SPORTS
The sports game genre has played an important role in video game history. Some of the most important video games in the medium’s past, Ralph Baer’s Magnavox Odyssey games and Nolan Bushnell’s PONG (1972), are based on sports. Sports video games have also been among the most profitable game genres (Crawford, 2005b) and continue to occupy a vital place in the development of the industry and the medium. Yet, in 2006, critical cultural studies theorist, David Leonard, could assert that academic attention to the sports game genre represented “a barren wasteland of knowledge” (p. 393); sports game studies were essentially non-existent. Since that time, scholars have slowly begun to cultivate this wasteland.
This essay on the sports game genre examines the seeds of growth that have developed as a result of this cultivation. The ensuing sections address existing work on the types of sports games, textual analyses of games in the genre, sports game player studies, and industry studies. Because so little research has been done on sports games, this chapter not only outlines the existing scholarship on the genre, but also establishes areas that could be explored in considerably greater depth.
Game Types
Conway (2007) has divided the sports game genre into three sub-genres: management simulations, extreme simulations, and action simulations. Kayali and Purgathofer (2008) dispute the notion that sports games are restricted to the category of simulation. To simulation, they add the categories of abstraction and transformation. However, they acknowledge that their discussion is loosely based on Conway’s work (2007).
First, management simulations attempt to simulate sport by focusing predominantly on realistic statistical outcomes. Photorealistic graphics remain a secondary concern for developers and players in this sub-genre. Many management simulations feature comparatively rudimentary graphics, if they have graphics at all. This sub-genre has its roots in the card-and-dice based sports board games of the mid-twentieth century (Baerg, forthcoming 2013). Although there are a few exceptions, most management simulations have users play as general managers or coaches. Users rarely, if ever, take direct control of individual virtual athletes. As such, the focus of gameplay within this sub-genre is on tactical acumen and decision-making. Strategic planning in the management simulation may occur in the short term as part of individual games, but greater emphasis tends to be placed on longer term choices that shape a user’s experience across multiple seasons (Conway, 2007). Examples in this sub-genre include annual versions of the Football Manager (Sports Interactive, 1992–present) and Out of the Park Baseball (Out of the Park Developments, 1998–present) series.
Unlike management simulations, the second sub-genre of extreme simulations dismisses realistic statistical outcomes almost entirely. Whether a team or athlete should succeed or fail, based on expectations from real-world performances, is next to irrelevant in this category. The effect of numbers on gameplay tends to be deemphasized in favor of a user’s skill in reacting quickly to different in-game situations. This need for fast reflexes is furthered by the extreme simulation’s tendency to stretch the laws of physics. Athletes in this sub-genre can run faster and jump higher than their real-world counterparts and can subsequently perform exaggerated stunt-like sports maneuvers as a key part of gameplay. The earliest versions of extreme simulations appear with games such as Epyx’s World Games (1986) and California Games (1987) and skateboarding titles such as 720 (Atari, 1986) and Skate or Die! (Electronic Arts, 1987). Popular examples of the extreme simulation include NBA Jam (Midway, 1993) and the SSX (Electronic Arts Canada, 2000, 2002, 2003, 2005, 2012; Electronic Arts Montreal, 2007, 2012) snowboarding series.
The third and most popular sub-genre of sports games is the action simulation. Action simulations represent an attempt to unite the quantitative realism offered by the management simulation with the direct control offered by extreme simulations. Users subsequently guide athletes on virtual playing fields while generating plausible statistical results. Action simulations are committed to a visual fidelity when it comes to modeling athletes, their respective uniforms and equipment, and the stadia in which they play. This visual fidelity is supplemented by an emphasis on televisual styles of representation. Action simulations feature various camera angles through which users can experience gameplay. Sports games in the action simulation category include the now annual iterations of the FIFA Football (Electronic Arts Sports, 1993–present), Madden Football (Electronic Arts Tiburon, 1993–present), NHL (Electronic Arts Canada, 1991–present), and NBA 2K (Visual Concepts, 1999–present) franchises.
As with the division of the genre into sub-genres, so too can the research on sports video games be divided into three areas. The following sections engage work done on the sports game text, the genre’s players, and the industry’s practices.
