Joe Bush dot Net

The Savannah Bananas are sort of a unique entity in the social media era in that their rise to massive popularity took place before the types of people with opinions on things like that had the chance to construct, aim, and fire them, which has left them infuriatingly enigmatic to that population (of which I am a member). Their success feels simultaneously inexplicable and unsatisfyingly simplistic in its explicability.

Their tour sells out ballparks and football stadiums that their full time tenants struggle to sell out. As the World Wide Leader in Sports Entertainment backs away from Major League Baseball, they’ve leaned into Bananaball. After securing Bananas tickets through their apparently cutthroat lottery system, your coworkers and friends, who have never cared about baseball, exhale sighs tinged with that palpable ‘I didn’t ruin Christmas this year’ relief. 

Banana supporters, if asked about their appeal, will respond simply. “It’s Fun!” They mean it earnestly, with no further explanation required for that sort of thing from their end, which tends to drive those of us who crave explanations for those sorts of things on our ends absolutely insane.

Read more: Seven Proposed Alternative Conceptual Visions of the Savannah Bananas

I bring sort of a unique perspective on this, as I was was there from near the beginning of their rise, back in May 2022, when the Bananaball World Tour made an early stop in Legends Field in Kansas City, Kansas (the house that Birahim Diop built), to play a Bananaball exhibition against our independent minor league team, the Kansas City Monarchs. My friend Mike and I paid our fifteen dollars for SRO tickets because we wanted to see Spaceman Bill Lee pitch an inning in his seventies, but we left with generally positive feelings about the Bananaball experience. They gimmicky rules were at least unique and engaging, the rule on fans catching foul balls for put-outs especially so, and I left the ballpark sincerely charmed with good wishes for these yellow-clad dreamers.

I liken it to the time that I saw both Turnstile and Big Thief, neither of whom I’m particularly interested in, perform at a music festival. Regardless of whether I’d go purchase an album of theirs on CD, I recognized the intense, life-affirming connection that those two acts have with their fanbases, and as a result still feel positively about them both. I hadn’t really looked back at the Bananas until I saw them selling out Clemson’s football stadium from across a Mexican restaurant back in April with three years of honing and optimizing the Bananaball gestalt under their belts, which has seen them leaning hard into the silly mass choreographed dances, the retired local MLB heroes, and far more romantic reality show hearthrobbery involving the players¹.

To swerve hard into another music metaphor, I imagine I’m like one of the people who bought Sugar Ray’s second album because I enjoyed thrash metal, ignored the secret track at the end, then heard “Someday” over the store speakers at K-Mart in 1999. Whatever first drew me to them is not what they’ve chosen to ride to success.

Larger questions pervade (e.g. is this good for baseball, are they baseball’s equivalent of the Globetrotters, is this ONANite, etc.), but they are larger than the scope of this piece, though I’ll take a stab in a footnote.²

No, today, I want to extrapolate the Bananas’ success based on the variability of its component parts, offer that as an explanation for their rise to prominence, and then pitch alternative variables for entrepreneurs looking to get in on the ground floor of gimmick sports themselves.

This is the definition of Bananaball that I’ve developed, with emphasis added to what I believe are the two key defining variables, along with the extra motivations that served as the sort of secret sauce for their rise:

Bananaball is baseball with [stratified new rules] and [low stakes], designed to go viral on TikTok by offering choreographed dances to overstimulated children, retired professional players to their nostalgic fathers, and romantic thirst-traps to their horny moms.

The stratification and seriousness can serve as an X and Y axis, as diagrammed here:

If the Bananas occupy the extreme boundary of Quadrant A, there may be gold to be mined from quadrants B, C, and D as well.

Quadrant B: High-stratification, High-seriousness

The rules adopted by the team that I’m imagining here may not be as explicit as the Bananas’, and certainly not as crazytown-cuckoo-bananapants as the Bananas’. Instead, this highly-serious team should lean into the sport’s proud history of arcane unwritten rules. In one sense, this team could be the Anti-Bananas, the team that the disgruntled father, out $400 and left to drive home with an overstimulated, fit-throwing child in the backseat and a reminder of his sexual inadequacy in the passenger seat, buys tickets to see out of revenge, akin to Mike Mitchell sitting his daughters down to watch the original Shworvels TV show in that Birthday Boys sketch that I’m certain was as impactful to you readers as it was to me.

