadn't seen in several years called upon me in the hospital ... some of them, I'm sure, not wanting to find themselves with regrets had I gone ahead and passed into the nether.

I reflect on this today because it's spring training in both Major League Baseball and also the league that inhabits my computer. Both MLB and my league just finished up their exhibition games for March 24, 2015. Tomorrow we'll put to bed the games of March 25, 2015. No more, no less.

In 1987, I began playing a game on the Commodore 64 called Pure-Stat baseball, released by the SubLOGIC firm, which reached its greatest acclaim by producing the true-to-life games "Flight Simulator" and especially "Flight Simulator II." So realistic was the latter that a pilot friend of our family would "train" on it at home, and taught his own son how to fly a real airplane after introducing him the concepts via that game. I still remember a scare-tactic article from one of the news magazines of the day wondering whether hijackers could learn to fly airplanes using the game.

SubLOGIC's baseball game was just as realistic. Although limited because of the Commodore technology, the game outdid MicroLeague Baseball, the standard-bearer of early strat-o-matic/rotisserie-inspired computer baseball games.

And, because of the speed (or lack thereof) of the Commodore hardware, playing more than a game a day for my favorite team (at the time, the Seattle Mariners) plus auto-playing the rest of the league was difficult. So I learned to love the one-game-a-day pace, as I had no choice but to think about the nuances of all the games I played that day.

The year was 1987. I've been through several different games since, but the concept remains the same: No matter the software I've chosen to use, I've played game-a-day baseball simulations for most of those 28 years.

A year ago now, my first child was born, a son. My old baseball glove waits patiently for his little left hand to grow to fit into it, although I secretly hope he begins throwing with that hand rather than catching with it and I have to go buy him a glove fit for a portsider instead. But assuming he doesn't, the last time I wore that glove in a competition setting, I was getting pulled from the mound after being knocked out of it by a string of hitters I couldn't retire. Perhaps my son will get better use out of it.

I'm looking at that old glove from my perch behind a computer, where I now recall and dissect the stats from each of my spring training games, wondering which relievers I'm going to take north with the parent club, worrying that a guy I'd like to keep -- but who is out of options -- will survive the waiver wire dance and take the assignment at my AAA affiliate. Although this game is artificial, it is so lifelike in its treatment of scenarios that I find myself thinking about some of these guys as if they really exist sometimes.

And that leads me back to a question I've kept boxed in for years, deep within. It popped the lock on its box after my heart attack, but it really emerged with the birth of my child: What will happen to my hobby when I'm gone, and what, if anything, is appropriate for me to share with my son when he's old enough to potentially enjoy this game?

Because, as superficial as computer simulations really are, I have played these games for twenty-eight years. It is tied, with photography, for the longest-running hobby I have. And there have been times when I couldn't afford to develop endless rolls of film, forcing that particular hobby into remission, so these games by default sit untied in first place on the list.

Part of the issue, too, is something that I've shared here before: I long ago tweaked the structure of my league. Because computer players sometimes perform long beyond their real-life counterparts, I initially added a few teams to my league so that a guy coming off a career year wasn't forced to retire in-game just because he retired in the real MLB. This practice has continued into OOTP, meaning that I now manage a MLB team in Birmingham, Ala. Also, there are more than a handful of fictional players mixed in with my "real" guys.

Had my heart attack proved fatal, it would have killed off not just me, but a small band of overachievers who have gotten me to the LCS the last couple of years. We still haven't cracked the code to get into the World Series. The real impact, of course, is that were I wake up dead, there would no longer be a Chris Kalen, no Alvaro Caraballo, no Steve Clarke. With my consciousness gone, so too would be gone the figments of my imagination. Build it and they will come? Perhaps, but if we die, they also disappear.

So as my son plays with his plastic tractor, or his fake TV remote (he's learning early) or chases our two dogs around the house, I wonder if one day I would pass to him more than just an old glove. Would I also pass to him a world in which his father once reigned as a deft manager, a world filled with a mix of real-life heroes and imagined ones? How does that particular conversation start? "Son, here's the password to a place in which I pretended I existed." If word of that conversation gets out, the next stop for me might be the 400 unit.

It's sort of funny how a game forces us to face these questions. At some point in my life, whether it ends tomorrow or it ends thirty years from now, it will end with me never getting to see some of my prospects make it to the bigs. Since I play in "real time," guys I drafted last year may not hit the field until 2019. And as silly as it is, missing out on their development would make me genuinely sad, were something sinister to happen to me.

My generation is the first to face these questions en masse, it would seem. We grew up with emerging technology; now, it is somehow a bit normal that we would worry about the legacy of our games as we might a family heirloom.

The legacy of my old glove is a part of my past that I can pass down to my son. But if he were to continue to operate his father's alternate reality -- is that also a legacy, too?

Amen brother. I too share the timeframe, sounds like I have 3 years or so on ya but this is a beautiful thought relative to the importance of simulation in digital gaming and legacy and our sons/daughters.

Thanks for sharing