Sports Mogul's Clay Dreslough

Part 2 of the interview

by Dave McAwesome

In part 1, we covered Madden cross-dressing, turducken and ponies. Here's part 2.

McA: How hard is it to program the AI of the computer owners?
Clay: All the AI together is pretty tough. It's not just trade AI--it's also signing free agents and cash management and drafting. Not to mention the in-game strategy.

This is one reason not to program sports games for a living. If you write a game like WarCraft, no one really cares if the Orcs are good at managing their "farm system." You can screw up the AI (or the "sim engine") pretty badly and most users won't notice. But if you write a game where Peyton Manning only asks for $5 million, every casual football fan in the world will immediately know that something's wrong.

I LOVE it when a real-life coach makes a mistake. Like when Andy Reid calls a timeout with 15 seconds left in the first half of the Redskins game. He's trying to ice the field goal kicker. But by stopping the clock he gives Washington enough time to take one more shot at the end zone, and they end up putting 7 on the board instead of 3.

When the Mogul AI makes mistakes, I don't even have to leave New England for examples of real-life GMs and managers being just as dumb. Can you say "Grady Little" in Game 7 of the ALCS? Or paying $14 million to J.D. Drew...

McA: Free agency. On the one hand, I hate Madden's bidding simulation that takes forever to do. On the other hand, it's more realistic than signing whatever player you want. Is there a compromise? Like, when you try to sign a QB, can the game do a short check of the AI teams who also need a QB and try to counterbid the user?
Clay: That's exactly the kind of system I want to build. First in Baseball Mogul, then port it over to Football Mogul. It might be "realistic" to wait around for counter-offers--but it's wicked annoying too. I'd rather keep the instant feedback, but add the possibility that you need to keep jacking up your bid until you are the last one left.

The tricky question is whether to show the bids or keep them secret. In real life, they are secret. Scott Boras calls back the Yankees and says "the Red Sox are offering A-Rod $30 million per year" ... and he might be LYING. So in Mogul you could call his bluff and say no. And then if he doesn't sign with the Red Sox at that price, you know it was a bluff. I'm guessing that over time you'd learn that some virtual agents were more honest than others.

As you can see, it's easy to dream up how cool this feature could be, but then it gets more complicated to build and test.

McA: Heh, you said "wicked." If you had an unlimited budget, what would be the one thing you would add to Baseball Mogul and Football Mogul?
Clay: I'm tempted to say awesome 3D graphics or head-to-head play over the internet. But the thing that really makes these games rock is the massive multiplayer capability. People using Mogul to run a league with their friends (or over the internet) is where it gets absurdly addictive. The problem is, it's a hassle to collect trade orders from users, enter them in, maintain a Web site, etc. It's like in the 1980s when my friend and I typed in stats from the newspaper every day for our Rotisserie league.

With Baseball Mogul Online, we do this all for you, but we're still improving it. After we add live amateur drafts and whatnot, it will just keep growing. Finding the resources to do the same for Football Mogul would be excellent.

McA: What is the one game you'd like to make that you haven't yet?
Clay: I have a lot of half-written games, like a collectible card game version of Baseball Mogul (because MLB Showdown is pretty crappy). I don't think I can narrow it down to one.
McA: You started a thread in your forum about live-action role-playing (LARPing). I gotta call you out on that, dude. Pretty geekish for a sports game maker, don't you think? Unless there's beer involved. I guess that would be okay.
Clay: I'm really impressed that you made it that far into our forums!

You have the rules for Misfit Mafia on your website, and you're mocking me for LARPing. :-)

I basically did LARPing with beer involved. It's called the SCA, and I dressed up in metal armor and beat up thousands of acquaintances in 95-degree heat. Then I drank all night and repeated this for a week (and I even invented a great drinking game called "Viking Dice").

As for LARPing without beer, it is still in it's infancy, and it is dominated by bad actors and bad game designers. It's like Cadaco's All-Star Baseball released back in 1941. Great idea (a baseball board game) but serious implementation flaws.

There are 5 million people playing World of Warcraft. Meanwhile, the obesity rate for teens has gone from 5.0% in the 1980s to 17.4% today. In my opinion, if you are running a LARP in your basement with 100 pages of rules and 3x5 cards representing your "powers," then you are just playing a super-nerdy version of D&D.

But if you go outside, strip out the long boring "scenes," and make the rules intuitive, you have the best of sports combined with the best of RPGs. Someone playing softball or touch football doesn't have to scream out numbers and yell "spell incantations" as he plays. That would destroy the fun of the game, as it does at many LARPs. But at the games I've run, we avoid this crap and focus on the combat, strategy, puzzles, bartering, and interaction with the environment (such as setting up an ambush, or actually digging up a treasure chest). Like playing a sport, you find yourself lost in the game and forgetting about the "real world." And when it's over, you have a bunch of stories to tell about all the great "plays" you made, and all the funny stuff that happened too.

I'll get off my soapbox now. But maybe I've inspired a few sports fans to think about live gaming in a different light. You don't have to dress up in tights or adopt a silly accent. Just grab a padded sword and run around in the woods for a weekend, killing and looting.

Most of the LARPs out there are run by people that I wouldn't want to play with. But I think that can change.

It's actually pretty "macho" on some level, in that the only REQUIRED armor is a helmet, shoulder protection, spine protection, and a cup (knees and elbows might be required too, I don't remember). The 'swords' are rattan -- like they make furniture out of -- so you get some serious bruises if someone finds a gap in your armor.

McA: Dude, admit it. An athlete scandal simulator would be cool.
Clay: I keep hoping to add more ways for players to become "disabled." Truth is always stranger than fiction. If I had put dog-fighting into Football Mogul last year, everyone would have told me it was "unrealistic." And then Milton Bradley tears his ACL because his manager is trying to keep him OUT of a fight. You can't make this shit up.
McA: Do people actually watch the Lingerie Bowl on pay-per-view? I can't understand the appeal. Have they not heard of internet porn?
Clay: The Super Bowl halftime show is so horrible that I really can't think of anything bad to say about anything else in that time slot. A lich-like Mick Jagger can make even the "Puppy Bowl" look good.

If the Lingerie Bowl wasn't rigged, it might be worth watching. But the cheerleaders should be guys, so the women (and gay men, of course) don't leave your Super Bowl party while you still have three cases of beer in the fridge.

McA: Lastly, an easy, softball question: How'd you get into programming sports sims?
Clay: Because my crazy hippie elementary school only let us play games on the Apple IIs if we wrote them ourselves. This is the same school where I got to "teach" a D&D class for credit--just like in the Beavis & Butthead episode. Add that to the fact that my parents wouldn't buy me any games, and I had to write them all myself. I wrote a single-season simulator in high school, and the rest is history.
McA: Plug yer shit.
Clay: My shit rocks! Seriously, Baseball Mogul and Football Mogul are severely addictive games that get in your head. If you download a game from SportsMogul.com and you don't like it for any reason, you just shoot me an e-mail for a refund. No complicated e-licenses or customer support lines in India to deal with. And we constantly read user feedback, so it's just like working for a small computer game company--except that we don't pay you.

And don't get me started on Baseball Mogul Online. We have people that play over 80 hours a week for only $5 per month. I've had to drop out of most of my leagues so I still have time to program.

Not wanting to barrage poor Clay with more "please add this feature" pesterings, I wrote up a list of more suggestions.