Sports movies — Transcription

I'm talking.

I'm talking mighty ducks.

I'm talking field of dreams.

I'm talking, like, probably the biggest one to come out this decade, and one that I plan to refer to a lot, um, over the uh, over the next hour or so.

So, you know, spoilers.

Probably also a sports movie.

Sports movies are like, there's such a specific genre, and I think they're a really good one for us to cover on the show because we are all about structure and so are sports movies.

Like, every sports movie has exactly the same shape and we know that that shape is coming, and yet we still go and we watch the movie anyway.

Like, like, these movies are literally all the same and you, you know what is going to happen going into them.

You know, you sit down and you know that these characters, these teams, whatever they are, you know that they're basically just going to have a straight up hero's journey, like, they are going to have a, an early high, and then a, like, a two-thirds of the way through low, and then they're going to come, come through and win it at the end.

We're talking the plucky underdog story, and I'm just really interested in how we turn that into a game.

So, look, this one could be a little bit fast and loose.

It's a movie genre that I've seen a fair bit of, but look, as you alluded to,

Neither of us are necessarily the people you would turn to for advice about actual sports, so we may fall down there.

I acknowledge we're working 2 levels of abstraction deep where we're making a game about movies, about sports, like, could run into some roadblocks there, but I think it could be a fun one.

So we almost always are building this thing around a formal competition of some kind, and it's a formal competition.

There is a winner and a loser and usually, in order to give us a little bit of texture to that story.

I think you have to be able to come in, have an early success, then have a failure, then bring it home for the win.

So we've got a structure that is a couple of contests, and then the interstitial spaces between them, and each contest has a winner or a loser, and then we end with a grand finale, and that's more or less the end of the movie.

We have all this stuff going on outside of the sport that affects what goes on inside the sport.

We have these like tensions and dramas that play out in those in-between spaces, but then also get expressed, I guess, in the actual sport itself.

They all have a group of players who start as underdogs, right?

Like we are not interested in hearing a story about people who are already winners.

We are not interested in hearing about the people who have already, who are the favourites, right?

Like we want to hear underdogs, and I think as part of that, there has to be some element of someone new has come in, right?

I'm, it's wild to me that your, your go to on this for this whole episode is going to be bring it on, but like, let's roll with it.

Um, so yeah, look, that's, I think that's our starting point.

We touched on it already, but I think that structure is the 2nd thing we need.

So you have to have a structured competition.

You have to have some kind of ladder that the team is climbing.

So there has to be a, the same way there's a real quantifiable like win and loss in the competition that has to result in quantifiable like moving up or moving down the ladder.

You are judged entirely by your position, sort of respective to your peers.

That's the, I guess, the thing that gives out our story, some tension, right?

moving up and moving down.

It's like you just, you just fight whoever is next up.

Like, you can tell that these guys are the main characters because they're the only team who ever moves around on the ladder independent of being like pushed.

So yeah, we've got we've got a team of underdogs.

And then you have the time in between.

And what happens in between is getting ready for the next match.

And sometimes that looks like things like training, and montages and things like that.

But I think what makes these movies tick is that a lot of that stuff is, it's psychological.

It's personal growth, right?

All those things we want to see from our players.

And is he talking about the role-playing game or is he talking about the sport?

And it's the fact that that character growth outside of the game drives better performance in the game, right?

Daniel's son doesn't win karate kid by becoming better at karate.

He wins it by, like, essentially, the thing that gives him power is as his relationship with Miyagi grows, and as he, like, comes to understand the parts of karate that aren't the kicks and the punches, the parts of karate that are, like, rooted in philosophy and mindfulness and that kind of stuff, like, as he comes to understand that, that is what lets him win the karate competition at the end.

It's not the fact that he got actually any better at karate.

So, in a way that is perhaps, yeah, a diversion from real sport.

You have these non practice things that really feed into player's success and team success.

It's like, oh, we, it's not enough to just believe we actually have to deal with our problems.

The other thing that's really interesting, that kind of builds off that is the characters, right?

So it's interesting that you brought up Ted Lasso there because, uh, or the, the, I guess the idea of the, like, the star player, we kind of have these archetypes, especially within the team sports was not so much for the, the individual sports ones, but for the team sports.

Yeah, so you have all of these, like, all of these archetypes within the team as well, who, again, in a lot of cases, I like little, little, like, cardboard cutouts.

So it's like, yeah, the star player needs to learn to share the limelight and the rookie needs to like learn some confidence.

So there's there's always a really obvious remedy to whatever their flaw is.

Like, we know that the underdogs are going to win, but there still has got to be some tension, there have to be moments where they, it looks like it's not going to succeed, and that like, that halftime during the finale and everything looks like it's gone wrong is like a classic.

And again, it's why Ted Lasso is so great at this, I think, because it subverts that and you think they're going to somehow like pull it out in the finale and then it's like, oh, no, they lose and they get relegated.

Like, despite the fact that these things are utterly formulaic and the characters are utterly formulaic.

We still want to see them and they still have that tension somehow.