Textual Studies
Existing textual analyses of sports video games continue to be few and far between. Those studies that have been published have tended to adopt a critical cultural theoretical approach as a way to engage a given game’s ideology.
Leonard (2004) adopts critical race theory to suggest that sports video games invoke discourses of white, masculine heterosexuality. In doing so, they provide a twenty-first-century parallel to nineteenth-century minstrelsy. Leonard argues that the overwhelming majority of black males in video games exist as athletes. Given this fact and given that the most sports game players are white, Leonard asserts that the sports video game’s primary pleasure is located in enabling white players to participate in the fantasy of becoming black. Like nineteenth-century minstrels, sports video games allow white players to put on the black other and to engage an imagined form of blackness. As a consequence, the sports video game becomes a site where white hegemony is consistently reinforced.
In his textual analysis of the boxing action simulation, Fight Night Round 2 (EA Sports, 2005), Baerg (2007) takes the issues of hegemony in a different direction. Rather than concentrating on race and hegemony, Baerg attends to the issue of gender and hegemony through an examination of the virtual boxing body. Baerg argues that the mediation of the boxing body via the game’s gendered avatar construction process and the camera angles that are deployed during ludic segments reinforces a hegemonic masculinity associated with physicality and violence. This form of masculinity is also furthered by a patented control system entitled “Total Punch Control,” an interface that emphasizes attacking movements at the expense of defensive maneuvers. As with Leonard’s (2004) minstrelsy, resisting the game’s hegemonic masculine ideology is nearly impossible unless the game is not played at all.
Cree Plymire (2009) also examines how sports video games generate a specific relationship to the body. Cree Plymire turns to Bolter and Grusin’s (1999) concept of remediation and its associated notions of immediacy and hypermediacy to argue that an important aspect of the success of the Madden Football franchise derives from its commitment to remediating televised broadcasts of football while simultaneously rendering these broadcasts irrelevant through its affordance of interactivity. Cree Plymire goes on to assert that this remediation fosters a posthuman subject position in which players potentially have a sense of embodiment subsumed as they play. Without this embodied sense of self, a politicized embodiment becomes increasingly tenuous. The avatar problematically becomes more important than the real-world body of both athlete and sports game player.
Where Leonard’s (2004), Baerg’s (2007), and Cree Plymire’s (2009) textual analyses concentrate on ludic aspects of sports game texts, Conway’s (2009) essay on soccer game start screens extends textual analysis beyond gameplay and into the nondiegetic sequences involved in the experience. For Conway, examining the first representation of a given sport upon booting up the game provides a way to understand the nature of sport and its accompanying ideologies in new media. This representation involves both visuals and sound. In working through various introductory videos and start menus from soccer games in the categories outlined above, Conway asserts how these nondiegetic aspects of sports video games become important for the way they position subjects, invoke particular aspects of sport culture and engage a “broader sporting ideology espoused by the global media-sports complex” (2009, p. 68). As such, these opening sequences become as important for communicating ideology as the explicitly diegetic sequences.
Baerg (2011) considers another nondiegetic aspect of the sports video game text by turning to the significance of the quantitatively-based player rating system. In the action and management simulation, the player attribute rating system sits at the core of gameplay by providing numbers for a given athlete’s ability across a range of categories. Rating systems in sports video games exist as classification systems with ideological implications. By combining theory on classification systems and applying it to the rating system at work in FIFA Football ’09 (Electronic Arts Canada, 2008), Baerg examines how the game’s player attribute ratings system enables comparability between players in the system, renders visible a specific vision of what constitutes a football player, and allows for control of both the population of football players at a macro level and specific players at a micro level. Through the lens of these three dimensions of the system, player attribute ratings in sports video games foster a quantitatively-based instrumental rationality.
The critical cultural approach to the sports game text takes one perspective on the genre. Another perspective shifts from the text to engage the experiences of sports video game players. Garry Crawford has focused most prominently on this aspect of sports video games.
