A woman's worst nightmare: a Football Manager obsessed husband

[rinka]

ATRUE story.

 

A woman comes home from work one day to find her husband sitting at their kitchen table, head in hands, disconsolate. She's pregnant with their first child and is alarmed by the sight of her husband, staring at his laptop, in a state of distress.

 

"Darling, what is it?" she asks. "I can't believe it, they've sacked me," he replies. "But what are we going to do? We're expecting a baby and if you're not working then . . . " her voice trails off, unable to finish the sentence. The man finally looks up from his computer. "What? Ach no, the job's fine, don't worry. It's Liverpool. They've just sacked me. I'm second in the league and still in Europe but we got beat 4-0 off Everton. It's not fair."

 

A story that will seem faintly ridiculous to normal people will elicit nods of empathy from anyone who has ever played Football Manager (or Championship Manager as it was originally), a strategy-based computer game that should come with a health warning. It is so addictive that it will surely only be a matter of time before Charlie Sheen adds it to his ever-growing list of vices.

 

The premise may seem fairly basic – choose a team you want to manage then see if you can lead them to glory by dealing wisely in the transfer market, picking the right players, sorting out your tactics etc – but it does not take long before it becomes all-consuming as you put in hour after hour trying to prove you can do it better than those useless losers managing clubs in the real world.

 

The price on the box may be around £35 but you pay with your social life, too. True disciples of the game, now in its 20th year, will admit, perhaps under duress, that there have been times when invitations to go out, to mix with actual human beings, have been turned down in favour of sitting in front of a computer in a darkened room, trying to find a way of managing East Stirlingshire to the third division title.

 

For particularly heavy users, it is not long before fact and fiction become virtually indistinguishable. I remember turning up to report on a St Mirren game for the paper one Saturday, after a particularly late Champ Man session the night before, wondering why none of the new signings were playing. There hadn't been any new signings.

 

I wasted my student years. While I was drinking warm lager, playing quiz machines, and memorising every line from Only An Excuse, I could have been playing Champ Man instead. I came late to the game, not discovering it until I had moved into journalism.

 

Afternoon sessions in the office would thereafter be explained away as research. After all, you never knew when a Scottish club would be in the market for a talented 17-year-old striker from the Swiss third division. I've kicked the habit for the time being – the iPhone version just isn't the same – but there are some who have got it real bad. Like some sort of group confessional, the tales of those who caught the Champ Man bug and couldn't get rid of it are grouped together in a new book Football Manager Stole My Life – 20 Years of Beautiful Obsession. Most of the stories are endearing enough.

 

There are tales of guys who stuck their cvs in for managerial vacancies in the real world because they had taken Leyton Orient to Champions League glory without ever leaving their bedroom, or those who would put on a suit to play the game because it was cup final day.

 

One dedicated/tortured soul (delete depending on personal viewpoint) would shake the door handle before each session as if greeting the opposing manager. All that seems harmless enough. Then there are those who maybe took things a bit too far. Football Manager has been cited in at least 35 divorce cases – or free transfers as the gamers would say – while one obsessive persuaded his wife to honeymoon in Bulgaria so he could visit the team he was managing in the second division. Perhaps he was fortunate not to become divorce case No.36.

 

Players (real ones) love it, too, mostly for the opportunity to sign themselves for Barcelona or Real Madrid, while some have used it to learn a bit more about their team-mates. Robbie Fowler, the former Liverpool ace and occasional touchline sniffer, admitted he turned to Champ Man in 1999 to keep track of all Gerard Houllier's new signings during a summer of upheaval at the club.

 

All that and more are in the new book that will surely thrill and disgust the game's many users at the same time. After all, is all this time reading not cutting into valuable gaming hours?

