Continuing our discussion from yesterday, Mark Fossen and I tackle the most relevant topic in sports gaming today: when designing games, what constitutes the most important “skill”? The ability to move the controller, or the ability to make the right decisions - and how can game-makers expand their audience by applying these concepts to their titles?

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Shawn Drotar: I’m convinced that “twitch” skills are perceived to be the overriding judge of gaming skill as a whole, whereas titles like MLB 08: The Show are penalized because the mental aspect of the sport is stressed more than the physical one. Is sports gaming doomed to be stagnant - or even negative - in terms of growth? My wife enjoys sports, but getting her to even try a sports game is out of the question. Can that chasm ever be bridged? Is streamlining the control scheme the key? Having the same buttons act contextually, for example? Or is this just the built-in difficulty with making sports titles?

Mark Fossen: I think streamlining is certainly a key. It’s certainly part of the appeal of NHL 08. The controls just flat-out worked. Though there was subtlety and complexity underneath the ease, at heart you moved your guy and you moved his stick. Pretty simple. It’s certainly an uphill struggle, though, because sports gaming has cultivated the hardcore to such an extreme that any attempt to expand the audience like EA’s Family Play initiative on the Wii is instantly met with derision and scorn. Sports developers are getting painted into a corner by an increasingly rabid fanbase that’s interested in little more than the status quo.

Shawn Drotar: And “twitch” is the status quo; sports gaming is still clearly planted in the chest-thumping world of “White Men Can’t Jump”.

Mark Fossen: I do think that “skill” is generally perceived to be that twitch component, as opposed to “knowledge”. And right now, both are requiring sports gamers to bring too much to the table as the cost of entry, instead of developing compelling, simple gameplay mechanics that can balance knowledge and twitch while teaching both. I know: I’m asking for the moon, but when I look at non-sport games that do such an excellent job of teaching both mechanics and knowledge, I don’t know why sports games lag so far behind. I ask myself this: what would a Valve baseball game look like?

Shawn Drotar: It would have more characters with glasses. Be that the case, is there some argument for a minor-league Madden; a football-like substance that’s entertaining for newcomers without turning into pabulum like NFL Tour?

Mark Fossen: Or the “Gran Turismo For Boys” idea. Just a mode that doesn’t assume you walk in an expert.

Shawn Drotar: The question - for studios, at least - is obvious; would this grow the audience at a reasonable cost?

Mark Fossen: Well… when you say “studios”, I almost wonder where the plural is coming from. The “studios” is essentially EA (and that will only continue), and I think the lead balloon of Family Play answered that question. Though I wouldn’t doubt that Peter Moore might find another approach to growing the audience.

Shawn Drotar: It seems to me, that sports games may need to find a niche like vitamins. Bear with me. When you’re a kid and growing, perhaps the Flinstones chewables work for you; they’re sweet and inviting, and its helping you without having to really understand how. As you get older, you get your plain old multi-vitamin. It’s a pill, it’s tasteless, but you know it’s a means to an end - and the end is a happy, healthy lifestyle. After you reach middle-age (which for gamers, is what? 40?), you start looking to the Geritol; you’re not as quick as you used to be, but instead of being an athlete; you’re now the coach. I have no desire to play Madden against a 15 year-old kid. None - and it’s because by nature, we look at the same football field, but see entirely different things. The kid looks at it as an opportunity to show his stuff; to preen and showboat and derive enjoyment from his physical abilities. The adult looks at it as a tactical exercise, planning and scheming to out-think the opposition.

EA tried this kind of thing with the first NFL Head Coach, and they’ll be trying again soon. But what hamstrung the first version was simple - it was monumentally boring. That’s why something like The Show is so darn impressive; it excites the mind as well, and what’s more important - it rewards it. Certainly, there’s a lesson here, isn’t there?

Mark Fossen: I think The Show hit a sweet spot of smarts and skill that definitely worked for both of us. I certainly enjoyed the game, as my mid-2011 career attests to. I think there’s a lesson there about creating a good sports simulation game for the knowledgeable gamer. I’m just not sure that appealing to you and me is the way forward for the genre, or a recipe for financial success.

