The End Is Nigh: Football Manager Handheld 2010

Imaginary jumpers…

The End Is Nigh: Football Manager Handheld 2010

The End Is Nigh is a weekly column exploring the nature of videogame endings, and why we do or don’t choose to finish the games we start. This week, Martin Gaston has been addicted to FOOTBALL MANAGER HANDHELD 2010.

Football Manager Handheld 2010 on the iPhone works by, if you’ll allow me to use a crude analogy, procedurally moving its goalposts. This isn’t specific to the new iPhone iteration by any means, but I’ll focus on that version because it’s the one I’ve been battering over the last couple of weeks.

Any season in Football Manager is a long, challenging affair that takes hours on end to see through – longer than the length of most games. I started a game this weekend and declared I was going to get Norwich back into the Premiership – it would be done. So far it looks good, with the Canaries sat at number two with just a few more games of the season to go. I’m happy with that.

And then, when all’s said and done, it’s all back to the beginning. Only now it’s all with a pre-existing set of allegiances and intentions, with a cast of regular characters like some kind of demented New Game+ mode where you end up loving your squad even more from the beginning. The in-game shiny trophy might have changed, but ultimately the player is back at square one.

Football Manager is a game that lives in the imagination, an amalgamation of text boxes and lists that conjures up intense emotions. That’s why it’s been knocking around for years and why I, with almost zero interest in football, manage to get myself thoroughly addicted to it every now and then. I’ve thought about Grant Holt more than anything else this weekend, imagining his happy face every time he’s scored one of his 31 goals across my 09-10 season.

I have no idea what Grant Holt actually looks like, but such are the incredible imaginative powers of Football Manager.

Where are ya!

It operates to a different beat than other sports games. FIFA, Tiger Woods, Madden et al are like very slick simulations of watching a sport on the television: you might have just pulled off a very nice putt, but you’re not under any delusions of being Tiger himself. You’ve probably not had nearly enough affairs, for a start.

In Football Manager, however, you’re controlling the back of house. You’re probably even called your own name, and taking on your role of sitting on the sidelines to watch your overpaid, oversexed squad go about their business actually feels true to form.

That’s not to say it’s wholly authentic – one of its most alluring illusions is that, with your guidance, your duff old local team could easily win the FA cup. Football Manager understands this. It’s a very clever, unique game, and there’s a reason Sports Interactive have managed to see off competition from nearly ever other rival developer at one time or another. Pro Evolution Soccer Management, anyone? I didn’t think so.

Like with my quest to get Norwich back on the road to glory, I play the game by defining my own victory conditions. I tell myself that achieving this will be the end, and afterwards I’ll go and play something else or get back to work. It very rarely works like that.

In Football Manager, the myriad cups, bountiful statistics and hard-earned victories are dangled in front of you like a carrot on a stick. As soon as you achieve one, and reach the point where you promised you’d stop playing, up pops another shiny thing on the horizon. You could get that, you think, and so you do. Repeat, ad infinitum. It just keeps on moving the goalposts.