Being a sportswriter who recently turned 41, I've always loved the universes and narratives that I could create in video/sim games; going back to the very simple Tiger Electronics Baseball game from 1987 that I still own (and it still works!). If I can be honest, the notebook stories I wrote after playing any sort of sports video game likely convinced me that I should just become a journalist. Well, that and the fact that my athleticism never caught up with my growth spurt during my middle-school years.
In 1997, I created my own dice baseball game* with index cards, a calculator, a season-end copy of Baseball Weekly and eventually dice. It got me extra credit in the mathematics course that I was in, even with the teacher marking on the attached report "You lost me at baseball, but it looks like you worked hard! +25!"
Since then, I've been gaming on so many different platforms with an eye toward just making the games as fun as possible while generating that escapism that we all crave when playing any game. There's a NCAA Football 06 save on a PS2 memory card that is about 20 seasons deep. Outside of the console-type games, I hopped back in with GM-type games with OOTP 16. Football Manager and Franchise Hockey Manager followed before recently tapping into the Wolverine Sports titles. It's only fed my obsession to play these games more, despite having less time to get into these games on top of the consoles that I insist on owning. (At least the cats are very low-maintenance)
*-compared to Strat-O-Matic, this game was about 1/10 as involved, but it took like 30 minutes to play a fairly realistic game as evidenced by the 80-82 record that I achieved with the Pittsburgh Pirates, who were the primary team for actual game play
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