Certain Happiness

Reality can be uneasy, uncertain, unwieldy, and otherwise capital-s Scary at times. Diversion from that reality is becoming increasingly necessary as the continued barrage of information wreaks havoc on our brains in ways that were absolutely not researched by the tech companies putting this world into place at a premium. Of course, Big Tech went into its pressure cooker of existential pain and decided that doubling down on this horrific cocktail of constant connectedness was best for the world. 

There has been a recent push by companies like Facebook, Google, and Microsoft to create and market digital spaces that are effectively a facsimile of real, brick and mortar, society. If you’ve read anything about the Metaverse, how well this technology works in the present and the extent to which it will control our lives in the future is a bit unclear to the regular working person, and even still unclear to the regular, non-working person (me). Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and whoever else are sure to do their research and come up with a new paradigm that is sure to not resemble any cautionary or otherwise apocalyptic sci-fi. 

One of the many problems I have with the initial rollout of the Metaverse and other augmented reality, “digital life” technology is the clunkiness of the tech at this stage of development. In Facebook’s cautionary tale for what the Metaverse could look like, Decimator Zuckerberg provides us a peek at a world where you can do regular, real life things in this digital space, like play chess, ping pong, and surf, all while embodying an avatar that on a graphical level on par with this collection of psalms from our lord and savior. While the idea of being able to surf with Zuckerberg is horrifying for a variety of reasons, the assured technical bumps in the road, present in pretty nearly every major technological breakthrough in the digital age, will make for a less-than-stellar experience in the early going.

Commenting on the efficacy of the Metaverse is in a bit of bad faith, because there’s nothing short of extreme financial gain or a date with Rihanna that would get me to willingly take part in the expensive delusion. One positive I can say about what I’ve seen/read about the Metaverse so far is the inclusion of the aforementioned digital avatars, which at this stage have appeared to avoid the pitfall of the uncanny valley. 

For those unfamiliar, the uncanny valley is an aesthetic valuation of an object's resemblance to a part or whole of a human. It’s the area of familiarity to a person, body part, or behavior where the object is close to resembling a human (or body part) to an unsettling (uncanny) degree. If you’ve seen any footage of the AMECA robot from earlier this month, you can see what I would say is the absolute lowest level of the valley. The robot can estimate a multitude of emotions, and looks like it’s on a great acid trip as it cycles through a variety of human processes. The CNET video linked makes the connection to the iRobot murder machines in the first two minutes, which (of course) is portrayed more as a positive.

This robot, and any other sort of technological foray into estimating human movement, illustrates the lack of care that certain sectors within big tech show for our humanity. That isn’t to say that there aren’t positive uses for things that estimate some element of human movement or thinking - prostheses being a good example - but by-and-large these projects make one question if any of the movers and shakers behind their creation ever read a science fiction novel in their life. 

Running congruently, but largely without the philosophical or existential implications, is the same directive to try and leap over the uncanny valley in sports video games. Allow me to provide an image to provide some greater context to my point before I go any further:

“Why did you form a monster so hideous that even you turned from me in disgust?”

Yes, I am aware that one could argue that graphical improvements in the past 5 years could potentially have dug us out of the hole of man made horrors that is Madden 17 and it’s close ups of Jeff Fisher’s radioactive jowls. It is true that I only use this as an example because it’s the most recent Madden game I own, and I’ll be damned if I give EA any more of my money after they bungled several of my favorite franchises (Mass Effect, SimCity). I also have FIFA20, FIFA22, and NBA2K20, and those more recent titles still have trouble climbing out of the uncanny valley by my estimation. While graphics have certainly gotten sharper and more accurate, players tend to glitch out less frequently (although that apparently isn’t the case with Madden), and environmental effects have become more and more robust, none of those accouterments amount to furthering my enjoyment of the overall experience.   

Ostensibly, these yearly attempts to find a path out of the uncanny valley that sports game franchises have willfully plunged into are made in the name of doubling down on Realism. Almost every sports game I have at my house makes mention of your ability to control your player more accurately and feel like you’re an actual part of the glitz and bright lights of the sports experience. Be it from a linear-story perspective, like that of MyCareer in NBA 2K, or from the physical controlling of a player on the field/court/ice/etc. While the former has failed in my experience more due to the disposable nature of the yearly sports title, which makes for fewer quality checks in the writing, performance, and overall ingenuity provided in the experience, the latter has failed in large part because of the insistence that true Realism is the Platonic ideal of a sports video game. 

Perhaps I’m off base or my brain is wired differently to others, but I’m here to say on record that I don’t give half a damn about the Realism of a sports game. With other genres of video games, the corner is a bit less tight of a turn; in the Call of Duty franchise for example, it seems commonplace within the game world that there exists soldiers that heal rapidly and infinitely, can sprint (at intervals) without getting tired, can pick up ammunition from fallen enemies without searching their bodies, and several other actions that are decidedly not within the realm of real-world possibility. There is no mandate within that section of the industry to create something that accurately simulates war and its alternate banality and horrors. Even then, I personally prefer the complete fantasy world of Halo to the reality-adjacent CoD, due to a combination of the devs being able to create whatever the fuck kind of weapon, creature, gameplay mechanic, they want with usually excellent results, rather than be tied to a moderate level of realism in the gameplay. Put simply: no one knows how Master Chief should move because he isn’t real.

Generally speaking, I’d guess that no critically thinking person would want an FPS that maintains the micro Realism of a real-life warzone, even excluding the PTSD or overly detailed injuries. Also, a very high percentage of FPS players will never set foot in a warzone. Realism in sports games is kept afloat as an industry mandate by the fact that most every player has seen or played in a sports contest and is familiar, consciously or not, of how those players are supposed to look, move, and feel. As a result, developers have set themselves on this path to create a sports game so real that you truly feel you are in the game, without the technology to make it possible.  

