If Only I Had Time to Play It

Listen to a podcast of this post, thanks to Talkr

I don't even have time to blog (*gasp*), let alone to play computer games. However, last night I was reading USA Today Sports Weekly and I discovered a game review about "Ultimate Baseball Online" (UBO), which is, get this, the first MMO (Massive Multiplayer Online) sports game. There have been MMORPGs (Massive Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games) for a long time, but more often than not those have involved wizards and magic and dragons and things like that, so I haven't been interested. UBO is a baseball game! In theory, while you're playing, the pitcher is another person, your baserunners are other people, the outfielders and other people, and so on and so forth. How awesome is that? I mean, if you're playing MLB '06 at home, and you strike out with the bases loaded in the bottom of the ninth to blow that game, that's not cool. But if you're playing UBO and you do the same, you've not only blown the game for yourself, you've blown it for (potentially) eight other people. You may even ruin someone's "career," as each custom-designed player represents its respective gamer's "life" in the game. D'oh!

As the USA Today Sports Weekly article pointed out, think about the number of kids today who'd rather get eight friends together virtually to play UBO than get eight friends together to go to the sandlot to play a real game of baseball. While that may seem scary, I don't think we need to be worried about the future of organized sports. I just think this seems like a lot of fun, and I hope I don't get addicted to it after I do my quick test-run on it (download in progress) -- I have too much other stuff to do!