Courtesy of EA Sports/TiburonOur man on video games takes a trip to John Madden’s man cave to see how the game is madeBy Tom Bissell on January 17, 2012
Pregame: how are We Going to Play this?
Sport-based video games occupy an odd space within the sphere of modern home entertainment. Reliably enjoyed by millions, the sport-based video game stands at what sometimes feels like an oblique angle from the larger medium, and in ways that can be hard to articulate. all video games are games, obviously. They’re designed, they’re digital, they have rules, they give an audience some type of vicarious experience. beyond that, El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron and NBA 2K12 do not on first glance appear to have a hell of a lot to say to each other.
I think we’re pretty much done with the are Games Art? question. how about this one: are Sports Games Art? Not a few of the people who make sports games, I now know, regard that question as somewhat hilarious and way, way too parlor-room aesthete. (They probably wouldn’t put it that way.) many of the games most of us feel comfortable viewing as art are, most basically, rule-set systems made dynamic by human interaction, out of which some kind of “story” emerges. this is, in fact, what excites a lot of us about video games: a brand-new narrative form, etc., etc., but here is my question: Sport itself is another such rule-set system, isn’t it? It’s based on just that kind of rules-meets-human-interaction dynamism and permits almost exactly that kind of emergent “story” to appear. Remember that the whole crux of the Ebert Position1 was that sports — and, thus, games — aren’t art but rather activity, no matter how beautiful and compelling said activity can be from the spectator’s point of view. Art, though, has intent and direction, meaning and submeaning, and is definitively not something that happens to arise within seemingly arbitrary rule sets.
Obviously, this whole conversation is hampered by the fact that people who talk about video games, myself included, often turn to those games’ narrative, atmospheric, or aesthetic content when discussing their artfulness. the conversation is also hampered by the fact that many who play and design sports games — not to mention athletes themselves — would sooner dive into a thornbush than say, “Yeah, that thing I do? Art, pal. Right there. Art.” but do me a favor: Go to YouTube and watch a few old clips of Jordan or Maravich. Watch Aaron Rodgers thread the needle through some impossible coverage formation. Watch Jackie Joyner-Kersee run. I’ve been doing that for the past 40 minutes or so. It’s been enlightening.
You forget, when you’ve been away from sports and sports watching for a while, how visually and emotionally ravishing sports of all kinds can be. Even football — which I have gone to impressive lengths to avoid watching and playing — can be as darkly gorgeous as peering down on warring amoebae through a high-powered microscope. something like humanity’s cultural ancientness is revealed through sport, which reminds us of what we actually are: savage, noble, strange, playful, and, above all, creative beings.
Whatever art is, it must be, in some way, beautiful. Acts of physical beauty performed within rule-set confines are not art, but acts of mental beauty performed within only slightly less rule-set confines (like, say, a sonnet) are. is that really how we’re going to play this? It doesn’t sit right. Here’s what I just realized: a world in which sport at its best is not seen as some kind of art is a world that doesn’t deserve any art.
First Quarter: “Soak It all In”
Every year for the past three years, key members of Madden NFL‘s development team have traveled to the Bay Area suburb of Pleasanton, Calif., to meet with John Madden himself at his production company’s office building. there, Coach Madden and the dev team discuss identifiable trends that have emerged in professional football over the past year and spitball ideas about how these trends might be implemented in gameplay. Coach Madden is also briefed on the creative direction and “feature set” of next year’s game. once that’s done, Coach (as he’s called) and the dev team watch a fully catered afternoon’s worth of professional football games in a large studio space that Coach built after retiring from broadcasting a few years ago.
Electronic Arts Tiburon, Madden‘s longtime developer, invited me along to observe this year’s get-together. I confessed to Rob Semsey, the director of communications at EA Tiburon, that I had not played a Madden title in many moons — though I played the hell out of the first couple Sega Genesis Madden iterations, back when it was called John Madden Football and lacked an official NFL license. Semsey assured me that this alarming lacuna in my Madden r
