I decided to put the ebook on sale at 60% off for this weekend. I expect it’ll be a while before I discount it again, so if you haven’t bought it yet this is your chance to save a few bucks and still help me out.
That link again: http://gum.co/fmonedayatatime
If you’ve enjoyed this series, please do try to spread the word. The more people who read it, the more I’ll be encouraged to try other big blogging projects in future.
Saturday 16 March 2013
Monday 11 March 2013
Now Remastered in Ebook Format
I finished it. For the past two months, I’ve been plugging away at a thoroughly-edited, revised, expanded, prettified, remastered version of the blog. And now you can read it.
I did custom layouts for every page, doing my best to make it a great magazine-like experience. I hope the results speak for themselves. I’ve linked to a sample version below, which is just the first month. Scroll to the bottom of the post for screenshots.
I’m charging$5 $2 (AUD) for it, so that I can make back at least some money for the huge time investment this thing turned out to be. If you don’t want to or can’t afford to pay, no worries—the blog isn’t going anywhere. But if you want a good experience as you read through this enormous project, you’ll need to pony up the cash. And if you want to pay more than $2, be my guest—it’s just the minimum, so you can pay $500 if you’re so inclined.
So what do you get?
You’ll receive a zip file (~120MB) containing PDF, ePub, Kindle, and HTML formatted versions of the ebook. They all have the same text, although only the PDF has custom layouts and lots of images. I recommend the PDF version, read on an iPad or Android tablet. But the other options are there.
If you need any help reading any of these, or putting them on your device of choice, hit me up and I’ll walk you through it as best I can.
The whole thing is around 91,000 words, of which close to a tenth is explicit fourth-wall-breaking criticism about the game and the nature and appeal of virtual football management (the rest is a diary in Juan Day’s voice).
I believe this is the first time that anyone has written at length about the nature of football management games, and the strange ways in which they simulate reality. I hope you enjoy reading!
Click here to make your purchase.
Here's a sample PDF with the first three weeks.
I did custom layouts for every page, doing my best to make it a great magazine-like experience. I hope the results speak for themselves. I’ve linked to a sample version below, which is just the first month. Scroll to the bottom of the post for screenshots.
I’m charging
So what do you get?
You’ll receive a zip file (~120MB) containing PDF, ePub, Kindle, and HTML formatted versions of the ebook. They all have the same text, although only the PDF has custom layouts and lots of images. I recommend the PDF version, read on an iPad or Android tablet. But the other options are there.
If you need any help reading any of these, or putting them on your device of choice, hit me up and I’ll walk you through it as best I can.
The whole thing is around 91,000 words, of which close to a tenth is explicit fourth-wall-breaking criticism about the game and the nature and appeal of virtual football management (the rest is a diary in Juan Day’s voice).
I believe this is the first time that anyone has written at length about the nature of football management games, and the strange ways in which they simulate reality. I hope you enjoy reading!
Click here to make your purchase.
Here's a sample PDF with the first three weeks.
Friday 8 March 2013
Final-ish Thoughts
Okay, so here we go. Final-ish thoughts below. Special ebook version and more words to come shortly.
I don’t think I realised quite what I was getting myself into, and I certainly never thought I’d last a full season. Yet here I am, nearly 11 months after I started, signing off at last.
My greatest appreciation: Simulation is not the goal, but merely a by-product. The goal seems so obvious when you say it, yet you’d be forgiven for never having thought of it. You see, Football Manager—and every other game of its kind—exists to approximate the glories, successes, and failures of controlling a professional or semi-professional football team.
It’s not about simulating the life of a football manager, or the lives of his players, or even the beautiful game. These things all happen to some extent, in that all are imitated and modelled by the program, but they are neither the focus nor the core appeal.
Football Manager does not seek realism insofar as it strives for authenticity. Its internal logic and the drama that unfolds must be perceived to be occuring naturally, by way of the ideology within and the interplay of millions of variables. The inauthentic seems contrived, projected according to some external value system—whereby outside expectations determine behaviour.
