“Skill” and Sports Gaming
As regular readers here know, Mark Fossen and I converse with regularity about a number of gaming-related topics, and after reading the latest issue of Game Informer magazine, where the editors tabbed MLB 08: The Show for its “Game of the Month” award for May, I sat down to talk with Mark about a telling snippet of the otherwise positive review. In Game Informer’s summary, they wrote, “…(MLB 08: The Show’s) gameplay is solid, but if you are looking for a game of skill, MLB 2K8 is the way to go.”
After mulling it over in my mind for a few minutes, I began to realize that this is the foremost challenge facing game developers. MLB 2K8 is an unquestionably inferior product to The Show by nearly any standard, but Game Informer felt that 2K8 was a greater test of “skill” because - to put it in a nutshell - it requires you to do more with the controller. While I don’t feel that necessarily makes a game better, many still do.
So the question before us as gamers is this: What constitutes “skill” in a sports game? Is it contorting the controller in rapid-fire fashion to throw a pitch, or is it the knowledge of when to throw the right pitch, and where? Could it possibly be both, and if so, what can developers do to improve their products and grow their consumer base?
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Shawn Drotar: Mark, knowing that game mechanics can either keep you in or remove you from an in-game world, are we playing games that try to fit video-game mechanics into the sports genre, or are we playing games in which the mechanics are designed to serve its source material best?
Mark Fossen: I think that when a magazine like Game Informer is talking about “skill”, then they are talking about twitch skills. Coming from a sports gaming background, it’s hard to recognize their place in the greater picture of video-gaming… and it’s a very small place. Gaming, as a whole, is still really defined by those twitch skills, and that cascades down into sub-genres like sports. Game Informer’s looking at a picture of gaming where Halo or Uncharted define the ideal game, and are trying to write to that audience. And I don’t know they are wrong to do so, either. At heart, gaming is still about collision detection and your ability to influence it: it’s a prettier Pong. Remember back in the day, when they’d just throw a different plastic layer on a Pong-like game, and then call it Tennis or Soccer or whatever? We’re still not that far removed from that; sports gaming is still just a skin for the basic video game.
Shawn Drotar: Then I suppose the question is: should it be? Should all action-oriented gaming still be about “twitch”, or should there be something more? Games like NHL 08 simplified its controls to great success; sure, a stick jockey can deke and cut to his heart’s content, but a smart gamer with good positioning can eliminate all of that with one press of a button. The end result was one of the best sports games of the year. In many ways, sports gaming seems to have accidentally mimicked sport itself; would you rather have the Kwame Brown types; talent galore with little else, or the Omar Vizquels of the world, who make their living out-thinking and out-working the competition? In baseball, for example, the differences between players’ skills is generally so small that the sport is simply a matter of execution. Physicality matters, of course, but anyone can catch a two-hopper if they’re ready for it. Games like MLB 08: The Show strike me as needing more skill to succeed while playing it - not less. But that’s because one needs baseball skill, not “video-game” skill. One currency has more value with The Show than the other, and I think it makes for a better game because of it.
Mark Fossen: Should sports games be focusing more on strategy than twitch? It really depends on the goal. The more you head down that line of needing “baseball” skill, the more you’re limiting your audience to seam-heads who don’t play video games. It’s like if “The Natural” had included detailed discussions of Roy Hobbs’ VORP and OBP. How detailed does the story need to be to bring people in, and how much detail starts alienating them? What’s the point of a sports video game: to appeal to the already-existing hardcore fan, or to create new ones?
Shawn Drotar: I suppose I’d argue that by using more simplistic and contextual controls without sacrificing the immediacy of controller input, you can do both. I’m just not convinced that gaming should come down to who’s more whiz-bang. If that were the case, the Patriots would have walked all over the Giants in the Super Bowl this year. But a less-talented team played smarter and came out on top. To me, the bar of learning the sport itself and applying it in a video game is lower - and more sensible - than learning video-game mechanics that add another layer of complexity to the proceedings.
Mark Fossen: Madden is much-derided for being an “arcade” title, but there’s no denying that those game-first twitch mechanics made it hugely popular. And that popularity certainly increased the NFL’s prominence in the American sporting scene. Madden created a new generation of football fans not because it was accurate, but because it was damned fun.
Shawn Drotar: Well, that’s true - and given the demographic, “twitch” based sports games are here to stay. But, like in NHL 08, the stick jockeys could do their thing, but the game was simplified in many ways without neutering it. In The Show, every pitch’s break is displayed, and you have an AI catcher helping you out. It seems to me this this type of design helps grow the audiences for both the video game and the real-life sport; it allows a player to learn at their pace while still having fun. Can we have it both ways? Or are the studios better off doing what Madden does; hold onto their hardcore base and basically throw up the white flag on attracting new customers?
