When Did Sports Games Forget to Add the Fun?

I used to play a lot of sports game back in the day: Tecmo Bowl, Double Dribble, Blades of Glory, Genesis versions of NHL, Joe Montana Football, International Superstar Soccer on the Nintendo64. But for my taste, the genre has gone down hill. In an effort to make the most realistic simulation of sport gaming, developers has consistently piled more and more features and controls on the player. They also seem to build off of each other forcing a player to master last years iteration before he can move on to the newest game.

Luke Plunkett at kotaku made this observation while playing NBA 2k8 a while back and then Zack Hiwiller expanded on the idea by pointing out the ridiculousness of the compounded complexity of sports games.

Your friend tells you about this movie he is really excited about and he convinces you to buy a ticket and see it with him. The theater is mostly empty when you sit down, except for a few kids in the front row holding those big foam #1 fingers. Before the previews start, your friend tells you it his ninth time seeing the movie. It starts and immediately you find it incomprehensible. There are dozens of characters whose origins and motives aren’t explained, you have a rough understanding of the plot, but the movie seems distracted with minor plot points and half the movie seems to be overwrought establishing shots.

When the credits roll, your friend applauds but you sit there confused. He nudges you and tells you, “Don’t worry. I didn’t start really “getting it” until the fifth time I saw it. Hang in there!” You are a bit dumbstruck: “Five times? I’m not wasting my time and paying to see that mess again!”. Your friend then gets angry with you: “Whatever. You just don’t want to put in the time to struggle for something sophisticated.”

That’s basically the game industry’s sports genre.

He goes on to say that there is "a push each year to add new features" which really just translates to "complicate this for the reason of depth." FIFA has done the same thing as the Madden franchise in an effort to catch up to Pro Evolution Soccer, which has been held in higher esteem for its "realism."

The developers may have eliminated aspects that took away from the purity of the game, adding layer after layer of complexity to create the most realistic sports sim ever, but the sacrifice has been too great. Gone is the debauchery of high-scoring, rowdy gaming encounters with friends and family. I still play competitive soccer when I need my fix of "realism" and I watch Manchester United with fanaticism. In much the same way the racing genre lost me when RC ProAm and Out Run gave way to Gran Turismo, the sports genre lost me when they cut the most appealing feature of all: fun.