The real is not always authentic, just as the authentic is not always real. But Football Manager depends upon you believing it to be so, for without authenticity it’s just a really sophisticated spreadsheet that purports to represent the complex interactions between real-world players, clubs, and leagues. With authenticity, however, it’s the best thing on the market for pretending you’re an insider of the world of professional football.
It resembles football in such a way that you feel like it could represent its approximated slice of reality. That’s all most of us need to buy in to the fantasy that we just signed Sergio Aguero for Weymouth FC. There’s no way Weymouth will be playing in the Champions League ten years from now, but Football Manager affords us this reality by mimicking just enough real-world economics that a crafty manager can guide his unknown team up through the leagues in record time with complete plausibility.
That is why we play—because the impossible becomes the plausible. That obscure Slovenian club you picked at random, just for kicks, can grow into the best team in the world. Mega-giants like Barcelona and Manchester United can inexplicably go from champions to relegation fodder in two seasons without a financial crisis. And a club other than Celtic or Rangers can actually win the Scottish Premier League.
The remainder of my closing remarks (yeah, I still have more to talk about) will be published in the ebook edition,to be available as soon as I finish it (but hopefully within a few hours of this post). available here.
I don’t think I realised quite what I was getting myself into, and I certainly never thought I’d last a full season. Yet here I am, nearly 11 months after I started, signing off at last.
My greatest appreciation: Simulation is not the goal, but merely a by-product. The goal seems so obvious when you say it, yet you’d be forgiven for never having thought of it. You see, Football Manager—and every other game of its kind—exists to approximate the glories, successes, and failures of controlling a professional or semi-professional football team.
It’s not about simulating the life of a football manager, or the lives of his players, or even the beautiful game. These things all happen to some extent, in that all are imitated and modelled by the program, but they are neither the focus nor the core appeal.
Football Manager does not seek realism insofar as it strives for authenticity. Its internal logic and the drama that unfolds must be perceived to be occuring naturally, by way of the ideology within and the interplay of millions of variables. The inauthentic seems contrived, projected according to some external value system—whereby outside expectations determine behaviour.
The real is not always authentic, just as the authentic is not always real. But Football Manager depends upon you believing it to be so, for without authenticity it’s just a really sophisticated spreadsheet that purports to represent the complex interactions between real-world players, clubs, and leagues. With authenticity, however, it’s the best thing on the market for pretending you’re an insider of the world of professional football.
It resembles football in such a way that you feel like it could represent its approximated slice of reality. That’s all most of us need to buy in to the fantasy that we just signed Sergio Aguero for Weymouth FC. There’s no way Weymouth will be playing in the Champions League ten years from now, but Football Manager affords us this reality by mimicking just enough real-world economics that a crafty manager can guide his unknown team up through the leagues in record time with complete plausibility.
That is why we play—because the impossible becomes the plausible. That obscure Slovenian club you picked at random, just for kicks, can grow into the best team in the world. Mega-giants like Barcelona and Manchester United can inexplicably go from champions to relegation fodder in two seasons without a financial crisis. And a club other than Celtic or Rangers can actually win the Scottish Premier League.
The remainder of my closing remarks (yeah, I still have more to talk about) will be published in the ebook edition,
Monday 4 March 2013
Sorry about the holdup; more to come soon
Well, as such things are wont to do, my plans for getting these final thoughts written up and finishing my something extra got thrown to the wind by the ravages of real life. Deadlines. Bloody deadlines.
Anyway, my new schedule is that the extra thing—which I’ll now admit is a thoroughly-edited, repackaged, expanded, prettified ebook version of this blog—will be done by the end of the week. The Final Thoughts post will come a day or two before that, hopefully. I’m working on it now, but it’s not easy reflecting on and articulating my thoughts about such a mammoth undertaking.
Anyway, my new schedule is that the extra thing—which I’ll now admit is a thoroughly-edited, repackaged, expanded, prettified ebook version of this blog—will be done by the end of the week. The Final Thoughts post will come a day or two before that, hopefully. I’m working on it now, but it’s not easy reflecting on and articulating my thoughts about such a mammoth undertaking.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)