Neo Twiny Jam postmortem

For the original Twiny Jam, I thought about an entry that discussed being a sports fan. It felt less weighty than those about depression, homophobia, discrimination, and so forth. And it was decidedly niche! People who write in Twine are less likely to watch sports. Back then I figured it best not to mix sports fandom and creative writing unless I had something good. It obviously can be done: see Nick Hornby's Fever Pitch. I did, too, and I figured, no way I could top it. But we can describe certain sensations of frustration and so forth, at lower intensity than you'd expect, but maybe there's stuff that can stick positively.

I got the idea from, well, being a sports fan myself, and always rationalizing the losses and puffing up the wins, and being stuck between stats that are scary-accurate and predict stuff and sports pundits who, the louder they get, the wronger they are. We all are this pundit, to some degree, even if we were not sports fans. But I couldn't see how to capture it in anything remotely non-linear, and I only had 500 words, so I didn't want to make a whole season of games, or anything too technical. And I didn't want to make a strategy game. But I wanted options!

So pretty soon this idea hit: what if we had slightly different seasons, seen the same way, always thinking "Oh, if we had one big break?" I think back to a conversation I overheard between two grocery store workers who played the lotto. I believe it was 6 numbers from o to 9, and guessing right got a prize. Someone said "I've gotten 4 several times. I believe I'm lucky. It will happen one day."

Being good at math I saw the odds of this right away. For 5, it's 54 in 1 million, and for 6, it's 1350. Which means that if she played once a day for ten years, it would happen a few times. Perhaps some digits were off by one, which made her feel closer. Of course, explaining this would be rude. So I did not. But I think sports fans suffer from a similar "Oh, if only..." We forget that close wins may've had a large component of luck, but close losses always did. Of course we do.

So I took a team trapped in Pretty Good status and said ... okay, you get to choose how your team performs! Well, sort of. They'll have a weak stretch, a strong one and a mediocre one. At the end of the year, you rationalize why your team had intangibles. Repeat and rinse until you nail all six in order.

This isn't much as a puzzle, but it

Technically there wasn't much in YTWDWTY. I learned how to insert graphics, and I learned about string manipulation and checking arrays. I also played around a bit more with headers, and I had to make an odd hack. For instance, the 6 ways through are 123 132 213 231 312 321. For whatever reason, the "this year's passage" variable wasn't set until after the link was clicked. I wanted to show the green graphic as soon as you made the final guess--but I didn't quite yet see a way to do something, then go to the next linked page!

My solution was simply to chop off the last digit, since the first two determine the third. So the graphic is checked and switches to green from yellow right away.

So it's sort of a story about fooling yourself, and I leave it up to the reader to decide how much of that is good and adaptive and how much is harmful. On my end, it's fun to recognize inherent biases as a sports fan and, I hope, practical to curb them where it matters, when discrimination and such might come into play. But there's also more of a class-mobility theme than I originally planned. At the beginning of the piece, the narrator tells you "you can't win them all. I'm giving this to other people" and you're informed you never make it into the group of blue-blood teams. So there is a ceiling. Even if it feels like there is not, and next year will be the year. Yet you should be happy you're not a mid-pack team. Right? Perhaps the narrator is an agent of the blue-bloods, who will let you do well, but not too well. The hard work described by the team in the off-season, to replace people who graduated or moved on, was meant to indicate that it may be hard just to keep pace, even harder than it should be.

Or it could just be a fluffy generally optimistic piece. But I'd like to think that all the paths together discuss how we might subtly fool ourselves.

I can't see myself modifying YTWDWTY post-comp. There's nothing really to add, for better or worse. But it felt good to get off my chest.