NCAA Football 2008 and other sports video games like it are an absolute blast. They allow us to recreate our favorite sports right in our own living room. Can't wait for September 1? No worries, pop in NCAA Football and take your team into the "Big House" in Michigan, or check out the "Sea of Red" in Nebraska. The beauty of these games is in the simple pleasures that they bring to what can largely be considered a complicated world.

Considering the simple joy of NCAA Football and other video games it is fascinating to consider just how difficult it is to find the correct combination of sliders to make the game play as real to life as possible.

I am a slider addict, as I have written in this space before. Saying anything else would constitute lying considering that I (on rare occasions) sneak onto message boards while at work to check any updates or new conversations on different aspects of sliders. As I zero in on what I consider (and desperately hope) will be a finalized set for NCAA this year, thanks in large part to the help of many from sites such as this I begin to think how complex the whole deal is.

If you move one slider it affects another, sometimes in a manner that becomes difficult to balance out. Some sliders work more than others, some sliders impact is felt so subtly that people begin to talk on message boards, with good reason in many cases, that some sliders are actually titles wrong, or worse broken.

It is like cracking a sophisticated code. The worst part is that not on the information is available to the person doing the work. For example, it is clear motivation or momentum impacts the gameplay, which is fine with me because is similar to real life games and brings about the variance of outcomes that simulation video gamers crave and true sports have. The trouble is we are not aware of just how great and what exactly these momentum surges impact making it tricky to balance the sliders.

Recently on one of these message boards in a thread that complained about sliders being broken and what not someone noted that sliders would work best if say, putting interceptions to zero meant no interceptions and so on. I am sure other people have mentioned this idea, so it is not just one person's claim, but this opened my mind to a wonderful possibility. If this were truly the case then player ratings and momentum could play the predominate role they should in games and tweaking sliders would be a much easier and useful process.

Here is what I came up with last night and if anyone else ever put this idea forth then I allow them to take full credit.

Currently each slider works on a 0-100 scale, with zero being 20 clicks away from 100. My idea was to have the middle point be complete simulation. This would be where pure ratings coupled with momentum impacted play with each slider. A click up for something means a 10% increase for all players on that team in for ratings that impact that area and vice versa. So if you want all wide receivers to have all of their wide receiver ratings increased by 100% simply take the wide receiver catching slider all the way to 100. Want to see all computer defenders awareness dropped by 25%? Move awareness down from 50 to 25.

I am no game, so perhaps this is too difficult to create. However, if it were in place the player ratings would have the impact they should and gamers would have a clear system that made manipulating the sliders more efficient.