This team is bereft of antics, of gimmicks, of flash and fancy to a ludditic degree. Cut the dancing and the stilts, sure, but take the music, the video board, and the PA with you too. There’s no Kiss Cam, no Hot Dog Race, no Swedish Songwriters, just pure, uncut fucking baseball.

Our two teams (working names are the Horton Spartans and the Salinas Ascetics) arrive in white and gray uniforms numbered 1-9, play ball, and depart. Spectators have to put their phones in those little lock bags from comedy clubs. The concessions include hot dogs with tomato ketchup and yellow mustard, plus water, 7-Up, and Lager for the adults. 

The Spartans and Ascetics will build focus and put hair on the chest. Fans are not disallowed from chanting or singing, but it will not be prompted. Fans determine whether they’re Spartan or Ascetic fans based on whim and whatever minor gasps of personality crack through the curtain of serious baseballing before those gasps earn said personality a fastball to the dome during their next at-bat.

Players are not necessarily anonymized, as they are named on cards passed out to guests upon entry, but there is obviously no TV broadcast or Social Media feeds from which to glean anything else about our heroes. There is a live radio broadcast, done Ronald Reagan style from a studio in Des Moines based off of play-by-play statistics transmitted from the ballpark to the announcer via telegram. The only advertising takes the form of flyers and billboards which read “The Horton Spartans are Coming to [Town Name] to Play Baseball against the Salinas Ascetics on [Date] at [Location], tickets are ten dollars cash at the gate per person.

Our target audience: Dads, Granddads, Joe Bush

Q3: Low-stratification, Low-seriousness

For this, I picture some kind of baseball bacchanalia, something closer to an avant-garde theatre troupe or performance art act than a sport, the only thing keeping it from devolving out of the athletic sphere being the most definitional aspects at the foundation of baseball itself: A ball will be thrown, a bat will be swung, and gloves will be worn, but the itchier details of scoring, umpires, outs, innings, at-bats, batting orders, and so forth, are left to the interpretations of players and spectators alike. The shape and ritual of baseball remains, and ought to be identified, but the fans’ interests are not dead-set on any competitive venture, sort of like attending a Terror Pigeon Dance Revolt show in the early 2010s.

Likewise, many of the sport’s prohibitions will be eschewed as well. Who is to say, for example, that we couldn’t put a stand-up bass at first (First Bass, perhaps) to be taken up by a baserunner in accompaniment with the trio of first baseman, first base coach, and umpire on drumset, keyboard, and Tenor Sax as sort of a rotating jazz combo? Why not have the third baseman and third base coach trade off as MC Serch and Prime Minister Pete Nice to resurrect 3rd Bass at Third Base, with the baserunner or umpire trading off duties as DJ Richie Rich? Why not codify baseballing legends of yore like Who, What, and I Don’t Know as de facto names for those base positions? Why not give baserunners the chance to make a defensive play if they’re in position? Why couldn’t there be fornication in the dugouts? Why not give outfielders the space to twirl and frolic in the grass?

At the game’s end, which arrives when everyone understands it to have done so, fans discern whether they’ve won or not, what they’ve learned, if anything, and how to process it, if desired. As for a name, I suppose that only fits to put on the viewer as well. Either that or the Of Montreal Expos.

Our target audience: The theatre kids, the art kids, Joe Bush

Q4: Low-Stratification, High-Seriousness

The Ballplayers’ Unaffiliated Movement for Liberation, Action, and Baseball (BUMLAB) is an amorphous coagulation of genders, races, ages, and baseball competence bound together by the distinct belief that some kind of ideologicospiritual advancement will take place as a result of their combined efforts every night on the baseball diamond. Many could not describe what that ideologicospiritual advancement would be, and those brave enough to try would present far different descriptions from even their closest comrades on the diamond. Nonetheless, they are pulled to this, believe this some path to a secular sort of salvation, and they play what is identifiably baseball in turn, with a tenacious, often violent drive pushing them forward.

The question of roles is solved by relations between infield, outfield, pitcher’s mound, batter’s box, on-deck circle, dugout, and bullpen, with the mere act of performing these roles enough to replace questions of whether or not one need fulfill them. For example, a pitcher and catcher perpetually, though the performers’ identities change throughout the endeavor, perform the act of “warming up” in both bullpens. Though some exigence to barnstorm may have once existed, and may still echo quietly in the souls of those in place along with countless once-held beliefs and intentions inside and outside of baseball, the rotation system ensures that the play persists perpetually, with spent players rotating out for breaks to eat, drink, sleep, put in a shift at Kinko’s, et cetera, before returning to the field.