One of Crawford’s (2005a) first essays on the subject addressed the relationship between digital games, sport, and gender. The impetus for this project derived from scholarly and popular concerns expressed by those who believed that sports video games were causing young people to move away from participation in real-world sport. Crawford’s project found that playing sports video games did not adversely influence real-world sporting activity. In fact, the opposite was true. Data revealed that playing sports video games fostered social interaction around sport. This social interaction, in conjunction with sports game play, generated further knowledge and attraction to the sports being played. As a result, sports video game play increased the possibility of real-world sport participation. This finding was affirmed by an additional study in which Crawford (2005b) concentrated on how players used sports games to construct identities and knowledge communities around their game play. In both projects, Crawford noted that this participation in sports games and its ensuing social interaction was clearly gendered male.
Crawford (2006) extended this previous work to focus on the pleasures players received in playing sports video games and the relationship of these pleasures to real-world sport. In this study, he used interview data to investigate the enjoyment gained by players of the Championship Manager/Football Manager (Championship Manager became Football Manager in 2004) management simulation. Data from this study revealed how deeply digital games could become embedded in the lives of their players. For Crawford’s subjects, Championship Manager/Football Manager served as a social lubricant framing a considerable amount of interpersonal communication away from the game. Players would frequently discuss their experiences in the game in deploying it as a conversational resource in their everyday interactions. Crawford also found that this experience of the game would also be woven into conversations about real-world football as well. Championship Manager/Football Manager effectively became intertextual in enabling an easy shift from game to professional football and back again.
In Crawford’s fourth essay (2008) on sports game players, he detailed the differences between the reception and success of sports films and sports video games. He noted that sports video games have been much more financially successful than sports films. He theorized about this gap between the two media by turning to Ricoeur’s notion of “narrative identity.” Narrative identity speaks to the stories told by the self about the self and stories told about the self by others. Crawford used this theory and applied it to interview data gathered from sports game players to suggest that sports video games offer players a way to actively create narrative identities in ways that films do not. These narratives can be used to project the self into the club being controlled in the game and subsequently into the real-world club that players support. Crawford and Gosling (2009) affirmed how the narratives emerging from sports game play could be deployed for constructing player identity and social performances as sports fans.
Baerg (2008) addressed another dimension of player interaction with the sports video game in examining how Madden Football 2005 (Electronic Arts Tiburon, 2004) players understood notions of realism. His study of sports gamer message board discourse revealed how this community desired a visual realism oriented around graphics and plausible animations and a quantitative realism oriented around statistically plausible outcomes. To achieve this perceived realism, the players in his data set established scientifically-oriented processes enabling them to experiment with the tools provided by the game. By manipulating in-game sliders, Madden Football 2005 fans were working collectively to achieve consensus on what they perceived to be the most realistic version of football the game could offer.
Industry Studies
Although sports game texts and players have received some attention, next to nothing has been written about the industry side of sports video games. To date, Paul (2012) has provided the only extensive look at the production and economics of the sports game. Paul’s primary argument suggests that the sports video game operates from the economic foundation of planned obsolescence. Paul argues that planned obsolescence exists as an important aspect of the development and marketing of the sports video game.
On the development side, sports games began the practice of an annual release schedule, a schedule that has been mimicked by the Call of Duty (Infinity Ward, Treyarch, 2003–present) franchise. Paul asserts that the sports game’s annual production schedule means that a game’s initial release is followed by the promise of improvements to next year’s game. Developers working on sports games must generate creative ways to differentiate the following iteration of the series from existing games. The short development cycle also means that the entire process of programming from conception to completion must occur in an extremely tight window. That could mean considerable pressure on a development team. However, if developers can come up with a few new features for the next version of the game, it may not matter if these features succeed or fail. The strategy of planned obsolescence means that there will usually be another opportunity to build on a successful change or quickly move in a different direction. This strategy is further protected by exclusive licenses.
Not only does this planned obsolescence shape the development of the sports game, but Paul also argues that it necessarily influences the nature of sports game marketing as well. A massive marketing effort must be mounted each year to ensure that customers both notice differences between the old game and the new game and see these differences as significant enough to warrant another purchase. The new features of each annual release must be endlessly promoted to convince potential buyers that they will be playing the best version of the game ever made. The marketing department’s job is simultaneously easier in that new features provide a ready-made narrative they can present to potential customers, but at the same time, the job is made more difficult in that these features may not make a significant enough departure from the previous version of the game, a version released less than one year before.
