As someone who strongly believes that there’s no right or wrong entertainment to be into, your brain likes what it likes; there is nothing I love that I’m more appreciative of having my brain vibe with it than professional sports. For my money, there is simply no better source of entertainment than elite athletics, and it’s why I can happily watch nearly any sporting event as long as there are meaningful stakes that can be explained to me, regardless of my familiarity with or prior interest in the sport.
The beauty of sports as entertainment is that it comes with so much uncertainty because even those responsible for telling the story don’t know how things are going to play out once the whistles blow. While this unpredictability is a key component in making sports so enthralling, it’s still important to have reasons to be invested in who wins or doesn’t, otherwise what drama exists in the uncertainty goes out the window.
Now, this is not to say there would be no stakes without outside drama considerations. People who worked their whole lives to be the best in a battle where one side will achieve that goal are inherently interesting. Still, relatively few people watching a sporting event will do so with no rooting interest at all, and the more we know about the relevant parties, from players to coaches to clubs to fans, the easier it is to get wrapped up in the story.
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It should be no surprise that, as the media has gotten more and more geared toward following the viewer numbers, the focus on what happens off the field has gone up, to the detriment of coverage of the actual sports in the eyes of many. Hearing about who might be moving where and which players said what thing about what opponent is a shortcut to suddenly caring very much about which of two teams you don’t root for comes out on top.
Why Outside Drama Can Improve Franchise And Career Modes
Whether you like its prevalence or not, it’s hard to deny that the sports landscape today is dominated by talk about what’s going on off the field as much as what’s happening on it.
- New Mechanics to Learn: One problem that longplay modes like franchise and career mode can suffer from is the game reaching a point of sameness. After awhile you’ve mastered all the mechanics and can feel a bit like you’re operating on cruise control. The ability for outside drama to lob a hand grenade into your locker room adds a new system to learn to increase the skill ceiling for a game.
- New Storyline to Follow: Just as what you’re trying to do can become rote in a long career mode campaign, so too can the type of things you encounter in your time. Diversifying the potential storylines that are available means that it’s less likely that one season will feel like the one before it and the one to come by injecting unique challenges from the drama around your club that year.
- Closer to Real Life Experience: Simply put, the things we view as sports drama actually have a big impact on the real-world sports we watch. Athletes and coaches are just people at the end of the day, and dealing with the rumors and discussion has real impacts on their play and so it makes sense for games to try to better replicate that to make for a more realistic experience.
The Drama We Could See In Future Games
When it comes to looking into what we might see implemented in games in the future, and what is not so likely, it can be beneficial to look at games that already go above the industry standard. The Football Manager series is famous for the intense levels of granularity it goes to in trying to replicate the real-world coaching experience, and that carries over into the type of news and rumors you encounter in your inbox during a playthrough.
Here are some things that more sports games could benefit from working into its franchise and career modes:
- The Coaching Carousel: One of the hottest sources of intrigue in sports is the drama around who will be in charge at the league’s clubs. The NFL season just wrapped up, and with it has come the annual glut of firings and vacancies, but the conversation around those jobs didn’t start when the final seconds ticked off the clock in Week 18. Instead, rumors of who is on the hot seat, who is looking for new work, and who could be in for a promotion to a higher role are ever-present throughout the calendar, both in season and out.
- Internal Squabbles: Another area where many sports franchises could significantly expand is in the world of internal drama at a club. By fleshing out the player dynamics systems and adding in more content involving interpersonal relations in squad games, can better replicate the real-world difficulty of teams where not every player always loves every teammate they have to work with.
- Player Movement Rumors: Few things dominate sports media programming like talk about player transfers. Adding mechanics where rumored discontent can lead to actual impacts on your team would be a new consideration in many sports games that makes for a deeper and more lifelike experience.
The Drama We Are Unlikely To Ever See In A Video Game
The sports-related drama is something that is certainly a viable option for game franchises looking to expand and improve from year to year, but not everything in the sports zeitgeist is likely to find its way to our PCs and consoles. While more work to incorporate drama around player and coach movement or internal squabbles is a reasonable ask, and something that in many cases would represent an expansion as opposed to a full introduction, don’t count on any major games incorporating huge off-field drama into their games.
The reason for this becomes pretty clear when you consider how common it is for movies, books, and the like to rely on fictionalized representations of real people or corporations instead of writing stories with real-world elements. Simply put, a video game that allows for randomly generated problems that mimic some of the worst real-world incidents is a recipe for a lawsuit. The first time somebody sees a screenshot of a game saying they committed some heinous act like the kind that has seen real professionals handed serious suspensions, there would be a letter from an attorney to the developer’s headquarters en route promptly. Fortunately, few people would consider a game not allowing them the thrill of managing a roster with a domestic abuser or the internal squabble of a player sleeping with a teammate’s partner to be a huge loss.
Do you agree that more games could benefit by increasing the mechanics around internal drama, or would this feature do little to make you check out another career or franchise play of your favorite franchise?