Mark Fossen: There are a couple of different aspects to that question. The biggest problem I’m seeing in sports gaming these days, and the No. 1 impediment to growth, is the complexity of the control schemes. “Twitch” or not isn’t the issue, the problem is that the games have become as complicated as PC flight simulations, where you need a ton of experience and training to begin to compete. You can explain the controls of Call Of Duty 4 in a matter of minutes, whereas you could explain how The Show works all game long - and still not get to everything. There’s a lot of assumed knowledge both of baseball and the control scheme, and that ensures an insular, entrenched audience. The other aspect is that if you want to attract a new audience, you need to define that audience. Where’s the entry point, and where are these new players coming from? Are they sports fans who need to be persuaded to pick up a controller? Or are they gaming fans who need to be shown that there’s just as much enjoyment to be had sacking quarterbacks as there is spawn-camping? The answer to that question would result in two very different games, and I don’t know which one’s better. I also don’t know that the one I would most like to see is necessarily the best one for the industry.
Shawn Drotar: That’s the catch, isn’t it? While the control schemes are undoubtedly complex, I’m not sure that they’re much worse than most console games, save ones on the Wii, of course.
Mark Fossen: Well, first off, there are multiple control schemes. You need to learn to pitch, to bat, to field, and run the bases. And I’m not harping on The Show; Madden has separate control sets for offense and defense, and separate controls for running, passing, and after the catch in the offensive control scheme alone. It’s endemic in sports games, and not so in the first-person shooter or platformer genres.
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We’ll have more of this discussion on Tuesday. In the meantime, we’d like to hear your thoughts: What takes more “skill”, knowledge or reflex, and how would you apply that to sports gaming? Let us know in the Comments thread below.
on April 14th, 2008 at 5:44 pm
Great stuff…
The one area I’ve had this discussion is which players you use on defense in a football game. I’ve read that it’s “borderline cheese” to use a d-lineman because it’s just easier…that “real players” use a defensive back or linebacker.
It just brings to light the question “Is allowing the AI to do some things not as “skillful”?”
In football games I’m not a joystick jockey enough to keep a cover corner on his man the entire route, jump the pass, and make the INT. Is that skill truly what defines us as players though? Or is it putting your players in the right position, even if you’re not doing the insanely hard manual plays.
Very interesting topic, especially as I notice that I no longer can hang with the scary Halo kids in controller ability. IMO it kind of makes things less fun when the game makes you play like a Halo elite player in order to win.
In the end, requiring total skill does not always mean fun. Then it just turns the games into a “up up down down left right left right b a select start” battle, not a sporting game.
on April 14th, 2008 at 8:47 pm
IMO, no game has ever done it better than NCAA Football 2004 on the PS2. It had the perfect mix of user control while using football knowledge that led to the better player winning almost every time…..regardless of team. If he was that much better than you, it didn’t really matter what team he was using.
Erick,
I think having the manual ability to play Safety, or linebacker and make the plays manually does constitute being more skillful. Now, you may be more knowledgeable about the game x’s and o’s of football, but it doesn’t make you skilled.
It’s like the kid in 5th grade that could rattle off every stat of every mlb player’s Topps Baseball card. He knew his stuff inside out, but couldn’t make a Little League team if his life depended on it.
Obviously this is nothing more than an opinionated topic and nobody is really right or wrong. Great subject guys and an interesting read…..as always. Keep up the great work!
on April 15th, 2008 at 11:02 am
Great article guys. One has to remember that we are talking about video games here. To me skills are the actual performance of something in reality. Hitting a golf ball is skill. Hitting a golf ball in Tiger Woods 08 isn’t. Actually throwing a curveball over the plate for a strike is skill where as manipulating a right analog stick or timing a button press is not.
The whole concept of “twitch” being skill is ludacris. Twitch is nothing more than a test of ones motor reflexes. Nothing more. Take guitar heroes for example. The players who excel at this game do so b/c they have superior motor reflexes. Any player playing this game sees the same patterns on the screen but not every one has the motor reflexes to execute the button presses in a timely fashion.
So in conclusion, reverting back to the discussion of MLB 2k8 requiring more skill than MLB 08, the argument is moot.
Merely moving a control from a button to a stick doesn’t amp up the skill level it merely adjusts the learning curve and once everyone learns how it is done it is no longer special or twitch worthy but merely routine.
As a rule I believe that controls should be intuitive to the point that it makes perfect sense and feels natural. You should never have to fight the controls in order to play the game. That has been the problem with 2k sports games for years. They are always trying to out think the room with there controls and the games suffer. That is why NHL 08 overtook NHL 2k8 this year. That is why MLB 08 is dominant over MLB 2k8.
on April 15th, 2008 at 11:28 am
Great read as always guys…
I personally find that this topic gets kicked around an awful lot in the Madden world - often times under the guise of code words such as “sim”, “str8″ (denoting more strategic-based players with less twitch skill), “tourney”, “East Room” or “cheese” (denoting the usually younger and more manually dexterous players) . Different strokes for different folks basically…but also what gives a game like Madden the ability to appeal to a wider audience than most titles.
