The Frail Gamernerd's Guide to the Super Bowl

Parties are more fun than not-parties.

The pomp and glory and cruft hanging off the game have grown so much bigger than the game itself. You bring the bread, we’ll bring the circus.

Last Sunday was Super Bowl MVXCLIIXXXL, my nation's second-biggest secular holiday. As we always do, we invited all our nerd friends over for a party. We had a lot of fun, and I got all reflective about what the Super Bowl means to me.

Let's be clear, I spent most of my life as the sort of obnoxious geek who looks down on those who enjoy Sportsball. (It's very important to display your superiority by calling sporting events Sportsball. Though it may be time to consider that maybe this joke is past it's sell-by date.)

Then one of my nerd friends invited me to a Super Bowl party and I went and had a great time. So I started doing it on my own and it's pretty great.

Because I'm a gamer and game designer, it shouldn't be surprising that I like watching games. Sports, both watching and playing, are one of the oldest and most revered human traditions. The Aztecs had their own Super Bowl. At the end, they sacrificed the losers. Sports is serious business!

Anyhoo. Here are a bunch of ramblings about football, the Super Bowl, and America in general.

Tips For a Super Bowl Party For the Nerds

After running a bunch of these, I've gotten it down to a system. We have a few tricks to make the event fun, which you might find useful.

You may have attendees who have never experienced football before. Therefore, we offer an optional brief seminar to explain the basics. Do not get too bogged down here. Explain the four downs, the punt, and the scoring (7 points for a touchdown, 3 points for a field goal, etc).

Don't explain safeties, penalties, and so on, or you will scare everyone and you'll never reach the end of it. You can explain the weird stuff as it comes up.

Provide a pile of beer and delicious food. I always make tons of fancy nachos. When people ask me what they should bring, I say, "Bring the comfiest food that makes you feel happy and at home." The ultimate goal is to sit around for hours eating trash as the TV turns your brain perfectly smooth.

The Super Bowl figured out that you can now order fading rap stars in bulk. They are delivered to you in large white boxes.

So How Was the Game?

I freely admit I don't understand football super well. Or any other sport, really, though I'm getting a pretty decent grasp of curling strategy.

After every Super Bowl, people who actually know football debate whether it was a good game or not. For me, any game in any sport is good if ...

1. It is very unlikely that it ends in a tie.

2. When there is a minute left on the clock, there is still a real question who will win.

By my standard, this Super Bowl was exciting. There was real suspense about whether the Cinnncinnnattti Big Guys would beat the Los Angeles Even Bigger Guys.

Forget All That. How Were the Commercials?

For many, the commercials of the Super Bowl are the main attraction. This seems weird at first, so let me explain.

Ad time for the Super Bowl is profoundly expensive. This is when the biggest corporations bring out all their best creative guns and spend huge amounts of time and effort hiring celebrities and focus testing in order to grovel to us normal folk. It is the time when the oligarchs who rule us communicate their will in a refreshingly honest way.

It is also a welfare program to keep forgotten celebrities from starving to death.

So what did we learn?

First. We got to see Facebook's VR-Powered Metaverse. We learned that, when you finally accept that all hope is lost and the world has no more further use for you, you can put on some goggles and enjoy the illusion that you are still valued. HUGE dystopia Philip K. Dick energy from Facebook.

Second. The biggest question for our party was: How many ads for crypto and NFTs will there be during the game? I invited everyone to write down their guesses. Nobody grabbed the winner: Four. FOUR.

So what should we learn from this? Well, if you were considering converting your investments into gold, ammunition, and bulk antibiotics, the time is now.

At the end of the Aztec Super Bowl, the loser went to the big Postgame Show in the sky. The Aztecs were pretty terrific game designers.

The National Anthem: Stand, Kneel, Lie Down, or Sit Criss-Cross Applesauce?

The singing of the National Anthem is everyone's signal to grab a chair and pay attention. The festivities have begun.

It is customary in my land to stand when the anthem is sung, though I'm pretty indifferent to whether people stand when it's played on the TV.

Time for one of those hot, muy caliente takes you read this blog for: I like that the Star-Spangled Banner is my nation's anthem. The lyrics were written under artillery fire, the tune was an old drinking song, and it's almost impossible to sing. A perfect match for this ragtag country of misfits we got going here.

