Striker Manager

"After many years in which the world has afforded me many experiences, what I know most surely in the long run about morality and obligations, I owe to football." -Albert Camus

As game engines and mainstream technology grow ever more sophisticated and inexpensive, the boundary between reality and ROM has become blurred and indistinct. Once a brief, beeping escape from the experiences of everyday life, video gaming has, for more and more people, gradually metamorphosised into a viable alternative to those experiences. The first twinklings of what will one day become fully blown Virtual Reality can be seen in those solipsistic frontiersmen of dark, gloomy bedrooms, living out rich and fulfilling fantasy lives on flickering, 14 inch bug-zappers, satisfying their need for human contact by exchanging coins and consonants with the stout yeomen of Ultima Online, and generally removing themselves from the public places they might otherwise have cluttered up. Such behaviour is to commended. But whilst VR technology is still in its infancy, the fictional realities these people create for themselves are sustainable only over short periods. Joypad wrested from sweaty, malformed fingers, PlayStation 2 switched off and safely stowed, no-one REALLY continues to believe that they actually are a government agent, mafia hitman, Chinese emperor or mutant superhero- blinking a little, they shamble back out into the burning light and go about their mundane business in the miserable, mechanical way we've come to expect from them, discharging their social responsibilities by stacking shelves or serving up our coffee and muffins. And this would all be very well and good, were it not for the football management games.

The superficial felicity and painstaking attention to detail of such games as Championship Manager has spawned a whole cross-section of society who labour constantly under the joint illusions that:

A) They actually do manage Dutch lower-league side Go Ahead Eagles, and
B) Their progress as manager of said club is a matter of on-going interest and concern to all.

The problem here is that the fidelity of football games to the reality of soccer management runs as skin-deep as most people's knowledge of the game, leading enthusiasts into the fallacious assumption that they are playing a simulation rather than a game and that ergo their on-screen "achievements" are in no way diminished by the fact that they didn't occur in real life. Which is, of course, exactly what the programmers had in mind. It's a lot harder to get people addicted to yet ANOTHER grim and ugly battle against relegation from Division 2 than a successful charge to the quarter-finals of the European Cup: and what has to be remembered is that, at root, football management games are an attempt to make paid work FUN.

Which is why Striker Manager stands out as a luminary of the genre.

Placing you in charge of the worst team in England's lowest league, Striker Manager immediately assaulted your sensibilities by inflicting upon you a team of absolute no-hopers, a rag-tag collection of ne'er-do-wells and random stumblebums who were, quite literally, not even half as good as any other team in the division. Indeed, the only half-decent player they had was you, the eponymous striker manager, and even you tended to be a bit of a big girl's blouse, picking up 4-6 week injuries almost routinely. With no money to buy players and precious few coaching opportunities, the only way to marginally improve the standard of your squad was to sell off your least useful players, scrape together enough cash to invest in another good player to complement yourself, and fill out your squad with untested youth players- but, in truth, the percentile difference made to your chances of getting a decent result in any match was about 2%. In a rather successful attempt to distract your attention from the hopelessness of the situation the game allowed YOU to participate in the matches themselves by allowing you to control your striker manager whenever a goalscoring opportunity fell to him, and even offering you the elusive chance of a call-up to your national team, if your form warranted it. And so to matchday, there to have exposed not the defensive frailties of the 3-5-2 system, but the bleakness of existence and the absurdity of the cosmos.

Striker Manager can claim the dubious distinction of being the very first Existentialist computer game. The utter meaninglessness of all endeavours was affirmed and re-affirmed on a weekly basis, as all your attempts to fiddle with tactics, team changes and coaching methods resulted in the exact same procession of opposition forwards towards your undefended goalmouth, shot after shot raining in on your hapless goalie as he attempted to maintain the viability of the Judeo-Christian ethos in the face of nihilistic despair by saving a couple of them. Even your self-serving, glory-hunting quest for individual fame was utterly thwarted by your team's insistence on only providing you with one goalscoring chance every four or five games, rendering your chances of pulling on the dark blue shirt and dingy grey gutties of the Scotland national team entirely negligible. Twisted and warped by this externalisation of your previous fears about the futility of action and the interchangeability of all ends, an insane glee wrapped your wracked limbs about, turning every goal you managed to score into a ringing blow square between the eyes of THE MAN, and every point you somehow eked out into a bitter, echoless laugh in a blank, unfeeling void.