Personal reflection by Jonas

A couple of years ago I was regularly playing Football Manager (Formerly known as Championship Manager). By regularly I mean at least 4 hours per day. It was a tragic amount of hours spent on that game. My team was often Seville and they had a left winger, who always developed into being one of the best left wingers in the game. His name was Antonio Puerta and I always liked him. Not only because he was awesome for my team but also because he was born in Seville and never complained. Definitely an evidence of my own engagement level and that the game developers successfully transferred his mentality and personality into a game.


However since then I’ve followed Seville in the real world as well and really enjoyed the last couple of seasons when they’ve been playing fantastic football in La Liga. Antonio Puerta was seldom mentioned by the commentators nor the press. He did his work and was slowly developing into the the world-class player he would always become in the digital world.

Yesterday he passed away. Suffering from the heart attack he had during the game against Getafe Saturday evening. Reading the tributes written by Seville fans last night was a moving experience.

My relation to Seville and Puerta started with me playing a game, just a game. But I’m kind of surprised by myself how I developed these relationships with semi-fictional players and expanded them in the real world.

A lot have already been written about relationships in games and virtual worlds, this was a trivial personal reflection of it.

My thoughts goes to his wife (who’s going to give birth to their first child in a couple of months) and family.

Related posts

August 29, 2007 / 2 Comments.

2 Comments

  1. Mattias replied:

    Great post Jonas, very moving.

    By playing a lot NBA 2005 lately on my PS2, I’ve found myself developing an unhealthy fascination for Hedo Turkoglu - not exactly a Kobe, Shaq or Jordan. I guess by taking on a role as the players, coaching them and caring for them you start to identify with them on some level. I’m suspecting that sports and manager games might really be be The Sims in disguise. Or is it the other way around?

    August 29th, 2007 at 6:38 pm. Permalink.

  2. Jonas replied:

    Good point regarding The Sims and how they relate to manager games. The aspect of creating your own value and status is the connecting link there. Both are able, through quite subtle reward schemes, create very engaging games.

    August 30th, 2007 at 1:35 pm. Permalink.

Leave a Reply


TrackBack Identifier URI