 

Football Manager Stole My Life – 20 Years of Beautiful Obsession, by Iain Macintosh, Kenny Millar and Neil White. Back Page Press. £12.99

 

Fonte: Herald Scotland

Editado 28 Outubro 2013 por rinka

[Mica]

Ou isto já andou por aqui, ou já li algures na Internet há bastantes meses. Já jogo isto há 15 anos mais ou menos e no entanto foram raras as vezes que prescindi de socializar por causa do jogo. E pelo que vejo o vício pelo FM nunca se tornou numa "epidemia" como acontece/acontecia com o WoW, DotA e LoL. Há que saber separar os dois mundos, arranja-se sempre tempo para tudo. Pergunto-me se quem leva isto a estes extremos está realmente a retirar algum prazer de jogar FM.

[Taka]

Nunca me aconteceu levar o vício ao extremo que é relatado aí. Como o Mica referiu, vejo gente a prescindir de socializar por causa dos jogos acima referidos e acho que é algo mais "doentio" do que o FM. O máximo que me aconteceu (e também vi escrito nesse texto) e vi acontecer é confundir factos do jogos com coisas que não aconteceram na realidade. As pessoas que adoram o jogo e têm vida além dele arranjam sempre tempo para jogar um pouco, socializar e trabalhar/estudar/wtv.

 

Contudo, o que me parece é que este livro apenas vai contar histórias bizarras de pessoas que jogaram durante muito tempo e as consequências que tiveram na sua vida social. Não faria sentido nenhum (*cof* Quintino *cof* Aires *cof*) começar a culpabilizar o jogo pelo quer que seja. As pessoas se são crescidas o suficiente para se casarem, são crescidas o suficiente para ter noção dos limites de um vício.

[El Shafto]

Por acaso deve ser dos jogos em que é mais fácil perder completamente a noção do tempo. Um gajo começa a jogar, é só uma horinha, quando olha para o relógio passaram 4h e já foram feitas 10 jornadas. :lol:

[José Mourinho]

Verdade, nos outros jogos pensas que passou duas horas e foi só hora e meia. E isso de confundir o que acontece no jogo com a realidade é também culpa de algumas transferências e factos que acontecem no jogo acabam por acontecer na vida real. Do tipo "Jogador x vai para o clube y" e eu "outra vez?".

 

Mas para mim é o melhor jogo de sempre. É o único que jogo todos os anos e adoro. Seja a começar num colosso ou com o clube da minha terra do zero. E isto de o pessoal partilhar o amor pelo jogo fazendo patchs, facepacks, partilhando tácticas faz isto tudo ser melhor.

 

É o jogo onde fico realmente agarrado e cada ano é mais real, tem mais detalhes. Sempre aprendemos algumas coisas, nem que seja que em Espanha podes inscrever 25 jogadores e que os guarda-redes são o 1, 13 e 25.

 

Mas nunca me afectou a vida normal. Quando era mais novo se calhar ficava um pouco lixado quando tinha de ir a algum sítio e faltava uma jornada para acabar a época e a seguir tinha final da taça e da liga dos campeões.

Agora isso de pessoal fazer algo de mau e como jogo FM a culpa é do FM (ou dos jogos) tem piada. Se vamos por aí a religião é a culpada de quase tudo. (Oh wait...)

Olha, o senhor Vítor bateu na mulher. Se calhar era por estar bêbado? Não, ele gostava de pipocas, acho que é das pipocas. Todos que comem pipocas batem na mulher... e chamam-se Vítor também.

 

in nonsense

[Hodor]

"One dedicated/tortured soul (delete depending on personal viewpoint) would shake the door handle before each session as if greeting the opposing manager"

 

Gostei, tenho de começar a fazer isso

[Scirea]

Já não tenho paciência nenhuma para FM. Prai desde o 09. Mas mesmo quando jogava nunca me viciei a esse ponto.

[Kanye]

Por acaso deve ser dos jogos em que é mais fácil perder completamente a noção do tempo. Um gajo começa a jogar, é só uma horinha, quando olha para o relógio passaram 4h e já foram feitas 10 jornadas. :lol:

É isto. E às vezes colo mesmo que nem me dá vontade de fechar o jogo, mas nunca deixei de me dar com ninguém por causa disso.

