One
Around 2018, I was searching online for a football management game when I came across Hattrick. Hattrick is an online football manager game with a slow pace. You start with a team in the lower divisions of your country, and you have to train your players, buy and sell them on the transfer market, scout talent from your youth academy, and ultimately build a team that reaches the top league and becomes competitive—or competes in the Hattrick Masters against champions from other countries. On average, this journey takes 3 to 5 real-life years.
[1] Alternatively, you can be more active in the community, get elected as a national team coach, and lead your country in the World Cup…
From around 2018 to 2020, I was very active in Hattrick. I even created the first podcast of my life for it. [2] But around 2020, I gradually lost motivation. I only logged in to keep my account active and practically did nothing.
A few months ago, I came back to Hattrick—and became active again, maybe even obsessed. I believe Hattrick now has the most alive forum on the internet, after Reddit. And I love forums. I’ve found my best friends through forums and blogs—spaces that are increasingly rare these days. In the Russian users’ forum, I found a nerdy person who had spent years experimenting with the match engine and had uncovered its hidden coefficients—numbers used by the game engine to calculate training speed, skill growth, match results, and team ratings. The developers never reveal these. Seeing this level of depth and encountering people like that deepened my interest in the game and its process.
⸻
Two
I first came across Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) through the series Stranger Things. [3] It was fascinating in the show and became even more appealing to me later. The more beautiful translation might be “Demons and Dungeons”—a tabletop game built on the players’ imagination. The game master (DM) creates a world, and each player receives (or creates) a character and story. You step into your role with your friends and begin an adventure—exploring, talking to NPCs created by the DM, leveling up, and ultimately fighting. And for a true dreamer, the game never ends. YouTube is full of people playing it, living with it, or explaining its rules and systems.
Sometimes I think if I had known this game in my teenage years, my life might have taken a more exciting turn. I’ve played it twice so far, and each time I enjoyed it more than the last. The main challenge is probably finding the right people to play it with.
⸻
Three
I think sometime between 2015 and 2017, I discovered a Persian football forum called FootiClub. Back then, I was much more into football and was basically part of every football-related community. FootiClub was a specialized forum covering all teams. In the off-topic section, a group of users had decided to play Mafia—the game—at a slow pace and with real-time days. But more complex. Much more complex and beautiful. It was entirely text-based. The mafia team coordinated in private and plotted. The game moved through reasoning and long written posts. Each “day” phase lasted about 18 hours, and users wrote long messages, Sherlock-style, deciphering the game through language.
FootiClub disappeared like many other forums, but the Mafia players stayed—and that style evolved and reached maturity over the past decade. There’s now a small forum with about 15–20 people where once a year, they play this strange and complex game.
There are things in live Mafia games that I dislike—things that are gone in our text-based version.
⸻
Four
About ten days ago, I decided to create a game. A football manager game.
The truth is—I wish I had created Hattrick. Because of its forums. Its community. The sense that we, the players, have for it. And because it’s text-based.
The internet, for me, is still about words and text. Nostalgia.
But the world doesn’t unfold as we expect, and I didn’t create Hattrick. The world is big. There’s room for every person with every idea. And making a game like this is fun and joyful to me. Besides, Hattrick has its own flaws in the match engine.
Why is it fun for me?
1. You have to design an economy. How clubs earn revenue. How player trading works. For example, in Hattrick, player transfers work like auctions. A player is listed for three days, and any club can bid (while seeing others’ bids). Eventually, the highest bidder wins.
2. A national community forms for each country—thanks to national teams. There’s domestic rivalry, and then global rivalry. I love these different communities. It’s the most exciting part of the game for me.
3. People spend a significant part of their lives in the game. It’s fascinating to age alongside your rivals in a fantasy world with its own rules.
4. These games are based on mathematical relationships and require long-term planning. Various strategies must be balanced to avoid one dominant meta. Users are smart and discover optimal strategies over time. Designing a balanced game like this is a fun and fascinating challenge.
⸻
Five
I’m stuck in a cycle of energy and psychological fatigue—between work, migration, and education. I try hard, then get exhausted and depressed. The cycle continues. Sometimes I want to let go of everything. But my rationality keeps me going. Still, I can’t find a solution for the exhaustion. That’s been the dominant issue in my life these past years.
When you suffer enough, you realize something must change—either externally or internally. The depth of the change isn’t always clear, and you realize it gradually. I’m at a point where I know I need change—and it must be deep. I don’t yet have the courage or energy. But small changes give me energy.
Maybe I need to store up these small sparks of energy to one day cross the threshold into a deeper transformation. Like Sam in The Lord of the Rings. There’s a border in the Shire that I haven’t crossed yet. I need a Frodo to form within my psyche—one whose loyalty outweighs my fear of crossing that boundary.
⸻
Six
I’m reading a book called The Art of Game Design [4]. It’s a book about designing experiences. Every game, at its core, is an experience being designed—whether it’s a board game, video game, or serious game.
The book is about building themes, understanding players and walking in their shoes. About psychology and storytelling. It’s about directing an imaginary world that people live inside.
I think about the games I love.
Text-based Mafia. The experience of discovery, admiration, and filth. Playing the guilty and the innocent. Sometimes being Sherlock Holmes, and sometimes your favorite villains.
The ability to do things in games that I can’t in real life. To be bad. To be good. However I want. To act and wear different masks.
In Hattrick, I experience linear progression. Competition and recognition. Volunteering to help the game community, achieving national and international success. Talking to and connecting with people completely unlike me—unlike the echo chambers of social media. Hattrick is my Marco Polo experience.
Dungeons & Dragons is the experience of living in your favorite world. The world of Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, Dark, or anything imagined.
Having supernatural powers. Being in the shoes of superheroes.
Creating a life. Writing the story you wished you lived.
Or discovering stories you didn’t know you’d love.
I believe game design might be the most complete art form of our time. Writers, directors, and composers are also experience designers. But games seem to reach deeper parts of me.
No game has yet matched the experience of reading Dostoevsky’s The Idiot, or hearing a wordless piece of music that sends shivers down my spine. But I’m sure that a great game can go deeper. And one day, it will. [5]
Maybe experience design gives voice to other parts of me.
I always wanted to be a director. A writer.
So far, I’ve become neither.
Maybe starting this journey will help me find the motivation I need and break out of the cycle. Writing about the game design process here is exciting to me. I’ll keep writing it, step by step.
⸻
Each season in Hattrick lasts 3 real-life months. Matches are 90 minutes, and the game engine simulates results based on team ratings across different areas of the pitch—like a chess game with dice, mixed with real football coaching. ↩︎
I found people willing to speak for free on my podcast. I was just a kid then—so I tried to squeeze everything I had in mind into that podcast: serialized audio fiction, football reports, and more. :)) ↩︎
While writing this sentence, I thought—maybe it’s not a bad idea to play a version of Dungeons & Dragons set in the world of The Idiot. Experiencing Prince Myshkin or Nikolai from The Devils. ↩︎