The size of the BUMLAP is undefinable, membership only identified when at the park. Spectators and on-lookers often become so enamored by this sisyphean exercise that they feel the pull themselves and become drawn in, walking without forethought from the bleachers to the diamond, a glove exchanged with nothing but a glance, a position identified in absentia. Indeed, much of the game happens in silence, the few vocalizations given only out of an undefinable internal compulsion. One embodying the managerial role, for example, may be compelled to perform a Pinellian temper tantrum, and indeed they may, and indeed they will vocalize, though which words are vocalized rarely relate to the situation at hand, if they are indeed understood as a language at all. They in the umpire’s role will perform the act of arguing and ejecting them, and they in the manager’s role will walk in performed jilt back to a dugout before silently handing off roles with another comrade. This happens without any requisite close or missed calls, and tirades last between thirty seconds and six hours.

Identifiably baseballing acts, some directly descended from real baseballing moments, will occur in an unpracticed, but well-coreographed fashion. They in the mascot role becomes Youppi, asleep atop a dugout while they in the manager role embodies Tommy Lasorda and berates them from below. Batters may perform Carlton Fisk waving the ball fair, George Brett’s pine tar freakout, and Amir Garrett’s attempt to fight the Pittsburgh Pirates. A hill behind the right field wall serves frequently as the spot to embody the roles of the infamous exhibitionists of the SkyDome Hotel. In one instance, an impulse overcame BUMLAP members, prompting them to silently pile disco LPs in center field over the course of weeks, which stood for months before one embodying the Bill Veeck role lit them ablaze.

They play on, the BUMLAP does. One day you and I both may be compelled to join this Cargo Cult to baseballing form just as well. When I make eye contact with you and extend a glove to you, take it.

Our target audience: The lost, the broken, the forgotten, the directionless, Joe Bush

---

The more complex, and perhaps more dangerous, variables are the TikTok-fodder components for which the Bananas have optimized themselves. With the dancing, the nostalgia, and the thirst traps, they’ve managed to perfectly scratch itches ingrained in the internet users of 2025. But these are not the only itches present online, and it must prompt the question: What other components of internet virality could we exploit?

Baseball, but with True Crime

If there’s one thing that leeching off of my parent’s Netflix account every time that I dogsit for them has shown me, it’s that We Love It When Someone Is Murdered Under Mysterious Circumstances. This shouldn’t be too hard to adapt to baseball.

It all starts with an attractive woman who serves as an MC. She’s jovial, effusive, and has some sort of seemingly genuine connection with everyone on both teams, from the managers to the players, to the mascots, et cetera. We all come to admire her for her commitment to the game of baseball and her seemingly endless supply of humanistic love. She drops thoughtful compliments to everyone: ‘Oh, second baseman, I notice that raising your elbow up on your swing, which you’ve worked so hard at all summer, is starting to pay off in your batting average.’ ‘Manager, I could’ve mistaken you for a player in that uniform with how physically fit you’ve kept yourself.’ ‘Mascot, you took that spill off of your ATV so smoothly. That sort of thing.’ She has a tragically perfect name like Angel or Grace or Martyr.

She hands the microphone to a young child with life-affirming needs that she knows personally from a charity with whom she volunteers but doesn’t make a big deal about it to sing the national anthem and she descends to the tunnel beneath the stadium… Seconds after the anthem, she screams. Cameras cut to her, bloodied and staggered on the tarmac beneath. She manages to mutter two final words: Play Ball.

We spend nine innings analyzing the actions of each player on the two teams. A team of new MCs enter the fray at this time. I imagine we have a classic hard-boiled noir detective, a YouTube guy who’s abnormally focused on doing research around the case, and a podcast host type that toes the line between gallows humor and tastelessness. Each partakes in interstitial interrogative interviews with various stakeholders from both teams, the fans get to play amateur body language experts (e.g. is he sweaty because he’s nervous about getting caught or because he just had to dive to track down a fly ball and fire it back to second to turn a double play?) Fans also receive detailed programs that describe the links between our slain host and each potential perpetrator so as to determine motives.