Graphically, there seems to be an industry mandate to create sports games that have the most life-like images imaginable (at least for AAA titles), which for some might be a heavy factor in this conversation. Whether that can be placed on developers for pushing renderings that haven’t yet turned the corner out of the uncanny valley or publishers/other executives demanding that their games remain the “industry standard” in graphics, it remains clear that the presence of these creations in sports titles will continue to inch forward until you can see the exact location of each dead follicle on LeBron and KD’s respective heads in NBA 2K27 or whatever. Graphics have certainly made improvements in recent years, but the sallow eyes and overall redness of Trevor Lawrence in Madden 22 is enough for me to at least consider trying to trojan horse the Tiburon offices. 

The issues I have with the graphics of sports games are running mates with the hyper-focus on creating an in-game avatar (not like a MyPlayer, but the players running around the court/field/whatever in a game) that moves like a real person. This recent article from SportsTechie highlights the attention to detail EA would like to provide gamers in future FIFA installments, specifically with regard to the HyperMotion system that it first employed in FIFA22. Much like the graphical uncanny valley, this system will assuredly take some time to test and flesh out (no pun intended), and yearly results may eventually approach how it actually feels to run around the pitch as a professional soccer player. With FIFA22 (which I got on sale, unfortunately there’s no demo), I still have had issues with my players overrunning the ball, or taking weird angles to get to a pass that is in front or behind them, absolutely gobsmacking a shot that had no business being that powerful based on their body contortion, among others.

(As an aside, the EA Sports titles are said to be worse in the physics department than 2K titles because of the limitations of the Frostbite engine, which was designed by DICE for FPS games and shoehorned into EA Sports titles. I’m not qualified enough to examine the specifics of those failures, but I can say that games before the Frostbite engine seemed a bit more fluid, despite having less “sharp” graphics. Here’s an article about Frostbite in general if you aren’t familiar)

Of course, with any sort of art every consumer will come in with certain expectations and leave with a certain level of enjoyment that is reflective of their experience with video games. For me personally, I would find a sports title much more enjoyable if they pumped the brakes on making the gameplay look and/or feel real, and stick to making a game where the experience feels novel and varied. The yearly release of many of these titles, further compounded on the NFL side by EA’s exclusive licensing deal with the NFLPA (eliminating the need for innovation, Econ 101) limits the ingenuity that these development teams have time to work on, but below I’ve identified a few key pieces that don’t seem too far fetched that would get me back on the bandwagon for certain franchises:

• For all sports titles, more resources should be devoted to developing a more in depth manager/franchise mode. The only title I’m aware of that lets you fully customize your stadium is MLB The Show, and their stadium builder does seem fairly robust, but in the year of our lord 2022 I’d like to see this feature pushed even further. Give players the option to design a complete stadium (from templates or from scratch), starting with the structure, then adding the seats, concourse, pro shop, and accouterments. Perhaps it could even delve into a “stadium district” where you create an area around your stadium. Also, uniform creation in many of these games has fallen off since the heyday of NCAA Football, which to my recollection had the most robust uniform customizer of any franchise, at least in the mid-2000s iterations.

• Separate enough for its own mention, but more randomness in how the CPU goes about their business in franchise modes. For example, apparently the same star players always resign or walk in the first year of an NBA 2K22 franchise mode, leaving a predictable crop of players for you to attempt to acquire in free agency. Franchises don’t typically tank the way they do in real life. I want to see a 7 win team again. 

• More zany, outside the box game modes or options. FIFA has dipped its toes in this with the Mystery Ball mechanic, but stopping there is a fumbled bag. Incorporate some sort of NFL Street Gamebreaker modes into offline Madden or create scenarios in FIFA where you are three adults facing 100 eight-year-olds. Take me back to the days when I could make a 400lb, 5 foot tall center who could jump out the gym. Hell, even something like the 25 ESPN Classic games from 2K5 would be simple to do yet provide a new grip of challenges.

• Sports remixes of songs for the soundtracks. “Never Scared” from Madden 04 and “Right Thurr” from NBA Live 04 come to mind. Throw a bag at someone to re-record a couple of verses, simple. A remix of Denzel Curry’s “Ultimate” where he shouts Jason Taylor?  Keep Travis Scott the fuck away from that though. 

When asked about their favorite entry in a certain franchise, many of the sports gamers I rub elbows with cite games from the mid-late 2000s as their most played or most beloved. Be it nostalgia or on actual merit, these games firmly existed outside of the valley that recent titles have dipped into. They also featured some if not all of the elements I described above, to a degree that makes current iterations of those same titles a huge letdown outside of the graphics and physics.  

Whether the current state of sports video games is indicative of a larger technological directive to create experiences that mirror real life is up to your interpretation. Realistically, the time for the buck to be stopped for pushing Realism as a central selling point was just before the release of the eighth generation of consoles (PS4, Xbox One, WiiU), as the dip into the deepest reaches of the uncanny valley don’t fully register (at least to my untrained eye) until somewhere around 2015. The graphical matters less than the physical to me, for enjoyments sake, but both combine for an experience that feels wonky and underwhelming. 

No sports gaming franchise has given any indication that they are willing to buck this trend, and the tenuous mutually-assured-creepiness that will exude from their player models will continue until the technology can climb its way out. Perhaps by 2040 I will be able to strap into a state-mandated Metaverse pod and see LeBron in the stands cheering on Bronny in 2K41. Perhaps his avatar will have better hair plugs.