The Greatest Game Never Played: Robert Coover's The Universal Baseball Association

Henry Waugh has created an awesome pen and paper baseball dice game. He plays the proprietor of the baseball league, playing through every game in a standard season on his kitchen table, rolling dice for strikes, doubles, and even stealing bases. He has carefully laid out out all the rules on sheets of legal paper, each page featuring the rules for specific situations such as runners on first and second or extraordinary occurrences for when three dice show ones or sixes three times in a row. Anything can happen then: the pitcher could bean and kill the batter, the batter could bean the pitcher, or the crowd could riot and delay the game, possibly injuring or killing even more players. And each player in the league has their own sheet too, with all the stats on it from the current season. If they gain enough experience and have a little luck, they can move up to Ace or even Star level, making their dice rolls count in their favor more. But if it all sounds a little too luck-driven, it's not! Henry's a brilliant statistician, and he's carefully made all the necessary calculations to ensure that each roll of the dice is as real as every play in an actual game. He's completely obsessed with it.

Pretty cool, huh?

Now here's the bad news. Henry Waugh is a fictional character from experimental writer Robert Coover's second novel The Universal Baseball Association. And the game only exists in the piecemeal descriptions given by the author. Granted, Coover did come up with the idea...in 1968!

Let me break down for you how incredible that is. Robert Coover wrote the concept for the first sports management game in a time when complex games (those that used statistical analysis or random numbers, digital or analog) were unheard of. And he did it three years before the text-based Star Trek game, six years before Dungeons & Dragons, and fifteen years before Intellivision World Series Baseball. But even more importantly, in his own way, Coover wrote the first (and perhaps only) novel about what it is to be gamer.

Last year, Tom Bissell's gaming memoir Extra Lives came out, lauding not only his only gaming experiences, but some that belong to all us who play--granted his cocaine/Grand Theft Auto addiction and tours of/interviews with high-powered developer studios might be a little rare. But Coover's novel (aside from the completely surreal ending, which I won't spoil here) speaks to the more common quirks of the hardcore gamer--the playing-till-dawn, edge-of-your-seat-office-clock-watching, sleepless-night-next-move-planning, and meal-skipping. There's even a great scene about the completely nerve-racking but entirely self-inflicted task of trying to teach someone else how to play a game when they aren't really invested in it.

As someone who's been playing games from childhood, with parents who've long given up the hope I'd "grow up", Coover's novel struck quite a few cords with me. I related not only to his obsession, but the emotions of his wins and losses, the impatience of the next game, and most of all, the feeling that others would not understand his love of it. As I mentioned earlier, games like Henry's simply didn't exist in 1968, real or fictional. Sure, wargaming has existed for centuries and had even garnered a large fan base in the late 1800s and early 1900s. HG Wells is well-known for writing War of the Worlds--the tale of Martian invasion--but few know he also wrote Little Wars, a rule book for war games using toy soldiers. But these aren't good enough for Henry, and his gaming community rejects his attempts at codifying more realistic rules to take into account the global economy, troop morale, and other variables that you don't find in classic Risk.

This is where I related most to Henry. As a kid, I had lots of friends who played video games, but trying to explain the difficulty of finding the Red Ring in Death Mountain to my friends who just liked attacking the skateboarding chick in TMNT II: The Arcade Game always made me feel a little silly. While my friends enjoyed playing Clue or Monopoly Junior, I'd rather play Stratego or HeroQuest. Henry reminds us that the rift between the "casual" and the "hardcore" gamer isn't new.

But while gamers these days don't have to worry about being ostracized for the hobby nearly as much as Henry in the late '60s or even me in the early '90s, he's an easy character to relate to anyway. I taught The UBA in my literature course this past spring, and I was surprised by how much my students (most of whom played video games as kids but are now "too grown up for that") could relate to Henry's connection to his fictional baseball players through their own, bygone days of Pokemania. Class discussions about Henry's addiction were usually explained through student Pokemon analogies. Discussing Henry's paralyzing depression over the in-game and irreversible death of a player, one of my hard, student athlete types compared it to her little brother accidently saving over her game, deleting her team of six, unstoppable Pocket Monsters--turning her off from the game, her Game Boy Color, and gaming forever.

Therein lies the value of Coover's book, lost in the annals of sports literature despite Sports Illustrated placing it at the respectable position of 61 on their Top 100 Sports Books list. Yes, it is a book about baseball, but it's also a book about playing games, beating them, and being beaten by them. It's a book waiting to be rediscovered and find a new audience. And in this age of gaming, we are that audience.

Questions? Quibbles? Controversies?

Source: http://bitmob.com/articles/the-greatest-game-never-played

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