[Sumudica by Night]

Football Manager craze has matured into a full-grown national obsession

As the computer game that discovered Lionel Messi prepares to launch a 21st edition, its popularity has never been greater

 

The comedian Jason Manford tells a story on stage which sounds too ridiculous to be true but, according to those who have spoken with him, , is completely genuine. "I went and did a gig at Manchester City and met a load of the players," says the self-confessed City fan. "I met Micah Richards, the defender, and I was a bit rude to him. Afterwards my dad, who was with me, said 'you were a bit rude to Micah Richards'. I said 'yeah, I don't know why'. It was only when I got home I realised on Football Manager he'd turned up late for training a couple of times."

 

"That's probably the best FM-related anecdote I've ever heard," says Miles Jacobson, studio director of Sports Interactive, the developers behind Football Manager and the head of the team currently in the process of creating the 21st edition of the computer game, which is scheduled to be released later this year.

 

"It was about 10 years ago that someone told me there was this up-and-coming comedian called Jason, who, as part of his routine at the Edinburgh Festival, was doing stuff about Football Manager. I decided to go see him and although this was before the Micah Richards thing had happened, the stuff he was saying was still really funny and really complimentary. It was then that I realised we'd broken into the mainstream."

 

Alongside Manford there a host of other famous figures who have come out as Football Manager fanatics, including fellow stand-up Kevin Bridges, Andy Murray and Stuart Broad. If anything, however, they are merely the well-known faces of an ever increasing community of people – some of them geeks, some of them natural obsessives, all of them football lovers – who share a passion for seemingly cryptic phrases and practically unheard-of footballers. Just watch their eyes light up at the mention of "DMA RLC" and "Nii Lamptey".

 

"Fans of Football Manager are like members of a cult," Jacobson says. "But it's a very big cult and one that is growing all the time. Dads who played the original games are introducing it to their children while big brothers are doing the same with their siblings. Football Manager 2013, our most recent game, has been our most successful to date – 1.2 million copies sold on PC and Mac and over 10 million illegal downloads in the past year. The interest is growing, which for a game that's been around for over 20 years is remarkable."

 

The first Football Manager came out in 1992, and back then was known as Championship Manager. The premise was a simple one – allow the user to manage any club across England's top four divisions in an authentic a way as possible. That meant buying and selling players, picking a team and their tactics for league and cup fixtures and, if the opportunity presented itself, the chance to move on to a big and better job.

 

The graphics were simple, as was the gameplay and range of options available to the would-be Fergie or Clough, but that to a large extent was the appeal. Users could find their stride easily and quickly and once they were in – well, as practically anyone who has played Football Manager would testify to, it was almost impossible to get out.

 

As the game's popularity grew so did its scope and depth, with Jacobson boasting that Football Manager 2014 (the name change occurred a decade ago following a split between Sports Interactive and games publisher Eidos) will contain close to 1,000 new "items".

 

Among the advancements are up to 10 new player-roles, including a shadow striker and a regista ("a deeper deep-lying playmaker"), individual player-instructions, a revamped "live" transfer system and even the option of offering long-serving squad members a testimonial.

 

"There is a lot of pressure on us to deliver a bigger and better version each year," says Jacobson, who joined SI 20 years ago as a tester and regularly speaks to over 50 people directly involved in football to keep the game as accurate and realistic as possible.

 

"The love Football Manager fans have for the game is intense — I regularly get death threats on Twitter from people who aren't happy with an element of the game or who've just lost in the Champions League final and for some reason think that's my fault. That's pathetic but it shows how much FM means to people, and alongside the abuse we also get a lot of compliments. It's particularly nice hearing from managers and players who claim they have developed their understanding of football from the game. Ole Gunnar Solskjaer, for instance, told us that he developed his understanding of the tactics he uses at Molde from playing Football Manager."

 

For all its innovations and increasingly slick graphics, Football Manager's greatest asset remains its database of players. Alongside the 60 SI staff who work full-time on developing the game, there are 1,500 researchers spread across 51 countries and regions around the world whose job it is to liaise with managers, youth coaches and scouts in order to accurately rate, across a number of different skills and strengths, the 550,000-plus players and staff available for purchase, sale and hire in the game .

