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 an entire save as CSV: roughly two million rows across 48 tables, including rosters, statistics, player ratings, and scouting grades. The player wrote a Python script to load each export into SQLite, preserving snapshots from different in-game dates, then put a local MCP server on top of it. With this, his AI assistant GM can query the actual save, track changes in prospect ratings, build draft boards, grade draft classes, write monthly reports, and score the roster against a custom 100-point rebuilding rubric. It even noticed that a goalie prospect had lost half a star of potential because the coach was not starting him.

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 a full data warehouse for his virtual junior hockey league that is probably more sophisticated than the data warehouses at some actual corporations.

The interesting part is that none of it starts with AI. It starts with an “Export CSV” button. All of this is possible because the studio made the underlying game data available in a legible format; one obsessive player did the rest. Save files are often just compressed JSON and can be extracted and parsed with enough effort, but that is not the same as providing a supported export of nearly everything the game knows. 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 it is also a reminder that people can only build on top of systems that make data accessible in the first place.

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