A cool thing about being alive is that there’s always new stuff to learn about. In the past couple years, I’ve gotten into knitting, bikepacking, playing the ukulele and mandolin, and learning Irish–all things I’d never thought about until I stumbled into them, but which now play various roles in my life. Thanks to the wonders of technology, there’s never been a better time to try to learn something new, with websites, forums, Discord channels, YouTube, and even video games all just a click away. Recently I have decided to get into rugby, and over the weekend I started wondering if video games could teach me more about this very confusing sport. The answer so far: no, and also dear god what have I done.
My quest to Become A Rugby Guy started when NYC’s gay rugby team kept coming across my Instagram feed. They make the game look really fun and the team seems super welcoming, even holding multiple “intro to rugby” events to teach newcomers like me the sport. Two of my favorite things are being on teams and doing stupid shit outside, so of course I want to do this, but I’ve run into a couple problems. One is that I’m 44 years old, and also about five feet tall and 110 pounds; as much as the team insists rugby is for every body, I’m hard-pressed to figure out what use my particular tiny body could actually have to the sport. But the more pertinent problem is that I have a knee issue that surfaced when I was training for the New York City Marathon in 2022, in which a badly-positioned kneecap is wearing away the cartilage of my left knee. While this hasn’t stopped my running yet, my doctor expressly discouraged me from playing any sport that requires lots of sudden changes of direction, which appears to be a large part of what rugby is.
To cope with the fact that I probably can’t play a sport I’ve only recently discovered a desire to play, I’ve been watching the current Six Nations rugby tournament the last few weekends. After an evening spent with explanatory YouTube videos, I grasp maybe 40% of the game–I understand the core concept and some of the intricacies, even if I almost never understand why penalties are called or what makes a play “good” beyond “that guy ran really fast” or “that dude didn’t want to be tackled, but that other dude tackled him anyway.” This past weekend’s games were particularly gripping; Ireland trounced England, and just when it seemed like things could be looking up for Wales, Scotland came from behind to clinch things in the final minutes. It’s been very gender-affirming to become the kind of man who torments his neighbors at 9am on Saturdays by yelling things at sports, but it’s also had me itching for more rugby.
So, much like my ill-fated foray into the Civil War, I turned to video games. There’s actually a fair number of rugby games out there, but apparently they are largely terrible. If online fans are to be believed, this is in part because rugby is particularly hard to simulate in a video game, with more moving pieces than football or soccer, as well as the usual licensing and budget challenges that face many sports games. Searching for “rugby” on Steam brought up a bunch of indie games that seem to be various levels of actually existing, as well as a long-running but largely reviled Rugby [Insert Year] series. That series seemed the most legit, but most of its games cost $40-$60, far too much money for anything plastered with so many negative reviews. But there was one available entry in the series people didn’t seem to totally hate and that only cost $20, which is the creatively-named Rugby 20.
Here is where I should note that I do not play sports games. The last time I picked up something that could be considered a traditional sports sim was Tengen World Cup Soccer for the Gear Gear in 1993. I remember being obsessed with it, and playing it in the car while my far more athletic sister played real soccer, but it was so long ago and I was so young that I feel like I can’t really count it as an introduction to the genre. I’ve never played a Madden or FIFA, and if I’m really honest I don’t even entirely understand how you play them. So I knew getting into a sports game, one I knew going in was going to be bad, would be a challenge, and that getting into a game focused on a sport I barely understand was going to make the whole thing worse.