 

"SI's biggest claim to fame is that it was us who first found out about Lionel Messi," Jacobson says. "He was playing for Barcelona B at the time and Alex McLeish tells a story of when, during his time as Rangers manager, his son came up to him and said he should sign this amazing young forward called Messi who he'd come across on Football Manager. McLeish said he'd never heard of him and forgot about the whole thing. The rest is history."

 

But as well as stumbling on the next superstar, SI's researchers have also been known for wildly over-estimating the talent and prospects of less well-known players, none perhaps more famous than Lamptey, the Ghanaian forward who was a must-have foreign signing in Championship Manager 93/94.

 

In real life his career proved less than fantastic, with a starring role at the 1991 Under-17 World Championship – and the subsequent claim that he was the "next Pelé" from Pelé himself – the high-point. There was naturally much excitement among CM fans when Lamptey signed for Aston Villa in 1994 but, up close, it quickly became evident that he had as much chance of being the next Pelé as Dalian Atkinson.

 

"When you've got a database of 550,000 players and staff there are naturally going to be a few mistakes, and in the case of Football Manager the mistakes have become cult heroes," Jacobson says. "The fans love them but I don't. I strive for accuracy and see any mistakes in the database as a failure on our part."

 

But that, as Jacobson intimates, is not how Football Manager devotees judge the likes of Lamptey, Kennedy Bakircioglu, Ibrahima Bakayoko, Cherno Samba, Tonton Zola Moukoko, or any of the other cult heroes created by game. Indeed, the comedian Tony Jameson devotes an entire section to them in his one-man show, Football Manager Ruined My Life, which he is performing to sold-out crowds at the Edinburgh Festival.

 

"There's probably no part of the show that gets a greater cheer," he remarks. "The majority of the people who come along are Football Manager fans and for them the likes of Lamptey and Bakircioglu are universally loved figures."

 

Jameson describes his show as a "mid-life retrospective" examining how a game he first played two decades ago turned him from an enthusiast into an addict. "I've worked out that, on average, I've played Football Manager for three hours a day for the past 20 years. That works out to 21,915 hours, or two-and-a-half years, of my life."

 

Jameson is on his 35th consecutive season as manager of Blyth Spartans, having taken the Northumberland club from the Northern League to Premier League and Champions League success. "I'm 76 in Football Manager years," says the 33-year-old. "I was going to apply for the Brazil job a little while back but realised that would probably be too much of a commute for a man in his 70s."

 

It has been during his time in charge of Blyth that Jameson has displayed the kind of obsessive-bordering-on-mentally-unstable behaviour that separates a casual Football Manager player from a genuine addict. "The worst it got was probably when I reacted to getting a touchline ban by playing the game from outside my room," he says. "I hit start, left the room, came in again at half-time, hit start and left again. It was a Champions League tie against Espanyol. We lost 1-0."

 

That is nothing, however, compared with some of the tales journalist and self-confessed FM addict Iain Macintosh gathered in the process of putting together Football Manager Stole My Life: 20 Years of Beautiful Obsession, the book he co-wrote alongside Kenny Millar and Neil White.

 

"We heard some horror stories," he says. "There was the student whose friends staged an intervention, holding him down and smashing the disk in front of him, and then the chap, another journalist, whose wife found him sat with his head in his hands in the kitchen late one night. 'What's wrong?' she said. 'I've been sacked,' he mumbled. His wife burst into tears. She was pregnant, they'd just taken out a mortgage, she was terrified for their future. It took him several minutes to clarify that he'd only been sacked on a computer game, not in real life."

 

Macintosh himself once wore a suit and played Abide With Me through Spotify before managing a team in an FA Cup final and ultimately a simple question has to be asked – why have so many people become so obsessed with Football Manager? So much so that it was cited as the cause in 35 divorce cases last year.

 

"I'm a comedian, but like most lads I dreamt of being a footballer, or being involved in football, and Football Manager gives you that hope of making it," Jameson says.

