As a recent thread on TAS evidenced, there's a big schism in the approach people take to press conferences. Many see them as turgid, repetetive, unwanted distractions and refuse to do almost any, always choosing to send their assistant. Others, myself included, view them as too easy to navigate to make skipping and risking your assistant alienating your squad and others a viable regular option. But either way, I don't think either side of the divide, and all the moderates within, are entirely happy with press conferences. Because, after the dust has now settled over several versions, the conclusion is that they are simply too limited and too repetitive. They're just a bit boring in an otherwise extremely fun game.

In analysing why press conferences are so unpopular and how they could be improved, one word is key for me - Robotic.

Press conferences are unavoidably robotic. They are a matter of simple equations. This question is generated, you have your choice of answers, you pick one, things move on. Rinse and repeat, ad infinitum. After a very short while, the same questions get tiring. The traditional idea of a robot is something without emotional response that can only respond to certain stimuli based on what it has been programmed to respond to and how it has been programmed to respond to it. So you can see why press conferences are robotic. You might think it unfair to raise this as an issue given that, well it is programming responding to your input in a defined manner. But robotics are advanced to the level where the reaction can be far more nuanced and individualised than simply an "x was pressed so y" reaction or, more commonly, ignoring the response entirely and moving on. It shouldn't be too hard to at least simulate emotional reaction. There is very little emotional response and resonance that you can garner from them.

My key issue with the robotic nature of press conferences is that it doesn't actually reflect the real life nature of a press conference, or even of dialogue in general. What should be discourse is left to a series of closed and unexplored statements, most obviously displayed by how few follow up questions to answers you give there are. Thinking on my feet, I can think that when you say you are confident or not in your team, you may then be asked which area is strongest/weakest, and then sometimes who is your strongest/weakest player in that area. You can be pressed to answer on an issue you're trying to skirt around. You can be asked who will mark x player. There are only a few more besides that I can think of. But these are only a start to reactive press conferences, and a very predictable one as well, which means they too become dull quickly.

So what if press conferences were really renovated to become more like press conferences? How could this be done? For one, a very simple start would be to give journalists regen faces. Journalists personalities and relationship with you are given, but these are hidden and easy to ignore in terms of how they affect you. Just the simple addition of a face would immediately humanise them, make you recognise them and be wary of their approach. But this would only work properly if journalists' personalities became more apparent, more obvious. If you knew one was a bastard because you kept saying his face when you were grilled hard on an issue or asked particularly negative questions, or one was a nice guy because he tended to ask you easy questions you had no trouble answering.

The previous segues nicely into my next point, and the key to my argument that I have already touched on. The press conference needs to be more reactive, more human, more emotional in nature. If you, for instance, are managing in the premier league, and you say in the press conference at the start of the season that you think Wigan will win the league, the reaction shouldn't be to move on to the next question. It should instead be "WTF??!" or something slightly more measured of that ilk. That is an answer that one could never get away with without follow up in a press conference. You would be asked to explain yourself. You would be asked if you were joking. And this is what Football Manager needs to reflect. A press conference could legitimately cover 2 topics in 8 questions because one point was important enough to merit a number of follow ups and explanation. Perhaps even more questions based on events in the week - a grilling on why you fined a player perhaps, or a serious discussion of how your top scorer's cruciate injury will affect the team, rather than just name his replacement and say that he can probably make the place his own. I dare say these kinds of conferences would be far more challenging and far more fun than the current set up.

Advanced robots in real life can react appropriately and answer a numberof advanced questions in good deatil. Football Manager doesn't require advanced robotics. Because you only have a limited selection of answers to choose from, it would simply need to know how to react to an existing answer in an appropriate and more nuanced way than it currently does. There is of course the wildcard of the free type box, but I'd wager more than 95% of the time this is used for a ball of guffawing expletives. Only defined keywords may require a reaction (they may want to ask, for instance, why you called them that horrible name just now). But the simple matter of putting more into the press conference could really turn them from being that old unpopular feature into a fun part of the game that really makes you think on your feet, much in the way agents have revolutionised transfers in FM11. But until press conferences are radically altered, they'll just continue to be a feature near the top of people's "most annoying" lists.


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