But I didn’t truly consider how much worse. Rugby 20 has a sort of tutorial, where it teaches you the button presses for passes, tackles, rucks, lineouts, scrums, and kicks. Some of these make sense: you pass by hitting the shoulder buttons, though it took a few rounds of the tutorial for me to understand the game’s particular idea of timing. Tackles I… sorta get, though the timing remains a bit baffling and the tutorial made it weirdly hard to run at the opponent I intended to tackle, though there’s also an “advanced” tackling mechanic whose timing I can’t grasp at all. Scrums are super complicated for no particular reason I can discern, featuring a lengthy series of button presses and stick flicks. I’ve actually been pretty adept at getting possession during in-match rucks by doing the thing the tutorial tells you not to do, which is throwing all my guys into the pile. As far as I’m concerned kicks basically don’t exist: there’s no indicator for where your kick is going to go, and while I did OK enough at it in the tutorial, in actual matches the ball seems to dribble away from my foot no matter what I do. Similarly, I have zero idea what the game wants you to do in lineouts, and basically I just watch them happen while half-heartedly tapping buttons so I can pretend I’m playing while the other team gets the ball.
There’s also a whole universe of other mechanics the game doesn’t explain at all, and which my nascent knowledge of rugby makes even more impossible. There are “set” plays the game tutorializes but which I somehow cannot figure out how to make happen in a match, and of course because I don’t understand rugby I don’t understand at all what they are and why I would even use them. A ton of button prompts come up in a match that refer to rugby concepts I’ve never heard of. There’s menus full of team management that I can’t wrap my head around because I keep having to watch YouTube videos about what the various rugby positions are, and also because despite clicking every available button I cannot figure out how to swap out my guys or how to add guys to my team in the game’s career mode. (I did do a pretty good job designing my imaginary team little uniforms though, which I bet my guys would look really cute in if I could figure out how to get some guys.) My players all have stats that mean nothing to me, and there are numbers affixed to the teams you can pick that mean nothing to me either. Some of the loading screens have rugby trivia, which is a really neat idea but I have no idea what the questions are even referring to, given that my rugby knowledge is made up of Six Nations and a couple New Zealand matches I watched online.
My first match, playing as Connacht against London Irish (I’ve never heard of either of these teams, and picked Connacht because it’s a place-name I know from learning Irish) was a 0-15 disaster in which I mashed every button on my controller and shouted nonsense as little enemy players scored. “Oh, that’s a terrible pass!” the virtual announcers declared at one point, though this did not dampen my enthusiasm for the fact that I had figured out how to pass. I was a bit relieved to find that, as shit as I am kicking, the computer-controlled teams are also shit at it; in the matches I played all day Sunday, an opposing team only kicked a conversion once, and otherwise missed the posts only slightly less badly than I do.
I eventually got lucky in a match by playing against a computer-controlled team prone to fouling for whatever mysterious sports game reason, which meant I frequently got possession of the ball. I used this opportunity to run around like an idiot making bad, frantic passes, which continued to not endear me to the virtual commentators. I did, however, manage to eke out a 10-5 win, which was a major triumph even if the only strategy I have at my disposal is to pass all the way to the outside and then just sprint like hell for the try line.
Despite my hopes, Rugby 20 isn’t teaching me very much about rugby beyond the one part I already know, which is that someone gets the ball and then runs. If anything my knowledge is devolving, since I’m so focused on whatever guy I’m controlling that I don’t pay attention to the rest of the field the way I can when I’m watching a match. (Also, seeing the game’s rendition of a lineout up close has made me even less certain precisely what the rules of a lineout are.) None of this is helped by the fact that the game just feels weird to play, but I can’t tell if all sports games feel like this or it’s just Rugby 20 in particular. So the mild sadness I feel watching rugby because I can’t play it is now compounded by a general annoyance at trying to play its video game version, which I guess is “fun” in a kind of frustrating, confusing, “I am going to sit here until I figure this out/ oh, I lost all day to sucking in a video game” way.
I guess in addition to finding it gender-affirming to watch sports, it is also a bit gender-affirming to play a sports game, so that’s cool at least. But, much like Civil War battles, a rugby video game does not yet appear to be a good way to learn about rugby, nor does it appear to be a good way to learn about sports games. If for some reason you’ve played this unholy concoction of a game and have some tips, let me know.
