Though I initially framed this blog around the start and now flow of a season in a particular game, I am also tracing my history that brought me to today. And a significant chunk of that includes a game I also still play currently.
I first signed up for Sim Dynasty in October 2002 while holding my infant son in one arm and navigating the web with the other. That baby just graduated high school.
Sim Dynasty offers a different experience of building and managing baseball (and football) teams, because owners draft their players, develop them in the minor leagues, then play out their entire major-league careers. Of course, these are not actual MLB historical players we are using, but rather their approximations.
Though there are certainly sim owners who greatly prefer either historical players or fictional ones, I have to observe that at the level of the game engine it simply doesn’t matter. I may refer to the incomparable Sim D pitcher Andy Bomback (more on him to come) or to the performances of Greg Maddux in WIS, but to a simulation all of them are just code bits that contribute information to the decision algorithm that results in an output.
Put them all together and you get games and seasons, and we put names on the statistical achievements and call them Andy Bomback or Greg Maddux. It’s all in fitting with the storylines we create in our imagination. The method of building the teams differs significantly, but what makes these and other great sim games work is that they produce game and season outcomes that mimic reality well enough to keep us coming back.
On one level we certainly must accept that nothing about this hobby is “real,” but the realism exists on a high enough plane that it satisfies the piece of my brain that craves baseball and all its numbers, streaks, championships, and (yes) players.
Bats or bits, it doesn’t matter.
One reply on “Sim Dynasty: What’s Real Anyway?”
You remind me of my own genesis to the game of Sim Dynasty. In October of 2009. “Real” baseball had just completed and I had finished another unsatisfying finish to another fantasy baseball season. I was looking for a baseball fix to see me through the off season. Stumbled across SimD and been hooked ever since. I may one day leave for the “more real” environs of OOTP or a league that uses the full potential of Strat-O-Matic but so far I stay for the community of owners I’ve found here.