It’s no exaggeration that the incredible is one of the primary appeals of sporting events. While it’s fun to watch two teams of elite athletes competing, there would be something missing if that never meant occasionally seeing things that boggle the mind. A tremendous catch or all-time shot can stick with you for the rest of your life.
When creating a sports video game, this means that the ability to recreate these once-in-a-lifetime experiences is crucial, whether that means truly creating singular experiences or creating experiences that feel like they are one-of-a-kind magic that nobody else has experienced before or will experience again.
So, why is it then that the most amazing moments in video games just can’t seem to live up to their real-world counterparts? What is it that keeps the magical moments happening on PCs and consoles from being as special as the ones that happen on pitches, fields, and courts?
The Delicate Balance Between Realism And Fun In Sports Video Games
When developing a game, a studio is forced to walk a delicate tightrope. On the one hand, gamers want their simulation sports games to be, in a word, simulations. They want realism and for what happens on screen to look like what happens in the real games.
Except that’s not quite true. What developers have found instead is that players want a gaming experience that feels like the real thing, which does not always mean perfectly recreating the real world. EA FC has shown this problem with its implementation of two modes, Competitive and Authentic, with the former designed to be more up-tempo than a real match.
Where developers settle on balancing between these opposing desires can significantly impact the frequency of amazing plays and how impactful they feel when they arrive as a result.
Why Do Huge Moments Feel Less Spectacular In Video Games
It’s clear that the incredible feels just a bit more credible in video games than it does in real life, but why is that so? There are several big reasons:
When It’s Not Real, It’s Simply Not As Impressive
The first thing going against video games is something that will always be true and can’t be accounted for in any way by developers, and that’s that no matter how realistic games get, they will never become real. For as engrossing as a game can feel and as spectacular as a moment or game may feel, it will never be able to match the feeling of seeing a remarkable play in real life.
When you watch a player do something inhuman that defies belief, you have to also reckon with the reality that it actually happened, and you saw it. In a video game, what has actually happened is some 1s and 0s aligned to make a cool thing appear on screen, so there will always be just a little bit taken off of any thrill. Greg Jennings putting the team on his back with a broken leg is a sight to see in a video game; it would be the most famous play in history if it happened in real life.
Pre-Built Movement Patterns Limit The Spectacle
Another key benefit that reality has over video games is that anything could happen once a play is underway. As a lifelong sports addict, my love has always been borne out of seeing sports as the truest, greatest drama entertainment available because nobody, not even the primary parties carrying it out, knows for sure how it’s going to go. When Eli Manning floated a pass to the corner, nobody watching was expecting to see Odell Beckham make a one-finger grab against his momentum, because nobody had ever seen that before.
Making games feel more dynamic has been a priority of video game designers for ages. Ironically, one major fix for this problem is a big contributor to making the spectacular less special, and that is the inclusion of more motion-captured movements. While this does yield more realistic movement by players, it also means that the spectacular grab you just watched is likely the result of a script that could run on the very next play if the circumstances align.
Overpowered Player Cards Make The Incredible Routine
One of the things that makes the most memorable sports moments so unforgettable is their rarity. They require a coming together of brilliant athletes, perfect timing, and just the right circumstances. Many of the most unbelievable moments in sports history could only have been completed by such a vanishingly small percentage of athletes that seeing them defies belief. In video games, inhumanly talented players are less uncommon.
Specifically, with the advent of card-based online modes, it’s extremely common to see individual athletes get multiple versions of their cards across a game’s release cycle. Often, these cards come as a result of some kind of real-world accomplishment, like making teams of the week based on great games, and to recognize that accomplishment, the cards feature boosted states.
When you begin applying these boosts to players who are already at or near the top of the sport, you start to get digital athletes capable of things no true player could ever manage. In the NBA 2K games, if you assembled the cards, you could put together a team of players who are all 99-rated and maxed badges across the board. When every player on your team is a god, then it becomes normal to see them doing godly things on your screen.
Player Learning Curves Can Make Brilliance Normal
When athletes step out onto the field, there is only one thing responsible for how well or not they can perform, and that is their own abilities. When you boot up a sports game, there is a second variable brought into consideration, and that’s you sitting there on the sticks controlling what the players do. There are few dunks in video gaming more time-honored than taking on someone else and letting them play as the best team in the game, only to destroy them with the worst one.
What it means for big moments, however, is that they become more attainable for players who are good at games because they have more opportunities to put their players into positions to make spectacular plays or go on historic runs.
There is no denying that it’s fun to boot up a game of Football Manager and choose a team in the sixth tier and lead them all the way to the top of the football pyramid. It’s a genuine accomplishment, and it feels incredible to watch little Boston United crowned Champions of Europe. It still pales in comparison to the pandemonium that a real-world team climbing five divisions and winning everything in less than a decade would generate.
Developers Have Deprioritized The Franchise Modes
Spectacular moments can be single moments of brilliance, but they can also be sustained runs that lead to storybook endings that nobody could have predicted. When Leicester City won the Premier League as anywhere from 1/2,500 and 1/5,000 underdogs, it capped off one of the most spectacular seasons in sporting history.
Unfortunately for gamers looking to make their own moments like this, the modes that allow for season- or even seasons-long pursuits are no longer high priorities with the developers who make them. Because online modes are so integral to the finances of modern sports game development, it has led to a reallocation of resources from popular offline campaign modes, and as those modes receive less depth than they could have, the accomplishments within them are lessened in impact as well.
You Can Run It Back Immediately
Closing things out is another issue that developers can’t simply code out of existence, and that is that there is no way to accurately recreate the true stakes of knowing that if you lose the Super Bowl, you don’t get to touch a ball in a meaningful game again for seven months. Every loss means more when you know that there is no coming back from it. You can’t restart the game. You can’t jump right into the next season to start fighting for another chance.
You can sit with it, and that’s it. That generates stakes that make those big moments hit in ways video games just can’t match.
Do you agree that video games lack just a little bit of that special flair that real-world sports can manage, and do you think there’s anything developers can do to fix this, or is it simply a natural byproduct of the limitations of adapting real spectacle to virtual worlds?
