No Crying in Baseball - Itch Game of the Week
Amateur sport can be a powerful fulfilling activity, or a hellscape.
No Crying in Baseball is a game by Anthony Bockley and Tiffany Doherty and can be found at time of writing at this page.
Sports games are a staple of the modern gaming landscape. Professional sport sims are some of the most popular games on earth, serving as the dependable money machine driving companies as large as EA. Sports sims are certainly something I enjoy, I played 118 hours of The Show 17 just last year. But the sports sim is certainly something that’s played out and predictable. They’ve more or less offered the same fantasy for decades. Far more rare is the game that celebrates amateur sport. While there is merit in replicating the professional experience for people who can never hope to achieve it, the amateur sports game has an earnestness to it. They are games that usually just rely on the idea that it’s sport is simply inherently enjoyable. Rory McIlroy PGA Tour simply doesn’t celebrate the sport of golf in the way its 2014 contemporary The Golf Club does. The latter is a game about enjoying nature and your buddy’s presence as you simply play a round of golf, no tournaments, no RPG progression, just the idea that golf is worth playing for its own sake. Amateur sport is the way almost everyone interacts with sport, and it’s nice when a videogame tries to showcase something so many people love.
But that’s not to say everyone loves or has a positive personal experience with amateur sport. For many, their time in sport is something of a traumatic memory. Something they were forced to participate in, or an activity they wanted to love that was spoiled for them by others. I’ve been lucky that amateur sport has been a tremendously positive part of my life, but I’ve seen this happen. It can take the form of bullying teammates, abusive coaches but most often in the form of overlording parents trying to live vicariously through their children. I’ve seen this happen personally, and unfortunately it’s common enough that I think anyone who has participated in amateur sport has too.
And that brings us to No Crying in Baseball. A new game from Anthony Bockley and Tiffany Doherty where the player takes on the role of a child who definitely doesn’t want to be playing baseball. Yet here they are, at baseball practice. Practice should be a nurturing environment, where faults are acknowledged but worked on and improved. In No Crying in Baseball the player has to work through a perversion of this. They must satisfy their father, who’s face looks down on the player at all times from the top corner of the screen. The player character is literally on the verge of a breakdown, and the player must try to protect them from bursting into tears right where he stands at home plate.
No Crying in Baseball asks the player to simultaneously smack some dingers while also keeping the kid’s emotions in check. Failure in either leads to the same game over screen. And that’s where I think the power of the game lies, that the emotional trauma doesn’t take a backstage to the drama of the sport. You could imagine a system where the emotional mechanic is merely a subservient multiplier to the sports mechanic. That failure to manage emotions would merely be a debuff the player could power through. Through its equal balancing of mechanics No Crying in Baseball acknowledges that suffering under abusive sports parents is something that can totally break a child. Hitting a homerun doesn’t make the player character happier as the father doesn’t seem to show much positive reaction. Satisfying the father isn’t actually possible in No Crying in Baseball, and that’s where the game’s tragedy lies. I’ve seen this happen, maybe not in baseball as I never played, but I promise this is happening right now. Somewhere as you read this, some kid is having their childhood love of a sport ruined by a parent, coach or someone who should be celebrating with them. It’s all just sad.
I’d like to think that No Crying in Baseball’s creators set out to depict all of this on purpose, but the game peripheries suggest that it’s a meant to be more of a joke than anything. The title is a reference to Tom Hanks’ famous one-liner from A League of Their Own. And it’s hard to see the game as a rebuke of abusive sports dads when it invites its players to come hang out and compare high scores in a discord chatroom. Plus its game over screen chastises the player for failure, the game doesn’t afford a moment of sympathy for its now sobbing hero. But I just find that it makes the metaphor more compelling. Abuse like this get ignored or even celebrated in many circles as long as it produces winners. No Crying in Baseball feels like a work a strict sports parent would laugh about and link on facebook to all their other arguably abusive parents on their kid’s team. The game truly feels like a genuine output of that culture, it’s a more powerful condemnation of abuse if it’s convincingly genuine in its malice.
So whether Bockley and Doherty meant to create an introspective work, or whether they did it accidentally there’s no denying there exists a real genuine tragedy in No Crying in Baseball. And in capturing that real truth, it accomplishes something a game like The Show 17 never could hope to.
No Crying in Baseball was the game of the week for April 2nd, 2018.