 

"It's a basic concept executed fantastically well and as the game has become more in-depth and detailed the more people who play it have been able to engross themselves in the art of management. There is a genuine sense of achievement when, for instance, you complete your first giant-killing in the FA Cup despite the fact that essentially all you've done is defeated a load of pixels on a giant spreadsheet."

 

The Guardian

Editado 28 Outubro 2013 por Sumudica by Night

[SAS_Robben]

É o único jogo que jogo com regularidade e é um vicio colossal.

[totch]

Já nao tenho mais paciencia para isso. Alias já nao consigo jogar mais nenhum jogo. Jogo PES em casa de amigos de vez em quando e faço no máximo umas 3 partidas (2 players), depois aborreço-me.

[John Bonifácio]

Fiquei-me pelo vício no "simples" CM 01/02. Tive medo do que poderia acontecer se me envolvesse nas versões mais time-consuming que se lhe seguiram...

[Dominator]

Mantenho o mesmo save de FM07 ha ja prai 2 anos, que vou jogando de vez em quando, tipo jogos da net (OGame, Travian etc..) quando me da ganas ou nao tenho nada pra fazer. Neste momento vou em 2050 :lol:

[xicantonio]

Mantenho o mesmo save de FM07 ha ja prai 2 anos, que vou jogando de vez em quando, tipo jogos da net (OGame, Travian etc..) quando me da ganas ou nao tenho nada pra fazer. Neste momento vou em 2050 :lol:

2050 no FM07 e jogas há 2 anos? Fraquissimo

Um user do dark side do forum em 6 meses de FM13, acho que passou 2100

[Dominator]

challenge accepted

[Kendrick Lmao]

nao acho nada viciante, so gosto das epocas de transferencias o resto passo em ferias

mas ja n jogo desde o fm2009~

[bug]

nao acho nada viciante, so gosto das epocas de transferencias o resto passo em ferias

Isto.

 

E faço alguns jogos com "Comentários Apenas".

[Castle]

Nunca fui viciado. Nunca fui grande jogador :mrgreen:

Editado 30 Outubro 2013 por Castle

[lastdance]

nao acho nada viciante, so gosto das epocas de transferencias o resto passo em ferias

mas ja n jogo desde o fm2009~

+- isto. Não faço ferias mas aborrece-me e ainda joguei depois do 09 acho eu.

[frederico.dr]

nao acho nada viciante, so gosto das epocas de transferencias o resto passo em ferias

mas ja n jogo desde o fm2009~

 

são fases, se experimentares jogar agora vais ver que ficas pelo menos 2 semaninhas agarrado :mrgreen:

[Abraxas]

Já a minha namorada às vezes diz "m*rda de obsessão por ver bolinhas a correr e a bater umas nas outras" :lol:

[smashing_pumpkin]

Comecei a jogar no CM3, fiquei viciado logo, foi sempre o jogo que joguei mais, mas o topo do vicio deve ter sido o 01/02, em que jogava uma liga online com uns 4 ou 5 amigos e só se falava daquilo, fazia-se tacticas nas aulas para bater os outros, era tentar roubar os craques aos outros, bem... nao se fazia muito mais que aquilo.

[Shai]

No FM 2011 já cheguei ao ponto de passar praticamente 24h por dia a jogar, mas felizmente o pc avariou e perdi o save. Apartir daí, tornou-se apenas um hobby, jogo de vez em quando.

[Mica]

Nunca cheguei a esses extremos, no máximo foi tipo "hoje tenho de acabar a época a bem ou a mal" e ir para a cama às 5 da manhã. Mas nem isso faço agora.

[Kimi Raikkonen]

Já a minha namorada às vezes diz "m*rda de obsessão por ver bolinhas a correr e a bater umas nas outras" :lol:

 

Estamos a falar de FM e nao de Haxball.

 

Anyway, o meu vicio tambem ja nao é tanto desde o 2008, mas sempre que posso arranjo um espacinho durante o ano (so nas ferias grandes) para me dedicar ao jogo.