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Why Introducing Customizable Avatars Betrays Everything ‘Football Manager’ Stands For

The world's premier football management sim is putting you in the game this year, whether you like it or not.

A work in progress screenshot from 'Football Manager 16,' via footballmanager.com

Like getting undressed for a GP or being forced to introduce yourself to your colleagues with an interesting fact, there's something mortifying and undignified in creating an in-game avatar once you're over the age of 13.

Do you go down the mortifying wish-fulfillment route, creating an "ideal" version of yourself that will inevitably be torn down by anyone who sees it? Or aim for brutally honest realism, painstakingly replicating each and every one of your flaws within a game that was supposed to help you forget your god-awful life in the first place? Or does juvenile ridiculousness take over, leading to a "you" who is nine feet tall with a purple afro and wearing assless chaps, knowing that this will become increasingly less funny and more grating with every play?

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In any case, unless you've got an innate feel for the clumsy sliders provided by these create-a-character engines to successfully carve yourself on their virtual kebab rotisseries, you always end up with a reconstruction of your likeness that would be rejected by Crimewatch.

The most obvious, primal appeal of video games is in their escapism. They are alternate realities where you are a sharp-shooting space cop army marine-cum-archaeologist and martial arts expert, or some benevolent tyrant presiding over an entire civilization you're hell-bent on torturing, or even someone who can actually hit a baseball with a bat. Crucially, you aren't you. Why insert a replica of unremarkable actual you into this blissful sanctuary from yourself? When forced into submitting some avatar, I'll arbitrarily assign him my most apparent physical characteristics (ginger hair atop a tiny goblin frame) and leave the defaults untouched. This leaves you with a boring slab of personality-free pixels harder to invest in than any pre-designed character could.

While playing Skate 3 recently, one such game which requires you to do this, I was struck by how, as well as being able to launch off a car park and perform a 720 varial fakie, the in-game me also oafishly tumbled off his board and dashed his head on the pavement or got unspectacularly mown down by oncoming traffic. It's a strange experience watching a likeness of yourself getting mangled under the wheels of a car, but the disconnect means there's no vicarious pain. I don't care, it's not me, it's just a video game character. As I've grown older, it's become increasingly difficult to suspend the necessary disbelief required to fully immerse myself within the worlds of video games, except for one: Football Manager.

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As shameful as it is to admit, playing FM has had an inextricable effect on my moods at times. I'll head into a night out buzzing off the back of an unexpected cup upset, or fret about the drawn-out negotiations for a second-choice left-back I've sounded out, or be in a foul sulk at work because my star player has started angling for a move elsewhere in the press. Why? Because it feels like an authentic extension of me, that my in-game manager is me.

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Introduce a newcomer to FM and they'll most likely contort their clueless, ignorant little face into a pudgy ball of righteous indignation. "It looks like shit," they'll say, pointing out that the 3D match engine appears to be a stop-frame animation of a particularly unrealistic game of Subbuteo, that navigating the baffling UI and menus would drive even a Kafkaesque bureaucrat insane, that it's "just a combination of an Outlook inbox and an Excel spread sheet full of footballers." And yeah, it is. That's that whole fucking point.

The beauty of the game's no-frills minimalism is that it requires the player to fill the void with themselves. Where most games attempt to control and shape their players' experience of their worlds—through iconic characters, memorable storylines, slick cutscenes, graphical wizardry, instant-gratification mini-games, mind-bending puzzles, atmospheric soundtracks, anythingFM effaces itself as much as possible. The task of transforming what is essentially a series of admin tasks into an enjoyable experience is entirely left to you and your fertile but otherwise inactive-in-adulthood imagination.

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You, who can't even manage eye contact during small-talk with the person you sit next to in your 9-5, have to envisage yourself commanding a dressing room of testosterone-addled athletes. You, whose most successful attempt at haggling was knocking $5 a month off a handset you didn't want anyway that one time you wandered into a Carphone Warehouse by mistake, have to believe that you could stare Real Madrid's top executives in the eye and high-ball them over your prodigal wunderkind. You, who can barely plan ahead long enough in time to book a haircut, must become the long-term strategist and lord overseer at a fully operational football club. This is what made FM hands-down the most immersive game out there. Until now.

'Football Manager' avatar work in progress image, via Twitter

One of the flagship new features to be rolled out in Football Manager 2016 is the introduction of your own "customizable touchline character," presumably to court the FIFA Ultimate Team market of casual players, and it's an utterly unforgivable decision.

Imagine seeing you on the touchline. Actual you. Imagine it. And now look at this guy. He's somehow worse than you. He's the bizarre lovechild of Chris Smalling and Ian Huntley created by a glitch in FIFA 2001. And he's the example of a customizable touchline character that FM makers Sports Interactive thought best represented their new feature.

Even allowing for the possibility that you might be able to somehow carve a better likeness of yourself into the turd clay provided, it's a travesty. Let's return to imagining seeing you on the touchline. Virtual you. They you are, playing Football Manager, completely engrossed in your Fourth Round FA Vase replay away to West Allotment Celtic, knowing you need to reach at least the next stage of the competition to keep your board happy, when suddenly you spot your crap little CGI avatar preening up and down the touchline, gesticulating wildly, and mouthing off to the fourth official.

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A work in progress screenshot from 'Football Manager 16,' via footballmanager.com

You are now forever torn from the world, the illusion irreparably shattered. You're not a football manager. You're an adult, on a laptop, cowering under a duvet in a bed covered in biscuit crumbs and skin flakes you've neglected to clean, trying to stave off actual responsibility and the grim reality of your utterly mundane existence by playing a video game and indulging in a make-believe alternate life in which you manage a football team. Not even a good football team, but one that plays Fourth Round FA Vase replays away to West Allotment Celtic. What a miserable dream. You could probably manage a team that plays Fourth Round FA Vase replays away to West Allotment Celtic in actual real life, if you weren't such a tragic loser devoid of any ambition whatsoever.

Look at you. There. On the touchline. A pathetic mesh of arbitrarily assembled values brought to "life," waving his arms futilely and occasionally glitching through the dugout. You're him. You can now see your face dimly reflected on your grubby laptop screen. You're not even him. You're nothing.

Where the "uncanny valley" causes observers to recoil in revulsion at hyper-real representations of humans—so nearly identical in appearance, yet so eerily unfamiliar in mannerism—Football Manager 2016's customizable touchline characters are potentially even more harrowing. So woefully inaccurate might they be in their depiction of a real human, let alone a manager, that these nightmarish caricatures confront the user with the sheer banality of their own existence.

You know what I used to do to escape this dread? Play Football Manager.

Football Manager 16 is released on November 13. It'll be really good, probably, almost certainly, and will swallow your life if you let it. But you already knew that.

Follow Tristan Cross on Twitter.