Influence: The CRPG Addict

A look into my inspiration.

I’ve decided to take a detour once every few months to write about “meta” topics, or topics related more to the thinking behind this project than to just baseball alone. Last time I wrote about why I started a YouTube channel. This time I’ve decided to talk about one of my direct non-baseball influences.

The CRPG Addict

The chief inspiration for this blog comes from The CRPG Addict.

I’m guessing you probably haven’t ever heard of The CRPG Addict before. It’s a Blogspot blog that popped up in 2010 or so, devoted to playing various role playing games from the early days of computing. Reading the first post gives you a pretty good idea of what the focus is.

Now, I’m going to let you in on a little secret. I’m actually not much of an RPG gamer.

In fact, I’m really not a huge fan of video games in general. I played a bit when I was in middle school and high school. My interest in gaming has waned since, though, aside from the obvious exception of sports games (particularly baseball simulators and Football Manager).

The thing that sparked me about The CRPG Addict was the fact that the author was taking the time to play really old computer games, the kind of games that I vaguely remember messing around with back when I first experienced computers.

I also vividly remember playing around with really old baseball simulators in those days. I’m not just talking about the old APBA DOS game, either. I have fading memories of playing around with old DOS-based baseball simulations in the mid-1990s, mostly games from the 1980s that were lying around on old abandonware websites, just waiting to be discovered.

Anyway, I thought it would be interesting to start a similar project — and here we are today, over a decade after I first discovered The CRPG Addict.

GIMLET

The CRPG Addict ranks games based on a somewhat arbitrary and subjective scale that he calls GIMLET. You can read about the original theory behind this scale here.

GIMLET is actually quite useful. Among other things, you can use it to discover that a game that you don’t think is an RPG probably has enough RPG elements to qualify as one. I applied it to Football Manager in this somewhat successful YouTube video a few weeks back.

I’ve thought for years about whether it would be possible to use a similar rating scale for baseball simulators. The thought here was that I could play some sort of small project with each game, and then come up with some way of rating its accuracy, its user interface, and other features to distinguish the various games that are available.

I’ve given up on a rating system, however. The variance that comes with every single replay creates so much statistical noise that I would likely dismiss a game as “inaccurate” without a solid statistical foundation for the decision. Besides, it’s a lot more fun to focus on specific components of individual games, both good and bad, for individual posts. Slowing things down and compartmentalizing also lends itself to more posts, which is useful for a blog like this.

Anyway, that’s why you won’t see a rating system here. As time goes on, we’ll get into the good, the bad, and the ugly, though we’ll try to go a bit deeper than our CRPG friend does. After all, I wouldn’t want to let you get bored!

Playing The Right Way

One of the things I love about The CRPG Addict is that he plays games the right way.

What I mean by “the right way” is that he doesn’t use any sort of guide or trick to figure out in-game puzzles. There’s no cheating involved. It’s just the gamer with a sketch pad and the game itself, trying to figure out decades-old puzzles and blogging about it in the meantime.

There’s no better way to judge a game’s merits and demerits than playing it the way it was intended to be played. And that’s why I’ve taken the approach I take to my projects.

I know that it would be faster to use autoplay to play through the unimportant games. But that’s not playing a replay “the right way.” And, trust me, you gain a much greater appreciation of the merits and demerits of a simulator when you’ve used it to play a thousand or so individual games.