Scott Hartsman - Off the Record

Literally. I’m enjoying it while it lasts.

I joined a softball team with folks from work this fall. Tonight was the first game. For my part, I was pretty happy I remembered which hand the glove went on.

Since we have a bye next week, I expect that my batting average will last precisely two weeks. Possibly longer if Coach Joe and Coach Ed can be talked into not playing me at all for the rest of the season. Hmm…

What’s this have to do with games?

This league uses some rules that I’ve never heard of before.

• You pitch to your own team. When you’re at bat, you have three pitches to hit a ball into play. No balls or strikes. No eternal foul balls.
• You don’t run home. You run to a little square piece of plastic next to home.
• If you do touch home, you’re out. (heresy!)
• There’s a “commit line” halfway between third base and home. Once you run past that line, you have to run home. (wtf GM, I’ll run back to third whenever I want to!)
• If the catcher would normally have to tag you out at home, they actually just have to touch home plate to get you out. (lol carebear)

These are rules that, for whatever reason, made sense to this tiny little corner of the softball community. (And, for all I know, are famous rules used by all community teams, since time immemorial.)

At one of the AGDC lectures I went to (Applying Web 2.0 Success to the MMO Space), Rick Luevanos spent some time talking about how community-influenced or community-driven rules could positively impact MMOs. If more people can play the game the way they want to play it, if no one else gets hurt, why not let them?

At the time, you could hear any number of attendees’ eyes rolling clear into the backs of their heads at the mention of customers getting their hands on such power. As a dev who’s felt the need to control the user experience a bit more than is healthy in the past, I can’t fault them for that reaction, either.

Usually when people mention things like that, many devs who’ve worked on MMOs take things to the logical extreme before deciding whether or not it’s a good idea. Working on games with Real Live Users has trained us to think that way, whether we like it or not. It’s one of the tools to protect our games from degenerate gameplay. When you talk about screwing with rules that we all view as already in delicate balance, our instincts scream: “NO! BAD! STOP! HURT!”

Back to tonight.

So here we are, playing this heretical version of softball with other people who’ve all agreed that these are the rules in our little corner of the universe. There were hits. There were outs. There was cheering.

I’m sure there were other people playing other versions of softball out there, at the same time, even. I bet they didn’t mind we were playing our way, and they were playing theirs.

Our game still felt plenty like Softball to me. And winning was still a lot of fun. And I’ll be back to play it again.

Unless I can talk Joe into not playing me.

I do have a batting average to think about.

- S.