Last week my little six-year-old son assaulted me with one of those existential questions that no one prepared us for in parenting school.
-Aita, if I went out in the FIFAWhat average would it have?
It turns out that the little boy has started to play with his brother (ahem, ahem: and with his father) the famous video game of EA Sports and the ratings of the players have become for him a sort of measure of all things football. So now when we watch a match together, he enlightens me on how good / bad goalkeepers, defenders and forwards are from what he has memorized from the PlayStation.
The question brought back memories. For a time my link with the Premier League was the Football Manager 93-94, in whose games I trained Ian Bishop or Chris Bart-Williams, who became players idolized by me, before I had seen them play even once. Yes, I know, I am a geek. I loved that game. When many years later I met in person Gordon strachan, I thought: 35 years, Leeds United, twenty points out of twenty in Passing, Creativity, Influence and Flair; and I remembered how great a player he was in my Commodore Amiga.
I have to admit that in not a few soccer conversations in my life I have valued a player only because of what he knew about computer games. At the end of the day, it is still a source of consultation, like any other. It is not always reliable, of course, that they ask Cherno Samba or Tonton Zola Moukoko (If you don’t know who they are, you’re not one of me), but she’s not usually very misguided either.
There will be those who think that this is getting away from the real thing. But, as I was asking Morpheus to Neo Inspired by ‘The Discourse of Method’ by Discards: What is the real? How would you define reality? As far as soccer is concerned, virtuality and reality have been linked from the beginning of the game, from the moment it began to be narrated, since soccer and the narrative were co-fused and confused. And video games, after all, are still a type of narrative, like novels or radio.
#Virtuality #reality