I have an excuse. I had a brutal fever Sunday night and on into Monday — went to work and then turned right around and went home. My thermal regulation is still cracked, though my fever is gone, so I’m at work with the cold sweats. So that’s why I didn’t write anything yesterday — I could barely speak coherently and I have no one who will take dictation anyway.

Actually that’s probably not true — I bet Jack would take dictation but I suspect her transcriptions would include some editorial comments. I might experiment with that one day but not until I feel a lot better.

Anyway of course I am getting ribbed for this because “obviously” I was just hung over after celebrating our Olympic hockey victory on Sunday night. Sadly that was not the case.

This hockey victory, especially in the context of the Olympics itself, was an interesting study for me in the way that reality is crappy fiction. I suspect this relates to role-playing games also being crappy fiction when they are at their best (with notable exceptions, Mr. Newman!)

Consider this. The Olympics are held in Canada and the very last event to play out is a hockey game (our sport!). It’s between Canada and the USA and Canada has already lost once to the US team. The game goes 2-2 in regular time and then runs for a substantial sudden-death period before Canada scores an elegant and uncontroversial goal, securing the gold medal.

Now if you were writing a sports movie, even a bad one, and this was your script, you’d be laughed out of every producer’s office from here to Bombay. This is a ridiculous story. But in real life, where there is no space for the fiction to be questioned (though interestingly we do see a lot of reality questioned as fiction these days — conspiracy theories are more popular than ever) this is just a nail-bitingly tear-inducingly too-many-adverbally awesome story. It could not have been more perfect.

But in fiction it would raise every suspension-of-disbelief alarm bell that there is.

So how about a role-playing game? I have occasionally heard it said that there are too few sports-themed role-playing games. I don’t know if that’s true — it seems to me that if there really were too few then there would soon be some more — but here is the kind of model for what you would want to deliver. You want substantial stakes. You want a defeat that does not require a final defeat. You want a gritty comeback. You want a final success (or failure!) that has awesome timing.

Who do you play though? I’m not sure one guy on the ice is the right perspective, though that does let you pull in personal stories to impact play and of course gives you some correlation between player and character. But with all the experimentation in what a character can be these days — we have games where characters can be space craft, corporations, and other aggregate entities — maybe it’s a signal that we should consider the team itself as the character. See I was going to suggest the coach, but that’s actually just a cowardly way to say the team — a way that keeps a traditional character but still deploys the action against the team proper.

I think the Olympic victory demonstrated that there’s something in this. I wouldn’t play it and I’m not going to write it because I’m just not interested in most sports. But if there really are not enough sports games, here’s a potential vein to mine for some.

–BMurray