I never planned for football, game development, and Jujutsu Kaisen to have anything to do with each other. They live in completely different parts of my week. But lately I've noticed they all scratch the same itch, just in different clothes.
The pitch
There's something about football that a screen can never fully replace. You can watch a hundred matches, study formations, memorise stats — and none of it prepares you for the split-second decision of actually being on the ball with three players closing in. It's chaotic and physical and immediate in a way that nothing else in my week is. I think that's exactly why I love it. It's the one hour where I'm not staring at a monitor, not debugging anything, just reacting.
But even football has systems underneath the chaos. Formations, pressing triggers, set pieces — someone designed all of that. Somebody sat down and thought "what happens if we overload the left flank" the same way I sit down and think "what happens if I let two players stand on the crown at once." Football is a game with rules someone wrote, being played by people who are trying to break those rules in their favour. That's basically what I do at my desk, minus the running.
The desk
Game development is the opposite of football in almost every way — slow, deliberate, mostly silent except for the occasional frustrated sigh when Firebase decides two clients are both the host at the same time. But it has its own version of that split-second decision-making. You're constantly asking "what happens if," except instead of a defender closing you down, it's an edge case: what happens if a player disconnects mid-match, what happens if the zone shrinks onto someone standing still, what happens if a bot needs to defend a hill it doesn't know exists yet.
What I like about building something like Crown Tag isn't the code itself, honestly — it's watching a rule you invented start to behave like a real system. You write "the crown holder gets a speed bonus for a streak," and suddenly there's a meta-game you didn't explicitly design, players chasing streaks, other players hunting the streak-holder. It's the same feeling as watching a football tactic you didn't expect emerge from eleven players just trying to win.
The cursed energy
And then there's Jujutsu Kaisen, which has no business fitting into either of those, except that it's built almost entirely out of rule systems too. Domain expansions aren't just cool anime fights — they're two people effectively negotiating the terms of a battle, each trying to force the fight into a ruleset that favours them. Sorcerers spend as much time thinking about how their technique works, what it costs, what its limits are, as they do actually fighting. It's less "punch harder" and more "who understood the rules of this encounter first." That's a game designer's fight scene, whether Gege Akutami meant it that way or not.
Where they meet
If there's a thread running through all three, it's probably this: I like things that look chaotic on the surface but are actually systems underneath, and I like being the one who either plays those systems well or gets to build them. Football gives me the physical, reactive version. Game dev gives me the slow, architectural version, where I get to be the one setting the rules instead of just playing inside them. And JJK is just fun to watch precisely because its characters are constantly doing both — living inside a system and trying to out-design their opponent within it.
I didn't expect writing this out to make the connection obvious, but there it is. Different scales, same instinct.
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