Dierkes: Questionable athletics
Doug Dierkes COLUMNIST
Issue date: 10/2/08 Section: Opinion
It's football season once again, and for the most part I'm neutral on the subject. I wouldn't say I'm jaded at this point, but after seeing Ohio State and the Cleveland Browns lose in the same week twice, I'm not all that excited about watching my favorite sports teams. But there is a way around this. Football video games.
So why am I content to play Internet poker instead?
My inner curmudgeon says this is due to the fact that modern football video games are so realistic that they include the fact that I suck at football. My inner optimist says this is part of a seasonal change in my gaming habits. Much like the leaves falling off a tree, my interest in explosions and touchdowns starts to wane once I'm back in the halls of education. I have to start being smart again, so I start playing more smart person games to reacquaint myself with my grey matter. How are things going so far?
Chess
This time when I dusted off my chess set I found I had a split personality. If I play chess as a puzzle, setting up the board for a one move checkmate, I'm practically unstoppable. If I have to sit down and play through a whole game, I'm kinda bad at it. I know all about setting up pins, forks, and skewers, how to build a proper pawn structure, how to dominate the middle of the board, and all sorts of other grandmaster-worthy bits of strategy. But for some reason, whenever I sit down in front of that board, all higher thought goes out the window in favor of "The horsey moves like an L!" I need to fix this.
Scrabble
When my family members realized challenging an English major to a competitive word building game might be a bad idea, I thought I was the king of the greater Youngstown area. Then I saw the National School Scrabble Championships on ESPN2 yesterday afternoon and realized how my game compared to the best our country's middle schools could offer. I felt a knife being twisted in my gut, the same knife used by the 7-year-old kid on YouTube who's better at Guitar Hero than I could ever hope to be. I hate being shown up by people younger than I am, so I may have to bring a travel board to the Jambar offices to settle the score.
So why am I content to play Internet poker instead?
My inner curmudgeon says this is due to the fact that modern football video games are so realistic that they include the fact that I suck at football. My inner optimist says this is part of a seasonal change in my gaming habits. Much like the leaves falling off a tree, my interest in explosions and touchdowns starts to wane once I'm back in the halls of education. I have to start being smart again, so I start playing more smart person games to reacquaint myself with my grey matter. How are things going so far?
Chess
This time when I dusted off my chess set I found I had a split personality. If I play chess as a puzzle, setting up the board for a one move checkmate, I'm practically unstoppable. If I have to sit down and play through a whole game, I'm kinda bad at it. I know all about setting up pins, forks, and skewers, how to build a proper pawn structure, how to dominate the middle of the board, and all sorts of other grandmaster-worthy bits of strategy. But for some reason, whenever I sit down in front of that board, all higher thought goes out the window in favor of "The horsey moves like an L!" I need to fix this.
Scrabble
When my family members realized challenging an English major to a competitive word building game might be a bad idea, I thought I was the king of the greater Youngstown area. Then I saw the National School Scrabble Championships on ESPN2 yesterday afternoon and realized how my game compared to the best our country's middle schools could offer. I felt a knife being twisted in my gut, the same knife used by the 7-year-old kid on YouTube who's better at Guitar Hero than I could ever hope to be. I hate being shown up by people younger than I am, so I may have to bring a travel board to the Jambar offices to settle the score.
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