Sports games rely on planned obsolescence, but they also have begun to rely on exclusive licenses with professional sports organizations. Paul suggests that sports games must maintain team rosters and stadia that are true to life. Without this perceived fidelity, the product is much less attractive to consumers. Electronic Arts began making licensing deals with individual athletes in 1983 and organizations in the 1990s. However, their 2004 licensing agreement with the National Football League, represented something new in making them the only developer who could produce a game using NFL intellectual property. This deal created a ripple effect in the industry and has drawn the ire of commentators and consumers for limiting competition and fostering stagnancy instead of innovation (Good, 2011).
Licenses have also generated other issues for the sports game industry. As of 2012, former athletes have filed ongoing lawsuits against EA for including their likenesses in the game without permission and subsequent compensation. Former Cleveland Browns running back Jim Brown, former college football quarterback Sam Keller, and former college basketball player Ed O’Bannon, have sued EA over their respective rights-of-publicity. EA has responded to their claims by arguing that video games are protected by the First Amendment as creative works (Thomas, 2010; Dodd, 2013). The Keller and O’Bannon cases remain pending and will certainly have implications for the sports game industry.
New Research Directions
Given the very limited work that has been done on the sports video game, considerably more questions can be posed about a genre that is among the medium’s most popular and lucrative. Each of the areas described above instigates further investigation.
In recent years, the sports game genre is borrowing from other genres such as realtime and turn-based strategy and role-playing games. By integrating game mechanics such as countdown clocks on free-agent negotiations and individual game modes that have players gaining experience points for their virtual athletes, the genre is beginning to blend into other genres while also opening up questions about how this blending shapes how we categorize sports games. Existing categorizations may also need to be reformulated with the rise of motion-control systems such as Nintendo’s Wii Remote, Microsoft’s Kinect, and Sony’s Move. Although developers appear to have struggled with implementing these systems into sports games, motion controls in next generation of consoles could alter the sports game landscape considerably.
More research can also follow Baerg (2007, 2011) and Cree Plymire (2009) with questions about the mediation of the body in the sports game. The body is crucial to real-world sport, so examining how it is mediated in the sports game ought to remain a concern for research on the genre. What might be some of the consequences, for example, of the sports game’s continued reliance on numbers in mediating the body? Both for the mediation of professional athletes, but also increasingly for players who themselves become quantified as their performances are tracked and aggregated? Questions of embodiment and the mediation of the body also arise with motion control systems. How might these systems influence the marginalization of politicized embodiment, if at all?
Paul (2012) also notes a development that could shape the nature of future sports game studies with the increasing emphasis on the online aspect of the sports game. Paul references then head of EA Sports, Peter Moore, forecasting a future in which the off-line game will entirely disappear. This disappearance has been perpetuated by the recent introduction of Facebook versions of Madden Football and FIFA Soccer. Other versions of these games will extend to tablets and cell phones.
If Electronic Arts, as the dominant sports game developer, should continue move in this direction, new questions will need to be asked about the nature of the sports video game text and the experience players have engaging it. Rather than existing as singular products in a singular media space, an increasing move to focus on online play potentially makes the sports video game a transmedia experience. A game such as FIFA Football would subsequently become less of a concentrated game and more of a ubiquitous activity. Clearly, this shift would have considerable implications for the player’s relationship to sports game play and to that person’s sports fandom as well. If the sports video game becomes a space of experience accessible from multiple locations, does it, in following Cree Plymire’s (2009) argument, become an even greater threat to televised sport? Does the sports video game begin to take over from television as the dominant medium of sport? More questions could be asked about the consequences of this shift for players as well. Would the real-world sports knowledge Crawford’s (2005a, 2005b, 2006, 2008) interview subjects gained in playing sports games still shape interaction with real-world sport? If the sports video game becomes more interesting than sport itself, at what point is this knowledge still real-world sports knowledge? Crawford’s work could also be used as a springboard into questions about the pleasures players would receive from having constant access to the sports game(s) of their choice.
The sports video game has come a long way since the days of the Magnavox Odyssey and PONG. Yet, it could be argued that research on the genre remains as sparse as the space between opposite ends of the screens from those games. In spite of being occasionally lamented by gamers, critics, and scholars, the sports game raises interesting questions and will continue to do so in the years to come. One can only hope scholars continue to cultivate this area so that research on sports games will no longer represent a barren wasteland.
References
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