Around the top of the ninth, spectators can cast their votes for who they believe to be the guilty party via text message. Once final out is called, we reveal the final standings on the jumbotron. Just as we’re about to declare the top vote-getter guilty, someone from the video booth will come out having exhumed a yet-unseen security video of the tunnel at the moment of the crime, which will reveal the actual perpetrator. If the audience was wrong, then they have to live with the shame of having sentenced an innoccent person to life as a convicted felon, and if the audience was right, they’ll get half off of a sub sandwich with proof of ticket purchase in that particular sub sandwich chain’s app (in all likelihood it’s going to be Blimpie’s, fair warning).

Intended Audience: Podcast fans, whoever is watching the new missing lady documentary that Netflix drops on like a weekly basis, Agatha Christie fans, Joe Bush

Baseball, but with Unhealthy Parasocial Relationships

I think the Bananas could reach this on their own if they play their cards right. I also think this might work better with a smaller-sized team sport like basketball, as with fewer players to pick from, you’ll probably avoid some of the archetypical overlap that is bound to occur with two baseball teams. This would probably work best as a co-ed outfit as well, as you’ll be able to draw in parasocially-minded fans from a wider base.

At the groundwork here, every player, coach, administrator, batboy, grounds crew worker, et cetera, will be fully plugged into the Fanum-style 24-hour Twitch streaming matrix. We’ll also write up a backstory for each participant that is engineered to appeal to a certain niche subset of potential fan. Whether that appeal is romantic or platonic is irrelevant, and ideally participants will form parasocial relationships with fans in both forms. For example, maybe there’s a hunky, wholesome, man-of-faith left fielder who appeals to the Christian women as an object of romantic desire and to the Christian men as a role model and aspirational figure. Maybe there’s an emo third basewoman who speaks to straight emo-slash-scene women on a level that nobody else does, appeals to straight emo-slash-scene men and gay emo-slash-scene women (or really anyone with that sort of romantic attraction to her) as a crush, and appeals to older men in sort of a paternalistic ‘well if this girl’s rebelled like this and has found a career in baseball, perhaps my daughter’s rebellion may lead her to a similar career path and she’s not so doomed after all’ sort of sense. Maybe the organist is a heartthrob organist, an object of crushes to some and a very good organist to those who care about playing the organ well.

There will be little cliques and alliances within their teams, and there will always be a palpable ‘will-they-won’t-they’ thing going on between players, though for the sake of the business operations here they cannot actually act on any built-up romantic tension (as this only works if audiences think that they have a chance).

Fans then arrive at the ballpark in an absolute lather (we also have to hammer home the idea that this might be their only shot to impress the particular object of their affection. Maybe whenever one of the players leaves or gets fired we instruct the other players to say “Man, I sure feel bad for any of their fans that weren’t at our game in Shreveport. You never know when your last chance will be to see one of us, it’s best to make the most of it as soon as you can”). Security will have to be incredibly tight. We want to avoid one of those incidents where a lovestruck fan risks tooth, limb, life, nail, etc. to grab the attention of the object of their affection. We don’t want a Chase Utley situation.

Provided our players have the mental fortitude to survive the ridiculous torment nexus of 24-hour streaming, I can see a disgustingly profitable endeavor here. Take all the gate receipts, broadcast deals, merch sales, and concessions, then add in those Twitch subscription and chat message awards they’ll soak up throughout the week? Oh my god, we’re in Embryonic Beer territory. Then of course there’s the tangible comparative potential of Twitch viewcounts we can use to pit players against one another in pursuit of popularity? Oh my god. It’s too good. It’s evil, and it’s representative of the absolute depths to which the internet has brought our culture… but if I were in charge of a small-market MLB outfit straddling the Missouri river, I’d at least hire me to consult on it.

Intended audiences: The lonely, the desolate, the desperate, the friendless, the ones who watch it and make fun of it but also sort of need whomever they’re making fun of to continue making stuff, actually not Joe Bush this time, this entire thing baffles me and I only know who Fanum is from reading an interview with him in Gentleman’s Quarterly

Baseball, but with cruelty and bullying:

It is the diametry at the core of internet relations. There are winners and there are losers. There are Jocks and nerds, alphas and betas, Chads and Virgins, Stacies and Girlfailures, trolls and normies, goons and redditors, cows and lemmings, and plenty more. One bullies the other into submission, has since the beginning of time, and will continue to do so henceforth until we each slough off this plane of existence or at least log off of our social media platform of choice.

There is already cruelty and bullying in America’s Pastime, and winning and losing is at the core of it to begin with, but we may appeal to expanded audiences if this cruelty and bullying is turned explicit. I propose two teams: the Branson Bullies and the Newton Nerds. This takes the Globetrotters/Generals model to its most logical ends.