Shawn Drotar: Then what do you see as “moving forward”? What can propel the sports gaming genre out of this stagnation if not truly innovative titles like The Show and NHL 08? Does the Madden team - or the Gran Turismo team really have it right - just pretty it up every year and throw something up for the back of the box? Should the sports game industry give up on growing their own product, and let their respective licensees do it for them, knowing that they’ll capture a certain segment of real-life sports fans - and simply work to retain them? Because, let’s face it - that’s what they’ve really done, and it’s worked quite well for the bottom line. But the games are more cookie-cutter than ever, like horror movies for teenagers - they’re essentially interchangeable. While BioShock, Mass Effect and even Grand Theft Auto advance the “games as art” argument, sports games often seem doomed to do the opposite; to simply feed the machine.

Mark Fossen: I think they are very different titles. For all my enjoyment, The Show is a quintessential example of preaching to the converted. The mechanics are too complicated to explain to a new player, and the baseball knowledge required for even something like the pre-load throwing mechanic means that those who might master the controller wouldn’t master the baseball. It’s achieving something wonderful, but it’s a limited audience that will ever be able to truly enjoy it. NHL 08 may be the way forward, as it really relies on fun, accessible mechanics. It’s the classic case of a game having a potentially wider appeal than the sport it simulates.

BioShock, Mass Effect and Grand Theft Auto aren’t simulating anything, and that’s the difference. They are games, first and foremost. They are trying to create excellent gaming experiences wrapped in a veneer of their subject matter. It’s even the same with the supposedly “realistic” shooter like Rainbow Six or Ghost Recon: it’s not a “sim” of the military experience, it’s a game. The games will stop being cookie-cutter when there’s some vision involved beyond strict simulation realism.

Shawn Drotar: Interesting. How so? I’m concerned that if you remove a sports game from it’s reality, than the tactics and strategies become inapplicable. In other words, you may be better off making a totally new sport and not bother with a license. How would you make, say, an NBA game?

Mark Fossen: If I knew that, I’d be much richer than I am now. I think - in short - that I’d begin by building from the ground up. Focusing on the athlete’s motion, rather than why he’s doing it. For example: a jump is a jump, whether you’re blocking a shot or releasing one.

Shawn Drotar: Aha. I get what you’re saying now. My apologies for mixing our sports up here, but I think the throw meters in The Show do a good job of that kind of thing, especially pitching - rotating the body, exerting relative strength and releasing the ball at the proper point. It simulates bio-mechanics rather simply and efficiently, I think.

Mark Fossen: Instead of worrying so much about shot percentages in basketball, I’d worry about physics and basic interaction with those physics. Again - the Half-Life 2 of baseball. I long for a sports game with half the inventiveness and joy of Half-Life, Super Mario Galaxy, or Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune.

Shawn Drotar: So you’re talking under-the-hood stuff? No parameters - just create… a reality, so to speak?

Mark Fossen: That’s at least part of it. But my main focus is creating a fun, believable game first… and if home runs occur at a 10% higher rate than reality, I’ll make that trade.

Shawn Drotar: Well, the fringe element that freaks out at slight statistical variants; as heretical as this sounds, I think you have to ignore them to some extent. For mathematical games of standard deviations, you have text sims. However, slugging 50 home runs should never be easy, and hitting 70 should generally be out of the question. I think there’s still room to maneuver within those boundaries. But, I also think that the 40-something gamer should have the same opportunity to clout 50 by working the pitch count that the 15-year old does with pure reflex… somehow.

Mark Fossen: Sports gamers always cry out for a return to Tecmo Bowl and Baseball Stars, and those games were designed for fun. “How can we make a good video game that’s about football?”, not “How can we create a simulation of football?”.

Shawn Drotar: That certainly may be so, but I think that many gamers find the nostalgia more comforting than the reality. Tecmo Bowl - as fun as it was - had nothing to do with strategy, or even football, really, when you break it down into its constituent elements.

I suppose we’re back to the start.

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We’d like to hear what you think, and we’ll be discussing some of your ideas in a future article. Please use the comments thread below to continue this discussion yourselves.