Starting Over (reprise)

Well now that I found out what it takes to win a championship, I thought that I would return to my moral, honest ways. I let Lebron James return in free agency the following year when I couldn't afford him, and signed one of my two young superstars to a legitimate, real contract. My team doesn't have the depth that it had the past few seasons, but I know now what it takes to win. Now that I have "mastered the game" in terms of winning a championship, I want to find out if I can win the right way. I want to honestly build a dynasty without cheating, without taking advantage of user settings or cheats. I have spent the entire semester playing this game and I have made a myriad of connections between 2K10 and the real world. I want to capitalize on them, put them to the test and see over the next two weeks whether or not I am a good enough gamer to succeed.

We are the Champions

Well it took all year, but I can finally say that I know what it takes to be a champion. The key ingredients: hard work, dedication, a little bit of financial strategizing, and a little bit of cheating. I hate to admit it but I think the cheating factor made all the difference for me. The realism of my players progressing to the point where I couldn't afford to have 4 all-stars on one roster was a legitimate problem that General Managers face every day. That's why it is so hard to have a dynasty in sports. If you think about the history of sports, dynasty's happen very rarely because of the influence of money and the power of free agency. Think about baseball for a second. How many times has a team repeated as champions? Very rarely. There are the same number of teams in the MLB, NBA and NFL so that can't be the reason. It has to do with the fact that baseball is the only sport without a salary cap. Teams can pour however much money they want into their teams and baseball players seem to prefer lucrative contracts over the prospect of winning a championship.

Until sports becomes more about the love of the game than money, it will be very hard for a dynasty to be built. The only time in the real world where we see superstars willing to sacrifice money for championships is when aging veterans out of their primes change teams at the end of their careers when they weren't able to win on their own. Think about Karl Malone. Why else would the second highest scorer in NBA history leave the Jazz, the team he built with his bare hands to live in the shadow of Kobe Bryant, Shaq, Derek Fisher and Gary Payton on the Lakers. It truly is great for society that the sporting world has developed into a billion dollar enterprise but the system as it stands now just sets up General Managers to fail. Unless you are the New York Yankees and have an unlimited payroll, you will never be able to have an equilibrium of wants and resources. I learned this the hard way in my own playing, and learned a valuable and extremely realistic lesson that costs General Managers their jobs every year. The world of sports is the most competitive field whether you are operating in the front office or playing on the field. There is little room for error, and we must keep the big picture in mind when making daily decisions.

Big Trouble

So not only did my team blow it in the playoffs, but I managed to do a poor job of screwing up my teams finances. I got so caught up in the fact that my team was having a successful regular season that I forgot to renegotiate the contracts of my 3 superstars, Lebron James, Ryan Simmons and Sadrunas Sankovic. When I began to re-sign my players in the offseason, I quickly realized that I didn't have enough cap-room to re-sign all 3. We spent a lot of time in class talking about cheating and why games need cheats. Barry encouraged us to try experimenting with cheats, so I figured I'd give it a try.

I found a way to manually edit my players so that I could increase their ratings and fix their contracts without taking into consideration salary, morale and personal wants. I manually added years onto the original contracts of Sankovic and Simmons so that I had enough money to sign Lebron and another marquee free agent. I haven't began the next season yet but I am curious to see how the game responds to my actions. When you simulate games, your team doesn't perform as well as it should and even the best teams don't have the best records. I'm curious to see if that same principle will stand with my team considering that all 5 of my starters have rankings above a 90.

While cheating goes against my primary objective to learn how to be a successful General Manager, it just goes to show how tempting it is to cheat and how greed can corrupt an individual. I'll be sure to write in my next post about the status of my cheating and how the game and my team is effected by it.

Almost There

After a long struggle, my team finally made it to the Eastern Conference finals where we faced the New Jersey Nets. After the worst season in NBA history, the Nets made moves in the offseason to acquire future NBA hall of famer Kobe Bryant. The series was epic from the start. Lebron against Kobe. Although my team accomplished a season sweep of the Nets, we didn't get off to a hot start. The Nets jumped ahead 2 games to 0 in a best of 7 series. In the third game, we made an unbelievable comeback but ended up losing in double overtime. We were down 3 to nothing and found ourselves in the inevitable hole that only the Boston Red Sox have ever been able to accomplish. The next three games, we dominated our opponent, proving that maybe video games aren't as realistic as we think they are. If only one team has ever won 4 straight games in a playoff series in the history of all the major sports, what is the probability that my team would be the second?

I began to doubt the system and resent the fact that my team could have such tremendous success. I would have almost rather my team lose just to prove that video games have some sort of reliability then to reach the goal that I had set when I first started playing. This was a defining moment in my video game playing because i proved to myself that i was willing to sacrifice success for reality. When I was younger, I was so anxious to win that I would do anything (including cheat) just to be victorious.

I find it so interesting that my opinion has shifted so dramatically over the course of the past few years. I am beginning to learn that life is more about "the process" than "the answer", and that by playing this video game, I am learning how to be more patient in my daily life.

The video game gods must have answered my thoughts because I ended up losing the next game, failing to reach my goal of winning a championship. Instead of hanging my head and questioning myself, I was relieved that video games can still be realistic.