The Bullies are a melange of your archetypical bullies of culture: There are plenty of letter-jacketed jocks, yes, but there’s room for the denim-vested ones who work out their difficult home lives on their classmates, the smarmy future-lawyer types, the religious fanatics, the prima donna musicians, the politicians, the drug dealers from the old DARE PSAs, the yearbook photographers with the abnormally inflated ego, the jazz band saxophonists, et cetera. They each adopt proper bully pseudonyms: Dirk Dayne, Chad President, Spike Duggard, et cetera. They are accompanied by an appropriately varied girl-bully cheer squad named the Mean Girls.

The nerds, you can imagine. Greasy hair, acne, poor posture, huge glasses, low self-esteem, with an accompanying Nerd Girls cheer team in tow. Many types of nerds are represented: Dweebs, dorks, gamers, losers, burnouts, Hentai-Clubbers, jazz band trombonists, zeroes, goths, emos, sadbois, softbois, Tumblrinas, bloggers, Simmers, model train conductors, improv club people, the ones who make edited videos of themselves doing power ranger morph sequences for YouTube, Reviewbrah, et cetera.

The audience is intended to support the bullies. The PA announcer will egg them on with WWE-style chants to moments scripted or otherwise. Fans will also given programs with backstories on the Nerds for better bullying material. For example:

Right Fielder #22: Hubert Hebert.
Batting Average: .112.
Hometown: Huntington, WV.
Attended DragonCon in cosplay as the evil version of Pit from Super Smash Brothers Brawl, harbors massive crush on Selena Del Rosario of the Nerd Girls cheer team (short, glasses, calf-high Converse sneakers), which is requited but both are too shy to tell the other. 

The fans can specifically heckle both of them using that knowledge. The bullying itself ranges from the juvenile (e.g. Hubert slides headfirst into second, is tagged out, stood up, has pants pulled down by a Bully Shortstop, another may receive a swirly in a toilet left in a bullpen, vendors all sell rotten fruits, mentos, eggs, as non-explicit projectiles for fans) to the cerebral (Awkward love poems between nerds and nerd-girls are confiscated and read during at-bats, at least one nerd gets publicly catfished by the sixth inning by a Stacy) to the disintegrative (One of the nerds’ children comes out onto the field as the PA reads a series of Ds and Fs from their report card and leads chants of “STU-PID DAUGH-TER” [clap, clap, clap clap clap], one of the nerds’ fathers is given the mic during his at-bat and repeats “You are a disappointment to me” over the PA system, during a Hebert at-bat maybe they throw Selena’s Tumblr on the jumbotron and read off how superior each of her various Tumblr Sexyman crushes [e.g. Benedict Cumberbatch as Sherlock, the Onceler, Jerma985] are compared to Hubert). 

Each game ends with two of the nerds donning trenchcoats and sunglasses like they’re about to do that uncomfortable Lil Yachty lyric, but they’re always foiled by two bullies and inevitably pantsed, atomic wedgied, and swirlied to the delight of the fans. 

Target audience: Bullies, former bullies, those who would like to consider themselves bullies, nerds with humiliation fetishes

---

1. I consider this the most under-appreciated wrinkle to the Bananas’ success. I’ve read and watched a few pieces trying to explain/understand the Bananas now and they tend to miss the mass of female fans they’ve cultivated. ↩︎
2. First, I can’t imagine that it’s good that the underlying origin myth of the most culturally significant baseball team involves the team’s founder stating that baseball is too boring, but they also bring audiences to ballparks that may otherwise not have touched baseball at all (read: horny moms). 2nd, I am uncomfortable comparing them to the Globetrotters, given that the Globetrotters themselves started as a response to racial segregation and the Globetrotters also don’t denigrate competitive basketball in their self-mythologizing like the Bananas do. 3rd, we’re not there yet, as the origin text has this kind of circus show pervading the real thing (In Orrin’s descent to the field from the rafters as an Arizona Cardinal), but we’re on the right path, especially if Major League Baseball were to observe the Bananas’ financial success as something to be emulated. ↩︎

I realize that this piece, regardless of where it ends, will serve as something of a year-end/year-opener piece because I’m writing it on December 31st of 2024 and hoping to have it up within the first days of January of 2025. I have no conclusion that I’m really working towards, I’m just going to type and ride whatever current the words offer me.