Bottom line is that try as hard as they might, EA is in a no-win situation. They are on the Kobayashi Maru and Lt. Saavik is at the helm. Making the controls more accessible could only be achieved by reducing or gimping out features that the base expects. It would go over about as well as if the Republican Party decided to pull the anti-abortion plank from the platform. Yet - the conventional thinking goes - with that perceived increasing complexity in the controls each and every year, they raise the entry barrier higher for new gamers.
I dispute that last point. The ENTRY level is established in kids these day as as young as 3-years old (my son Tristan can handle a 360-controller and run around the screen in Viva Pinata or Lego Star Wars with little difficulty). They simply grow up in a more complex world than their parents like me did 25 years ago.
But while they grow up in a more complex world, they also adapt to and learn how to play video games under a very different set of expectations and realities than say a 40-year old who has never gamed (or hasn’t gamed since their late teens) trying to play Madden NFL 2009 would. For kids (ie. the “new” customers by virtue of coming of age and wanting a football or baseball or hockey game for the first time), the complex controls are not nearly as daunting or over-wrought as they are for adults - or adult non-gamers more precisely.
I bet dollars to doughnuts that I could teach my 5 year old son how to play Madden inside of a week. Teaching my 65-year old father the same thing is a virtual impossibility. He wouldn’t get it because the last time he touched a video game of any kind was when I was beating his ass in Atari 2600 Combat and he got mad enough to “ban” me from playing (soon deciding that he would just give up playing the “kids” game for fear of a nightly ass-kicking from his 8-year and 6-year old sons).
Years and years ago, as the video game industry was born and began to grow, a very important part of this overall experience was growing with the industry - the number of interface buttons on a standard console controller.
From the original Pong home paddle (with a disc a single red button) to the Atari 2600 (joystick + 1 red button) to the NES directional pad and two red buttons to the Genesis directional pad and three buttons then six buttons to the PSOne to the Dual Shock (two analog sticks, 4 shoulder buttons, 4 face buttons and a myriad of additional options.) The point being that as each subsequent generation of hardware and I/O devices have come to market, the expectations of increased user control options has grow along side it. In effect, this means that gamers today start from a much higher assumed or integrated complexity than previous generations.
I realize that the Wii has been a massive hit in the industry, but truthfully, after an initial fascination with the bowling game, my kids - who got a Wii for Christmas - have quickly abandoned it for the 360 to play games like DDR, Viva Pinata and Lego Star Wars. I believe in my heart that the Wii was a niche product - for an admittedly very BIG niche - adult or aged non-gamers who felt threatened by the complexity of modern console systems but wanted to see why other people seemed to have so much fun with video games. That is a stroke of marketing genius by Nintendo, but they have done that before when they saved the industry from oblivion in the mid-80’s by bring back home games with the NES.
But ultimately, I believe the games industry is not in need of a massive Wii-ification of intuitive control redesign. I think that the Wii nicely fits the exact market that was underserved in the games industry - older, mature non-gamers and little kids looking to get into something cute and new.
As for the rest of us, those who have grown up with the industry or have just grown to love the industry as a hobby, pass time or diversion, I personally want to see the game developers continue to offer MORE control options and not LESS. If people can’t play a certain game because of the control scheme, then they really should have 2 options - play a gimped out version or learn how to play. Making things easier to gain accessibility is a sure fire way to make games that satisfy no one. Newbies will still get ‘pwned’ and veterans will be put-off by the simplistic nature of the games.
NHL 2008 was unique in my opinion because of the nature of the game - one player + one stick (used to do all of the actions in the sport) + two analog controls = good math. Similarly, golf is another example - one player + one club + two analog sticks = good math. But in football or basketball or soccer - one player + 2 legs + 2 arms + torso and one head + 2 analog sticks = bad math. This necessitates either combination-style controls or pre-programmed, canned animations, which - even if contextually based, usually leave players very cold.
Anyway, thanks for your article and the site…always a great source of information and opinions!
on April 15th, 2008 at 2:02 pm
[…] “Skill” and Sports Gaming […]
on April 15th, 2008 at 2:08 pm
Not sure why NHL 08 control are so highly praised. Every time I played that game my thumb was killing me from using the right analog stick to shoot. Too bad I learned after I shipped it back to Gamefly that you could change the controls so that you can shoot with a face button….Doh!
pb
on April 16th, 2008 at 10:27 am
pb I feel your pain. Being left handed I used to have my hand killing me from extensive RS use. But games like FNR3 changed that. It’s just a matter of repetition and building the right thumb muscles.
As to the other points, I’m totally with moostache. I’ve already done the little block men that were supposed to be the height of tech for their day and let the action button decide what I’m doing at said point in the game. Now, I’ve got ten buttons that, in context, can give me a depth of control that I could never dream possible. And they have the processing power and graphical power to give me a virtual Carson Palmer that looks and acts like him. What’s the point of going back? Other than trying to attract some fad gamers who will try to play and realise that they didn’t like games in the first place?
on April 19th, 2008 at 11:12 pm
THAT SUCKS