If we're playing it completely straight, of course it's getting to the top of the ladder and winning the grand final, but like we have these, all these interesting alternate definitions of success because this genre has been around for so long that we get to kind of play with.

And we also have all these interesting like ways of getting there.

You know, there's tricks that they will pull out to kind of snag the win. So it might be like a new technique that they've learned.

It might be like a piece of teamwork.

But equally likely, it can be a, you know, someone remembers an obscure rule, right?

Um, or like something happens off the field that like throws the other team.

Like, there's all of these different ways that the growth that we've seen throughout the movie throughout the season.

There's all these ways that that can come into play and it's not always, and then they learn to play together properly as a team and then they won.

It's like, well, they don't always have to win as long as you set that like success criteria up before the end so it doesn't feel like a rug pull.

And it also doesn't necessarily have to be straight up.

They were better at the game.

There can be some like some other stuff going on as as well.

It's been a like a recurring thing throughout the show that he doesn't understand.

He's like, no, I think they were offside.

And that becomes the like pivotal point of that that game is that that player was offside and that's that's this growth point.

Yep.

Mm-hmm.

Fight me in the comments.

Great sports movies of the, of the, the past, such as field of dreams.

The longest yard.

Scott Pilgrim, bring it on.

I don't, again, I think it's missing that structured competition.

If we were being boring, we would call the episode structured competition films.

Predator is a sports movie.

Um, 2 episodes in a row that we've talked about a Super Giant Games game, um, because they're very good.

But Paya, you're basically in hell and you have to complete, in quote marks, the rights.

Um, and in between, you have, in actually what I think is a really, really elegant illustration of the concept.

In between, it's essentially a um, an interactive novel.

So like, the game itself switches between 2 completely distinct gameplay modes and one is a, like, very heavily modified, but it's essentially gameplay wise, it's those, like, soccer games where you're kicking the, like, passing the ball around and then assuming control of whichever player has the ball.

Um, it's that, but like with fantasy tones and it's, it's real time, it's quite dynamic.

It's got pretty rigourous rules.

You have players with particular abilities that they get to execute. And then in between, it's very much like an interactive fiction game.

It's a dialogue simulator.

It's you talking to the characters and learning more about them that then has mechanical effects later on the games and and on which players end up being allowed to ascend.

Yeah, it's it's just like a really neat.

You don't look at it and think it's a sports movie, but Pyre is actually mechanically exactly what you would do if you were trying to gamify a sports movie. And I think looking at that as distinct from, for example, an actual soccer game, right?

There's like a series of, there's a series of like scaring games and there is exactly that plot point, like they are at the bottom of the ladder.

They're about to get eliminated and then they're like, oh, shoot, the team who won, we're cheating.

I guess you get to go through to the next round after all.

Yeah, weirdly, I think of our, the more I think about it, the more I think of our previous episodes, the one it has the closest bearing on is when we talked about Mean Girls, and we were like, this is absolutely a one shot.

But no, the same way with that one where we started out with like, this is definitely a one shot and by the end of the conversation, we were like, oh, no, this is definitely a thing where like, each party is basically a whole session and we're doing most of our, like, or a lot of manoeuvring in the lead up to that and and, you know, between games almost.

I think this is one where like actually the more time we give it for all of this in-between stuff to happen, the more fun we're gonna have.

Um, because the juice is not in the sports matches.

And I remember last time we came up with, we were like, oh, we're gonna need to come up with some kind of metaphor for like what counts as a win or a loss in a particular scenario that moves you up or down the social hierarchy.

What if we counted losses as wins and wins as losses?

Like that's that's a different game.

Like that's a pretty key part of the arc.

We do also have to have some texture within the match itself, right?

I don't think we can just have a single role.

That's my favourite kind of role.

No, look, it's it probably is something very similar to a skill challenge. This many successes before this many failures would be a good starting point.

Where I actually went was the kind of the 3rd thing I want to bring in is you have to have some way to have what's happening off the field, play into what's going on on the field, and vice versa. And so because of the kind of tactile objects that I like.

I went to cards.

So the, uh, in much the same way that you would draw from a like a fate deck, but it has that affordance that cards have that dice don't, which is that you can swap out cards, unlike a dice roll, it's customisable.

It's still random, but you can you can add things into it and take things out of it and change the odds as you go.

And I think that's going to give us the kind of mechanic that we need for this because we need to be able to remove like blockers, remove things that like, oh, Timmy won't pass to Jimmy because they, you know, they, he cheated on her girlfriend or whatever to, you know, to steal from, again, Ted Lasso.

You need to be able to remove those things from the deck and add cards into that deck that represent teamwork so that over the course of the campaign.

You have a deck where the odds have changed substantially, that reflects kind of the changes that have happened outside the actual sports matches.

Yeah, I think.

Right.

So dipping in a bag, sure, you get a +one or a -one, like you get it, you get a token.

If I draw a card, I can have on there Oh, this is, Jamie has learned to give up the spotlight and has like passed to another player and that's what causes the win.

So the cards, because they are bigger and can have words on them.