I’ve really, really slowed down with video games in 2024. I wrote that blog entry back in July “You hear about video games?” with the intent of it turning into a series. I left readers on a cliffhanger – I was going to buy a magazine and buy a copy of College Football 25 and come back with my results after a few days. I never ended up writing that post because what actually happened was anticlimactic and sort of sad. I bought and read a copy of Edge Magazine, and I actually enjoyed that experience even if I didn’t end up purchasing anything based on their coverage. I also, for about an hour, had a copy of College Football 25.

You see, I was going to go halvsies on the game with my roommate, but he ended up getting cold feet about it. “I don’t think I need another distraction in my life,” he said. I ended up still buying the game for myself that afternoon. I’ll include an excerpt from the unpublished follow-up piece that details my experiences here:

Upon starting, I found myself truly unexcited about what was laid out in front of me. I clicked into the “Dynasty” menu and cycled through the list of teams to choose from, and after a bit found that I’d joylessly bypassed all 130+ teams in the NCAA Division I Football Bowl Subdivision, looping all the way back to the Air Force Falcons without finding a suitable choice to ride with throughout the long-term, high-effort single player mode. I’d stopped and thought about either of my two alma maters (apologies to Laval, UWaterloo, and Johnson County Community College, all of whom I’m sure will have a place in College Football 26), but passed on both. The thought of choosing San Diego State felt sort of pathetic, like a pale grasp at virtually reliving glory days that weren’t that long ago. The thought of choosing Kansas felt even worse; I thought about getting Gamer Emotions about a team I was sure to already feel Sports Emotions about during the upcoming season and felt adolescent, plus the thought of paying $70 to pretend to take on the job of Lance Leipold, who is, by most definitions, a coworker of mine, even if that statement feels very very strange to say, felt downright ridiculous. It reminded me of my sophomore year of high school, when NCAA Football 11 introduced the chance to take a player in “Road to Glory” mode through their own high school football career. I made a player, named him after myself, put in my actual high school’s name and colors for his team, and played a single game before realizing that there was an entire group of kids at my school, many of whom I knew relatively well, for whom the fantasy of participating on my high school football team was not any sort of unattainable fantasy, leading me to delete that save file and start a new one where the character played for a fake high school team named after one of the hosts of the Talkradar podcast and called it good. 

I shook that experience off, figuring that I’d need to put some time into a real contest first and get a sense of the gamefeel before committing to a team for the long term, and went to the “Play Now” menu. The game chose two random teams: Texas State and Tulane. I picked the TSU team because they were at home in San Marcos and started the game up. 

I was taken aback by the pageantry on display in the cinematics that played prior to kickoff.  The developers of College Football 25 should be commended for their attention to detail here. I know very little about the Texas State program (I’m not 100% sure that it’s located in San Marcos, for example. I’m not 100% sure about their mascot, either. Bearcat? Bobcat? Cougar? It’s a large cat.), but the game made a Saturday at a Texas State game seem like a delightful affair. I chose to receive the kickoff, which I understand is an outdated way to approach the coin toss, but I wanted to feel what it was like to run an offense. 

Immediately, we went three-and-out. I used the plays that the game told me to use, but the short passes were broken up and the short runs couldn’t cover the distance I needed. My punter came through, leaving the Green Wave with the ball at their own ~30 yard line. This defensive series was about the only satisfying experience I had with College Football 25. On a third down and short, they called a toss sweep play to the right side. I took my middle linebacker, sprinted towards the sideline to meet the runner, and tackled him short of the line-to-gain. That felt good, especially with the well-timed pop from the crowd that accompanied it. 

I think I had a good punt return, then at least had one first down before punting again. Tulane then made fairly easy work of my defense, scoring a touchdown. I then went three-and-out again and punted. They worked their way down the field again and scored another touchdown. 

Down 14-0 at this point, I was starting to grow frustrated. I’m emotionally intelligent enough at this point in my life to recognize when I’m starting to grow frustrated at a video game. As soon as I make that recognition, my brain tends to slam open on the “SHAME” valve, and I felt it flood through me as I ran another unsuccessful read-option play to prompt another summoning of my surely-beleagured punter. 

I paused the game, only about halfway into the second quarter, and allowed what were certain to be shameful scenes of the coming months roll through my head. If I were to get upset about losing a game in the dynasty mode, I’d feel embarassed. If I were to win a championship, would I feel all that much better? Would the joys of the accomplishment outweigh the shame for spending so much time on it in the first place? 

