Everything Bad Is Good for You Read Free Page A

vital decision to throw different kinds of pitches—sliders and curveballs and sinkers—was entirely absent. The game took no notice of where the games were being played: you couldn’t simulate the vulnerable left-field fence in Fenway Park, so tempting to right-handed hitters, or the swirling winds of San Francisco’s old Candlestick Park. And while APBA included historic teams, there was no way to factor in historical changes in the game when playing teams from different eras against each other.
    And so over the next three years, I embarked on a long journey through the surprisingly populated world of dice-baseball simulations, ordering them from ads printed in the back of the Sporting News and Street and Smith’s annual baseball guide. I dabbled with Strat-o-Matic, the most popular of the baseball sims; I sampled Statis Pro Baseball from Avalon Hill, maker of the then-popular Diplomacy board game; I toyed with one title called Time Travel baseball that specialized in drafting fantasy teams from a pool of historic players. I lost several months to a game called Extra Innings that bypassed cards and boards altogether; it didn’t even come packaged in a box—just an oversized envelope stuffed with pages and pages of data. You rolled six separate dice to complete a play, sometimes consulting five or six separate pages to determine what had happened.
    Eventually, like some kind of crazed addict searching for an ever-purer high, I found myself designing my own simulations, building entire games from scratch. I borrowed a twenty-sided die from my Dungeons & Dragons set—the math was far easier to do with twenty sides than it was with six. I scrawled out my play charts on yellow legal pads, and translated the last season’s statistics into my own home-brewed player cards. For some people, I suppose, thinking of youthful baseball games conjures up the smell of leather gloves and fresh-cut grass. For me, what comes to mind is the statistical purity of the twenty-sided die.
    This story, I freely admit, used to have a self-congratulatory moral to it. As a grownup, I would tell new friends about my fifth-grade days building elaborate simulations in my room, and on the surface I’d make a joke about how uncool I was back then, huddled alone with my twenty-sided dice while the other kids roamed outside playing capture the flag or, God forbid, real baseball. But the latent message of my story was clear: I was some kind of statistical prodigy, building simulated worlds out of legal pads and probability charts.
    But I no longer think that my experience was all that unusual. I suspect millions of people from my generation probably have comparable stories to tell: if not of sports simulations then of Dungeons & Dragons, or the geopolitical strategy of games like Diplomacy, a kind of chess superimposed onto actual history. More important, in the quarter century that has passed since I first began exploring those xeroxed APBA pages, what once felt like a maverick obsession has become a thoroughly mainstream pursuit.
    This book is, ultimately, the story of how the kind of thinking that I was doing on my bedroom floor became an everyday component of mass entertainment. It’s the story of how systems analysis, probability theory, pattern recognition, and—amazingly enough—old-fashioned patience became indispensable tools for anyone trying to make sense of modern pop culture. Because the truth is my solitary obsession with modeling complex simulations is now ordinary behavior for most consumers of digital age entertainment. This kind of education is not happening in classrooms or museums; it’s happening in living rooms and basements, on PCs and television screens. This is the Sleeper Curve: The most debased forms of mass diversion—video games and violent television dramas and juvenile sitcoms—turn out to be nutritional after all. For decades, we’ve worked under the assumption