the playful utopia

There’s always a tinge of fear deep within the loading screen of a new computer baseball simulation game. As I wait, I get a distinct sensation of the passage of time. It’s possible that I’ll devote hours to navigating menus, learning rules, all for nothing. On the other hand, the game could be good, in which case chronology goes right out the window. The loading screen finishes, and a moment later, a key turns in the lock. My wife is home. It is dark. The cat is hungry. I am hungry. The effect is eerily similar to general anesthesia.

This article is a review, and I am a firm believer in transparency regarding the work of others. So allow me to provide the background: I have not played a baseball simulator since Out of the Park 5 was released a lifetime ago. I remember little of the old game. My forays into the genre since have begun and ended with Madden, where every few years I buy the new edition, play halfway through a season, get sick of the interface, and quit.

The computer sports game, as a genre, faces a few issues. The first is that the essential content of the game, the sport itself, is unchanging. When a company creates a series, it can’t (or shouldn’t) rely on producing the same product as the year before, slapping on a roster upgrade and a couple of graphical amendments. Sports games have two ways of doing this: making the game more realistic or making it more challenging. The former is desirable; the latter is usually a necessity, especially for a niche market like baseball simulation. Many of your customers are repeat buyers, and they’ve had lots of practice. In Madden, this phenomenon results in a product so complicated that training courses could be delivered on the subject. For those who progress along the learning curve, this is fine; for those who are new to a series, it can be utterly alienating.

Entering the series with essentially zero experience, I can’t attest to the difference between this edition and the previous one. I was, however, surprised by how accessible the game was. The gears and pulleys are all there; you can agonize over the coaching ability of your team’s Single-A hitting coach, or the likelihood of insulting a free agent by trimming a year off his contract demand. It’s a credit to the game that these features exist. It’s also a credit, perhaps a greater one, that you can largely ignore them. Automation is a click away, allowing the player to focus on whatever aspect of the game he or she finds interesting.

The player must be prepared to suspend a certain amount of disbelief. The game provides e-mail alerts to provide news and subtly remind the player of tasks undone, using an algorithm for producing copy that is noticeable, if not glaring. This is hardly a complaint in a game which is already extremely complicated, but the game becomes predictable in how it supplies the player with information, and this system can ultimately be manipulated (as will be explained below). Out of the Park also provides an online multiplayer experience, which would eliminate the foibles of the computer AI and, in the process, curdle the very synapses of the human brain itself.

There is another way in which Out of the Park fails at complete realism, and in this case it is of no fault of the game itself. In this case, the paradox lies in the free will of the player. The visceral thrill of the baseball simulation is that it provides the player with a level of control that, in the sport itself, the fan lacks. It does so, however, via a bond that can be severed. To wit: I began my experience as the general manager of the 2011 Mariners. After tinkering with the features and the rosters, my version of the M’s were meeting expectations, hovering a few games below .500 based on believably strong pitching and horrendous offense. Then, in the span of three days, Milton Bradley, Franklin Gutierrez and Ichiro all went on the disabled list at the same time. In real life, this happens sometimes; the ballclub stumbles onward with an outfield of Carlos Peguero, Michael Saunders and Mike Wilson, and the fan base discovers something else to do with its summer evenings, like gardening. In the game, however, I simply pulled the plug on the season.

For my second time through the lineup, I changed tactics. I began a custom league set in 1977 (OOTP 12 has historical data running back to the nineteenth century) and took the helm of the expansion Mariner club. It was at this point that I realized what game Out of the Park best compares to: Civilization.

The 1977 Mariners are your archetypal cavemen, the baseball equivalent of only knowing mines and road building. Collectively, they’re slow and helpless. And as you watch them grow, the red “End of Day” button looms in the corner, providing a little more feedback, urging you to spend a little more time shaping your team. The compulsive nature of that next turn, the possibilities and strategies that lie beyond it, brings out the best elements of the turn-based strategy game. What followed was the least realistic, most enjoyable baseball experience I’ve had in a long time.

The most direct link between Civilization and Out of the Park lies in the trade screen. The game allows you to shop players around the league, testing out what other teams might give you straight up for a player. Your in-house scout rates those players, based on his own preprogrammed biases. But you’re only allowed to shop three players a day, so there’s strategy in working the market, as well as another incentive to go one more turn. I slowly began upgrading my roster, finding to my surprise that other teams were far higher on my players than my own team appeared to be. The league couldn’t get enough of Julio Cruz; teams fell over each other making offers on him. Even complete scrubs seemed to draw attention, resulting in slight improvements, which led to even more lucrative trades. The process felt extremely similar to improving tiles in Civilization, except that I was improving the raw ratings of my players.

The AI in Out of the Park tends to severely underrate the value of young, team-controlled talent, which was decisive even while playing in an era before contacts really exploded. The limitation on shopping players is meant to be reflected in their morale, but I merrily did it anyway, destroying their self-esteem as I picked through the market. Who cares if they’re miserable if they’re about to join another team? In a couple of months I had transformed my roster from the one on the left to the one on the right:

Stashed on my bench were Dale Murphy, Frank White, Alan Trammell, Darrell Evans, Gary Carter, and Fred Lynn. The only guys I couldn’t eventually pry away were 10/5 guys like Ryan and Carlton. The expansion Mariners rolled along, went 105-57, and took the World Series in six games over the Los Angeles Dodgers. The hypothetical owner of the team took home $5 million in revenue, the fan base was energized, and Seattle became the capital of the baseball world. Realistic? Not in the slightest. Fun? Certainly.

And that’s the other connection to Civilization, one that links us to the beginning of the review. The vast majority of people don’t play Civilization to lose. Many never bump up the difficulty to the point where the computer puts up a fight. That’s because these players don’t need a challenge to enjoy the game; it’s fun for the creative aspects alone, a simulated sandbox. This is how I enjoyed Out of the Park, and it’s how I enjoyed Civilization for a long time. For the latter, I eventually waded into the Monarch difficulty levels, and the possibility exists with Out of the Park as well.

There were a couple of facets to the game that I found disappointing. The lack of logos and profile pictures is unsurprising, and there is a strong community that develops these things for each game. However, the modification process is unintuitive , and my version of the game had trouble at times recognizing files. Perhaps most of all, however, I found the lack of an auto-save feature in the game mystifying. Twice I played into the wee hours of the morning, and stumbling to bed. When I woke, Windows had helpfully auto-updated, quitting the game and losing all my progress.

Overall, however, I heartily recommend Out of the Park 12, especially for new players who may find themselves initially intimidated by all those little numbers and bar charts.  It’s more accessible than it looks, and it has so many facets (managerial, historical and online play) that you’re likely to find something that appeals to you.  But be warned: you may want to keep an alarm clock next to the computer.