Sports Video Games Are Too Real!
I’ve written about sports video games before, and I do this for a reason. I like sports (hence the blog) and video games (hence the blog) but I am not physically cut out for many of the sports I enjoy. Also, at times I prefer fandom to actually playing — especially those sports where’s I’d likely break bones. But has it come to a point where the games are extremely accurate simulations?
FIFA soccer (the video game) has a World Cup event. I wonder if players from the same countries dominate every time like the real World Cup?
Madden doesn’t just suck at announcing in video game form, he sucks at the real thing too:
In a recent playoff game, Mr. Madden said the New York Giants, who faced a third down with 10 yards to go, had not performed well in those situations. Seconds later, Mr. Madden’s NBC booth partner, Al Michaels, called his attention to a graphic on the screen which noted that the Giants were tops in the NFL in third-and-long situations.
Find more examples from that article in the Wall Street Journal and wonderful comments section of The Big Lead. So it seems that EA has definatly got one thing right. What about the realism of the game?
For that I turn to a monolith of Nerd on Sport — Mark Cuban. Yup, the now owner of the Dallas Mavericks who made a good chunk of his early money from selling a website to Yahoo. He wrote on his blog:
NBA Live 09 is becoming a management tool in the NBA.
That’s right – good enough to be used by the real NBA, live. And it sounds like a good plan to me. What better way to try out how some differing strategies might play out against a certain team.
So what I’m getting at, is that maybe these games have gotten to real. Is that possible — I mean it is “just a game.” Either way, if Cuban is looking for a new hire to run his NBA Live division – I enjoy Dallas, and the AA Center is very nice.