The best feature in sports sims

The other day I was curious what kind of hockey games were on Steam and came across this review of Franchise Hockey Manager 12 by someone who had built an AI assistant general manager for his OHL team.

The game can export your entire save as a few dozens CSVs with a couple million rows between them, including rosters, game stats, player ratings, and scouting grades. The player built a script to load all of these data into SQLite, preserving snapshots from different in-game dates, then layered an MCP server on top of it. His AI assistant GM can then use longitudinal data about his team and the league to plan draft picks, catch mistakes, and help him develop his players.

I guarantee this guy is having more fun playing the game than anyone else. Players of simulation games are known to be obsessive, but this guy built an enterprise-grade data warehouse for his virtual junior hockey league with a more developed AI strategy than some corporations.

This all started with one deliberate choice by the game dev: the ability to easily exfiltrate your game state in a machine-readable format. Sure, a lot of game save files are just compressed JSON and can be extracted and parsed with enough effort, but that is not the same as providing first-class support for exporting everything the game keeps tack of.

As the reviewer put it: “Franchise Hockey Manager 12 quietly has one of the best features in sports sims: Export CSV”.

This is just-build-things-ism at its best, but also a reminder for game devs that giving players to freedom to tinker with your game is a great way to keep a particular subset of them engaged.

As a side note, I actually think Simon Willison’s Datasette would make a useful browser for the SQLite snapshots this guy generates.