Was this worth the effort? The emotional investment? The financial investment? I couldn’t see a way forward in which substantial investment into College Football 25 didn’t have me feeling ashamed of myself. Meanwhile, I had essays that I hadn’t taken the time to write, so many books I’d bought and not yet read, and other things I could actually put myself into and leave feeling, if not satisfied, at least better than ashamed. 

As it turns out, I also didn’t need another thing to distract me.

All throughout that experience, I couldn’t shake that sentence: “I don’t need another distraction.” That idea has come to color most of my experiences with video games in the months since.

Yet, I never really stopped playing video games. I just stopped playing the sorts of time-sinking games that define the current era of gaming in which we live. I actually had a surprisingly affective experience with a video game only a month or two after that experience.

I love the work that YouTube documentarian Pandamonium does in his series on the history of the Sega Saturn. It is incredibly admirable that he gives the same attention and detail to the system’s forgotten entries that he does to the system’s most revered entries. This is a theme that crops up in my life: When something is treated as unimportant or forgettable, I tend to get more interested in it. Of course I want to see interviews with the actors from Corpse Killer. Of course I want to hear about the development process behind the unusually complex Saturn port of Virtua Racing. I love that Pandamonium does this.

Sega Rally Championship is in the odd position as a beloved and critically acclaimed game that nonetheless exists in the shadows of an underappreciated and unsuccessful console. It shares the same fate as Alien vs Predator for the Atari Jaguar, Metal Head for the 32X, and Wario Land on the Virtual Boy as a really good game that a lot of players never had the chance to experience. This phenomenon, in an era in which console exclusives are rarer and the choice between XBOX and PlayStation is mostly a question of set dressing and which one your friends have if you want to play online with them, is nearly extinct. But I will beat the drum for Sega Rally Championship as I have ever since I found a disc-only copy of it for $3.99 at a Vintage Stock days after Christmas in 2011. I’d spend hours replaying the standard arcade mode, shaving seconds off of my time with each run, but always eventually hitting a plateau that left me somewhere around 4th to 5th on the final course. This was something of a cycle: I’d dig it out, play it for a few days, hit a plateau, and then move on to something else. I could never seem to beat it.

The Pandamonium video re-ignited the urge to play Sega Rally. I dug up the CD, the same one I’ve used since I was 16, unplugged the Saturn I typically use with the Optical Drive Emulator, plugged in the Saturn with the working disc drive (in a weird twist, this is a Japanese model in which I have to use the Action Replay cartridge I originally used to boot Japanese games on my American model, the disc drive for which sadly stopped working a few years back) and dove right back in. Again, I gradually shaved seconds off of my overall time, but no matter how well I did, I never finished in first when all was said and done on the third track. It was only this year that I recognized why: I’d been playing in automatic all this time. I’d defaulted to automatic transmission for my entire life, dating all the way back to Cruis’n Exotica on the Nintendo 64. I’d never even tried to learn to play Sega Rally Championship with manual transmission. If I was going to finally see that fourth track, I would have to learn it. It would be a challenge, one that would probably leave me performing worse than I’m used to for a while as I struggled to get comfortable. This was the choice I had to make: Be comfortable, accept the ceiling that I’d hit, then put the game back away for another stretch before something else prompts me to pick it back up, or accept the mild unpleasance of suddenly failing at a game I know so well in order to reach a peak I’d never found before. Either accept the mediocre cycle or work to break it.

I chose the latter, and, sure enough, I had to struggle for a bit before I even returned to my normal times. After a couple of days worth of reps, I ended up reaching that goal and finally got to earn a run on that last, hidden course.

This prompted me to ask myself: Where else am I accepting such a mediocre cycle? What other minor lifelong struggles have I allowed to fester? What other hills could I climb if I only allowed myself to struggle for a bit?

This is an old lesson that I’ve learned many times before: Escape the comfort zone, the fruits of one’s own labor are the sweetest, Ad Aspera Per Aspera. I think this wouldn’t have been as affecting had it not been built up over 13 years of experience on the same video game, though. This is actually something I’ve come to appreciate about growing older. Sinews and undercurrents build up over time that I don’t necessarily notice until they reveal themselves and I find myself facing the same problems that I’ve experienced as younger versions of myself, only now I carry more wisdom and experience that I can use to overcome them. I feel so far removed from those prior selves, but with these common touchstones, even in something as insignificant as a video game, I can interface with them, learn from them, finish the chapters that they began.

