I have a theory: that at least part of the reason for Football Manager 2013’s formidable concurrent player total is that, given a cursory glance by a passing boss, it looks a lot like work. For a majority of its playtime, FM13 is graphs, calendars and email inboxes – the data may be fictional, but needs to be sorted and sifted all the same. It is the ideal SFW game.
Sports Interactive, for their part, have to be pretend Google. Pretend Analytics, pretend Calendar, pretend Gmail. The following two videos detail the vast number of usability tweaks coming to the series in its next iteration.
It’s surprising to hear Miles Jacobson talk about bringing the UI and terminology of the game in line with that of football stats in the popular media – like FIFA, I suppose, Football Manager deals in the sofa-bound experience of football as much as it does football itself.
Also of note is the Manager Landmark page: a sort of anti-XCOM memorial screen which swaps crippling guilt for pride and rows of past trophies. Take a look:
Football Manager 2014 is due out on Windows, Mac and Linux at some stage before Christmas. Miles really does sounds like a manager, doesn’t he? Easy to imagine him standing there, forehead veins popping, on the edge of a field.