I WANT TO WORK IN SPORTS MEDIA: THE BOARD GAME
Riffing on this very good Job Hunt: The Board Game article from McSweeney's, I present:
I WANT TO WORK IN SPORTS MEDIA: THE BOARD GAME
Rules:
All players must have taken or have considered taking the LSAT or GMAT in the last nine months. This is non-negotiable.
If you have not already written content for less than minimum wage at some point in your life, you are ineligible unless you receive a Nepotism or Ivy League Dispensation from the Game Master. Otherwise, go do some unpaid labor for that exposure, baby.
Players should have a working knowledge of AP Style, or have the common sense to look up all AP Style questions on that Purdue OWL site.
Players must pretend they have any interest whatsoever in running a Twitter account and then get hopelessly addicted to doomscrolling and social democratic policy proposals.
You will need a calculator, a piece of paper, a six-sided die, and a 20-sided die to play. Just use a random number generator if you don’t have dice.
Gameplay:
Each player starts with 100 Sanity Hit Points (SHP) + 1 HP per game that your favorite football team won last year or your favorite team’s winning percentage). If you lose your sanity, you must give up or start over. At the beginning of the game, choose from one of three Starter Skills: Writingsaur, Pivoting to Videomander, or Everything Else, Just Please Not Social Media.
Congratulations! Your Starter Skill is oversaturated and underpaid. Writingsaurs can churn out content like no one’s business, giving them a 10 SHP boost at the start of the game. Unfortunately, they are also required to write a coherent paragraph about the NFL or NBA Draft every 3 minutes that they’re playing the game that has no bearing on success at all.
Pivoting to Videomander has multimedia skills, a good on-camera presence and can use Adobe Audition like a champ. That’s a solid 2 SHP boost for every YouTube video you’ve watched in the last 12 hours! Unfortunately, the Pivot to Video didn’t work, so you must go to a sports website of your choice and watch an autoplay video in its entirety every 3 minutes.
Everything Else, Just Please Not Social Media has an array of abilities like audio editing, graphic design, and even a little bit of (gasp) coding. That means you get three chances to re-roll throughout the course of the game! Unfortunately, this also means you have to make a change to your resume every 3 minutes.
All players must spend time compiling work samples. Lose 7 SHP from general burnout if your work is from exploitative sites like SB Nation, 12up, and Fansided. Lose 6 HP if it's from your student newspaper (maybe you got paid once).
Lose 15 SHP if you majored in journalism. Idiot.
If you did the previous step, also take off 4 SHP if you majored or minored in something in the liberal arts to make you seem more "hirable." That shit isn’t really good for getting food on the table, but at least you got to go on one awkward date with that person from Intro to Sociology. You also burn through your free New Yorker articles after two days, which is good in the long run.
Lose 2 SHP if a Boomer or Gen X person rants to you about how he really likes that Bill Simmons guy and wants sportswriting to be about “the experience”.
If you didn't major in journalism and want to do sports journalism anyway, lose 15 SHP. I will say, your idealism is charming.
PANDEMIC! Lose 1-10 SHP depending on how depressed you were going into the ordeal.
After filling these opening moves, roll a six-sided die. If you roll any number below 5, you are immediately sent to the "Not Sports Journalism, BUT" portion of the game. If this happened, roll again. If you rolled a 1 or a 2, you are in the Law School or Other Bourgeois Moneymaking Activity track. Have fun learning Python, bitjc, you're out of the game.
Sports Journalism Track
After the first roll, fill out 20 internship or job applications. For each one that you fill out, roll a 20-sided die. If you get a 13, congrats, you got the job! If you land on 15, you are in social media and every SHP you lose from now on gets doubled. If you get any other number, lose one SHP per failure until you have rolled 20 times.
If you got a job, congratulations! Welcome to the world of low salary, unpleasant private equity bosses, and constant fear of layoffs. You lose 2 SHP every 60 seconds to simulate the ideological and emotional drift into anxiety and depression.
If you are female, I apologize for how awful men can be. Watch a sports highlight that brings you joy.
If you don’t classify yourself as white, I apologize for how awful America can be. Watch a sports highlight that brings you joy.
Roll a die. If you got a 6, I’m sorry to tell you that your position is no longer necessary. If you want to keep playing, go back to the 20-sided die and do the job application process again, only this time you have to get 13 twice in a row.
Roll another die. If you get a 1 or a 2, you’ve suffered a bit of a mental health crisis and need to go to therapy. Instead, you tweet even more. Lose 5 SHP per bad tweet you’ve sent in the last month.
If you still have SHP after 5 minutes, congratulations, you are now a content producer who will churn out content for your corporate overlords.
Roll the 20-sided die six times. If you land on any two numbers in succession (1 and 2, 4 and 5), congrats, you’ve successfully shown that your creative skill, networking ability, and dumb luck have gifted you a successful career in sports journalism.
Not Sports Journalism, BUT Track
After the first roll, fill out 20 internship or job applications. For each one that you fill out, roll a 20-sided die. Here’s a handy chart for your job outcomes. If you are in one of these current occupations, you can pick it, but now is the chance to try something even less enticing.
1-4: Corporate Communications
5: Government Staffer
6-9: Marketing
10-14: Content Editing
15-19: Paralegal
20: Rideshare Driver
If you want a career outside of these options, you must take an instant 35 SHP penalty and have zero time to write anyway.
Corporate Comms people lose 5 SHP per press release that shamelessly promotes exploitative capitalism as “good” for the people. Lose everything if you write Blue Lives Matter copy and say hello to my friend Q.
Government staffers will continue watching sporting events but gradually drift into irrelevancy. Bye!
Marketing employees must roll the six-sided die until they successfully get all six numbers at least once. This is to represent the boredom or ignominy of their job. Each failed roll costs 4 SHP.
Content editors lose 5 SHP before walking through the door. Each unreasonable expectation and annoying coworker costs 5 SHP. Roll a die. If you get any number other than 3, congrats on burning out completely. Go back to the job/internship phase. If you did get a 3, well, roll again, you’ll burn out eventually.
If you got paralegal, congrats, you’re out of the game until you start your Substack newsletter about music, your favorite college football team, and a country club sport to distract from the mild emptiness of not having a family.
If you got rideshare driver, you will have enough time to produce your own podcast with your friends, but gradually the deepening costs of being a rideshare driver will exhaust you. You lose 15 SHP and have to pick a different career, but at least you can tell your friends you’re on Spotify.
If you still have SHP by the end of this process, congratulations, you have likely gone to grad school by now and set up a successful career with some sportswriting on the side.