Football Is A Gamer's Dream

I love games. Football is a game. So I'm already defaulting to being interested.

A lot of the extra fun comes from the fact that the rules and strategy of football are impossibly complicated and no one human can ever comprehend them.

In almost every game, someone will catch the ball one-handed in a weird position with their toes dragging over the line and everyone will argue for ten minutes about if it was a good catch and then they have to go to a vault three floors below the stadium and bring out an ancient guy dressed as a wizard holding a thick book called, "Ye Rules of Gridiron Footballe".

Then he'll command perfect silence and consult the book and declare, "As the catcher is a Scorpio and the moon is in the house of Mars, I declare the catch null and void. The receiver must have his heart removed as an offering to Quetzalcoatl."

The sacrifice will happen during the Halftime show, and Miley Cyrus will wield the knife.

Speaking of the Halftime Show

This is a great opportunity to hear the music cool people listened to twenty years ago. I can't wait for the 2045 Pepsi Superbowl Show featuring Doja Cat.

The halftime show provides a great break from football and a good chance to assemble nachos. It also has hilariously inconsistent production values. This year's Festival of Ancient Rappers looked like it was set in five Winnebagos. Meanwhile, a few years ago, Katy Perry entered the stadium RIDING A DRAGON.

The Amorality of the Activity

I think it's important to point out that pro football is basically watching giant people suffer permanent brain damage for our amusement. It is a violent game, for a violent nation.

People die playing this game. Once, so many players died that they had to change the rules to keep the government from banning it. There is a hardcore, Aztec quality to it, and you'll make your peace with it, or you won't.

Why are Americans so attached to this game?

I think we’re trying to send a message to the world: These guys are our heroes, and we'll happily spend our Sundays watching them beat each other senseless. This is how we treat the people we love. So think about what we'll do to someone who pisses us off.

"you KnOW ThAt THe rESt oF tHE WORld CALls a diFferENT SpoRt footbalL rigHt? rIGHT?"

Nobody cares.

Football is my country's sport, and the rest of the world doesn't care about it. I find this interesting, because, if you wanted a view into the soul of the United States, here it is.

After World War II, the United States became The Western Superpower (tm), tasked with helping rebuild the world and coordinating opposition to Stalin, who was not a nice guy.

I don't want to get too into politics here. I don’t want debate about whether we should have had that role, how well we did in that role, or whether we still have that role.

What I will say is that, if you were born in this country, this role is pressed into your brain, burned into your DNA, from birth. Everyone everywhere saw the Avengers movies, right? What country were the Avengers based in? Hell, where were those movies MADE?

So to all my friends in other countries: Why do we watch brutal, regimented, formal, war-based football and not prancing-about, loose, every-game-goes-to-tiebreakers football? Answer: It just matches our programming better.

If I could throw a party entirely about eating nachos, I would. But that would be weird. So nachos are just another unrelated thing hanging off the football game.

I Like Feeling Part Of A Culture

Over the last few decades, our culture became atomized. Events everyone shared became rare, and we each got our own perfect TV show, watched by you and ten other people. Then Covid came along, and society was atomized even more.

That's why I throw Super Bowl parties. I'm not a big fan of football. Hell, I couldn't have picked the teams I saw Sunday out of a lineup.

But for one afternoon, I got to feel part of a culture, and I got to do so with my friends. Yes, the thing we shared was silly and trivial. That makes it better. You'd rather we bonded over something desperately serious and traumatic?

This is why so many people see Marvel movies. I mean, come on. They’re all the same and pretty forgettable. I’d much rather spend my time seeing, you know, an actual movie. But there is a value in experiencing the thing everyone else experiences.

And, if nothing else, we had a party. Parties are more fun than not-parties. If this intrigues you, it's not too late. We have a few days of Olympics left, and several of the figure skaters aren't totally doped up.

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My last post got lots of harassment, so Substack let me into their new mod features beta. If you see inappropriate comments, you can report them, and hopefully I’ll be able to deal with them better.

I don’t just watch games. I write them. And, as always, all posts on this blog are free.