I’ve started work on a basketball tactics game. After the very limited adoption of Syphilisation, I’ve decided to try a one-for-you-one-for-me release schedule for a while and alternate commercial and experimental games. This is a commercial release and my personal metrics for its success reflect that. However, every game has the potential to answer some of the big questions open in video games and a commercial bent doesn’t keep you from asking questions but simply changes the questions to ask.

I have a number of pieces on my mind here but I learned on Syphilisation that even finding the question to answer is a matter of iteration. I started that game aiming at parody in video games but was able to abstract that to the larger and more meaningful question of integrating ideology in video games.

Sports in Other Media

As far as I can tell, there is only one meaningful overlap between the poetics of a sports video game and the poetics of sports in other media; the intrinsic pleasure of the recreation of the sport. This is, of course, heightened for those very familiar with a sport, but the pleasure of watching a ball go through a hoop or into a goal is clear to everyone.

The sports movie, for instance, does not center around that pleasure though. Certainly the spectacle has inherent value and yet the sports movie never features the equivalent of an extended car chase or fight scene or dance sequence. At most, there is a montage but the sport is never treated as a fundamental reason to watch the movie in the way of other action sequences.

Instead, sports are used to demonstrate a narrative point. They tell the viewer if a player or team is doing well or if they are not. They underscore an attribute of a character. They can both provide tension and let the narrative breathe.

Sports act as the canvas of conflict. This is what allows the same techniques to be used in both superhero and sports shonen anime. However, the healthiness of sports recontextualizes the conflict, practically almost necessitating a free and fair contest of peers over the imbalance of good and evil. Thus, sports as the clash of philosophy naturally emerges, as done expertly in Headshot, but absent from video games.

The bildungsroman naturally attaches easily to sports media. Athletics is a young person’s game and the teamwork and personal growth that come with it suits a coming-of-age story perfectly as do the friendships and rivalries that come with sports. Video games tend to focus on professional sports, as would be expected from their AAA lineage, leaving this area unexplored.

Anime storytelling

Delving deeper into sports anime, we find particularly promising veins to explore. Broadly, the pivot points of a sports scene can be divided into jigsaw solves and Plus Ultra moments. The jigsaw moment, where a hidden weakness is deducted and then exploited, is a natural intersection point with tactics games but requires more work than may be apparent. Before the jigsaw solve has meaning, the viewer must both understand the problem and see it as overwhelming. The interactivity in these shows comes from the viewer trying to solve the problem as the protagonist does and so the problem must be non-trivial. Similarly, a jigsaw solve in a game requires that players find the puzzle non-trivial and that the solution be designed to engender a moment of insight.

Plus Ultras are moments where a character pushes beyond their limits to achieve more than they believed possible. This is a welcome injection of the human into the sterile stats-based systems that games default to. These moments are mostly generated from interpersonal relationships, particularly rivalries and friendships, reinforcing this dynamic.

These two branches are most interesting when they intersect. When a key facet of a player’s character is their ability to solve difficult situations, then the desperation of the Plus Ultra moment leads to the jigsaw solve, as in Isagi figuring out how to use Barou in Blue Lock. From another direction, the missing jigsaw piece can come from the personal growth of a Plus Ultra, a sequence that proves very satisfying.

Separately, note that anime spends a lot of time in each match, sometimes taking as much as half a season for a single match. This leaves space for personal growth during a match, contrasting with the standard pattern of video games to treat these as separate, loosely connected aspects. This blended approach also allows anime to hold suspense for an astonishing amount of time, as in the aftermath of the district qualifying match in Ahiru No Sora.

The NBA

NBA games hold the tension of competition. Viewer interaction is not in predicting an author but in understanding a system. It is thus that a storybook ending such as Dirk in 2011 or LeBron in 2016 holds so much weight. The drama bubbles up from the interactions of the actors rather than dripping downwards from an author’s pen but the drama is undeniable. It is not for nothing that the NBA is called a soap opera for men.

By the structure of the league, someone must win and someone must lose. As one viewers root for a team, another roots for the opponent. It is not possible for both of them to succeed.

Interestingly, NBA games have a lot of air. Personally, I often multitask as I watch. Many of the games are largely meaningless, the first three quarters matter much less than the fourth and yet often make the fourth meaningless as well. I say this not as something for games to emulate but as a signal for the tolerance engendered by the systems-driven nature of the NBA.

Questions

Some standing problems in games surface from this analysis. The first is the pattern of solving a crossword to turn a page, a poetic that puts the players in two distinct modes; watching and playing. Hoop holds the space to blend systems and narratives together in a way distinct from other answers like The Sims, Crusader Kings or Dwarf Fortress, games that find themselves relying on the player to sustain the illusion that transparent systems stand in for something more.

A second issue to address is the lack of stakes in video games narratives, particularly in roguelikes. This exercise has not brought an approach vector to light but highlights the limitations of leaving the question unanswered.

It is much more fruitful about the question of breaking personal growth away from XP systems. This is an area already somewhat explored but this breakdown makes clear a number of ways to create mechanics that not only serve as alternatives but also transcend the sterility of an experience system.

Finally, the sports structure gives us avenues to crack the strong singular perspective of the protagonist. Sports media often excels at providing you with both sides of the contest, most notably in Headshot. Games would do well to pull some of that in.