I have laid out two conflicting viewpoints on video games to this point: In the case of CFB 25, I saw them as a distraction from what was important, and in the case of Sega Rally, I saw them as a tool to show me what was important. I would prefer to approach them from the latter point-of-view.

I tried to apply this to Castlevania: Symphony of the Night in real time in the above video. I did this in a very, very slap-dash manner, bringing back the lost old art of the Camcorder Let’s Play. I’d say that I did this out of an attempt to revive the format, but honestly it was a decision borne of convenience and disinterest in going through the rigamarole of setting up a capture card and OBS and everything properly.

SOTN is my favorite video game. I’ve made a habit of playing through it the past few years in the days following Christmas, and each time that I do this, I realize more about why I love the game. I try to exhibit this in the video, in which I find myself at the entrance to a corridor crowded with particularly annoying enemies that block my path to the Shield Rod, which is my preferred attack weapon to use for most of the game. I detest this corridor, but I need this weapon. I have two tactical decisions to choose from: Approach with caution and preparation, ducking behind the shield and striking with intention to gradually grind my way to the end of the corridor, or leap right into it, hoping that momentum and the brief invincibility spell that overcomes Alucard upon taking damage can carry me to the end of the corridor before I run out of health points. The second path is riskier, and still leaves me to have to work back through enemies in the corridor, but since the most annoying of the enemies (the Bone Muskets, which are skeletons with muskets that shoot bullets in quick succession from a screen away) can’t turn around, I’m mostly left to outduel the lumbering Armor Lords, which is an easier task than facing them and the Muskets head-on. Typically, I try to be cautious and well-prepared for my first few attempts at completing the room, but I give up and throw caution to the wind and eventually brute-force my way through the corridor.

I expected to demonstrate this in the video. I expected to fail a few times, give up on the virtue of preparation, and then reach my goal in an ugly, graceless fashion. This was to illustrate a point that, often, in my life, I over-prepare for things I ought to just throw myself into despite the risk of doing so.

What actually happened was that I decided to leave the Colosseum area in search of the Holy Water sub-item, which led me to explore more of the castle, including one of my favorite rooms in the game, the confession booth with the priest. The confession scene’s inclusion is purely an aesthetic decision, it does nothing to aid Alucard in progression, but I love what it provides to the castle. It has its own background music, unused anywhere else in the game. The priest only shows up in this room. One could complete the game and miss this room entirely, but I always stop in. On its face, it’s not necessary, completely ostentatious, but I think the developers’ capacity for ostentatiousness is what makes this game so special to me. There are so many of those little extra touches that make up Symphony of the Night, from that scene, to the spyglass at the bottom of the outer wall, to the boots that do nothing but make Alucard appear slightly talller. It’s a dense game, and not everything about it works perfeclty, but its extra wrinkles and nettles make me appreciate it even more.

I had this video set-up for a perfect comedic anticlimax. It took me ten-plus minutes to find the Holy Water. I was perfectly set to try my hand at patience and diligence once again before failing, resetting, and simply throwing caution to the wind. Yet, on the first try I made with Holy Water in tow… I made it. It was tedious, yes, but so satisfying to stand in front of the Bone Muskets and slash my way through them, having honorably worked my way through the heavies in front of them. Preparation and diligence had paid off when I expected them least to do so.

My 2024 was defined by that push-and-pull between diligence and spontaneity. It came to an all-too emphatic head back in September, when an impromptu trip to Chicago with my roommate saw his car breaking down on the side of the interstate south of Joliet and the tow truck driver admonishing us curtly, stating “It’s basic fucking maintenance, bro,” but it had been there as an undercurrent in many other situations. It will continue to be there as an undercurrent throughout my life, but I’ve learned that it’s not necessarily so firmly set. Preparation and spontaneity do not have to be in conflict in practice. One can feed the other.

This experience did not feel like a distraction. It felt allegorical. Perhaps my issue with video games is not that they are a distraction, but that I tend too often to use them as one. It takes more effort to see them as something that enriches my life and helps me to understand it, but the ends tend to justify it.

After the success of my last writing prompt-based post, I have decided to make a serious move into the Writing from Prompts space: Monetary Investment. Specifically, $5.49 spent on a book entitled “303 Writing Prompts: Ideas to Get You Started”, written by Bonnie Neubauer.

Continue reading →