They give you a way to explicitly link out of the match and into the interpersonal stuff and vice versa.

Like, I think that's what I, I love the idea of dipping in a bag.

I love that I love the how that feels.

Um, but I think the fact that you can write things on cards pips it for me.

I don't hate that actually as a concept.

Put a pin in that one.

It's a deck building game.

But yeah, I think the idea of a collaborative sort of deck building game is not.

I don't think that's fun.

So contempt tokens, if you're not familiar with, the quiet year is if you feel your player or your monster in, um, uh, Deep Forest has not been has been snubbed or has not been cared for has not been taken into account in a particular decision.

They can take a token of contempt, and that goes on that monster's lair, and you, they can get rid of it by, in a bunch of ways, um, they can get rid of it by acting out, which often causes other monsters to also take on contempt, or they can get rid of it by like reconciling, but that takes a lot of,

But I almost think we want to start with a full board of contempt, and then our performance in the finale is determined by how much of the interpersonal contempt we're able to clear from the team by the end of the game, but we can only like, we can only clear so much.

We can only do so much work on ourselves before the next match comes up.

And then I think you also end up looking for a mechanic where you are.

Maybe some of the negatives that you pull from the deck during the game.

Maybe it's like, okay, now adds some contempt.

It's like you didn't pass to me in that match.

Why is it?

Like, why did that happen?

So you can have the game, what happens in the game, start to inform or start to create problems outside of it as well, which is why, again, a deck, I think, works really well because you can have, you can also have cards come out for the opposing team.

And so it can be like, well, we screwed that up because that player that it's just the prompt or the card is like, why did this, you know, player give you the the yips so bad?

Yeah.

Look, I think there's other ways we can use these elements as well.

Are you ready to maybe talk about systems?

That would be like a complete rewrite of that game.

It would be a new game that borrows some ideas from it, really.

If I were going to run this in an existing RPG system, I've got 2 thoughts.

One of them in a shot for everyone who is drinking along at home with the drinking game.

One of them is fate because I think it can do that putting of things like writing down of abstract grievances and then invoking them for mechanical effect really well.

You can write things down on character sheets and strike them off as part of play, um, and you can also write things down that are just like aspects of the setting or aspects of the other team, um, and invoke against those, and the players can also invoke against those.

And so I think it just lends itself quite well to that.

We're going to get to it so soon.

But basically the premise of Kill Him Faster is that time travel has been invented, and then speed running, killing Hitler becomes a the world's like most popular sport.

But Kill Him Faster has a couple of things that I really, again, haven't played it, but just it does a lot of things that I like.

It's very much centred around a team rather than an individual, like than individual players, which I think fits it really well.

It is designed essentially to evoke something that feels like a deranged team sport.

So it does a lot of this stuff kind of.

has in-game concepts for seasons and rounds and and the louder and that kind of stuff.

But one thing that I think is quite cool about it, um, is that it also includes sort of explicit mechanics for hype and how popular your team is in the sort of televised aspect of the sport, which I think is really interesting and, again, adds another, like, interesting avenue to the what does success look like.

It becomes another thing to manage another thing to try and maximise another thing to draw on.

So I would probably, if I had a hankering to run a sports game, I would probably run kill him faster because that also solves the neat question of like, as you said before, what sport are we going to run?

Do we even need to decide what sport we're going to run?

Like, no, we don't.

We absolutely don't need to choose a sport.

And in fact, we don't even need to have a real sport.

We can have the entirely fake made up sport of killing Hitler and still tell this kind of story.

So probably that would be my 1st choice.

Not that I'm not mad keen on, like, riding a weird, deck building-y, feeling-sy, Ted Lassoey, like, quiet year hack, but if I just wanted something that I could grab and run with, it would be kill him faster.

Are you saying the Odyssey is a sports movie?

Rapid file.

Let's go.

I'm just looking at some of the cards I'm like, set up, like flashback to the last time this brought you joy.

Why do you struggle to capture that feeling?

Ask a teammate.

Do you feel the joy of this right now?

Teammate must give an answer.

If you do feel the joy, you may contribute one spirit to their draw.

If you do answer, how do you share your joy with them?

This could be a moment to embrace the feelings welling up inside, you choose, rein it in, or fly exuberantly.

Like, this is perfect.

Ah, time cut short, break the news that you will be leaving or find a way to stay with a team.

It's far too soon to say goodbye.

You thought you had more time, but your family is moving away.

You don't know when or if you'll be back.

You haven't told anyone and the clock is ticking.

Who have you misled about your future here?

Why is your family moving away in what familiar place? It will be hard to farewell.

That's that's so many more game options than I thought we were going to have going into this.

Oh, look, I've done that thing where I'm like, of course not.

So, yes, there are dungeon running crews who compete to like get them, compete or compete in quote marks to get the most the best loot.

What is a gym leader?

Um, so like, yes, but with a very specific sport in mind.

It's been a little bit chaotic, but hopefully hopefully quite fun for you as well.

No, you're doing fine.

I think that's it

All right, I'll catch you next month.

Thank you very much for listening.