Post by cinestertheater on Mar 14, 2010 21:25:06 GMT -5
I don't watch basketball. I mean, I don't watch *any* sports, but given the fact that all my friends love basketball, it gets a special mention; I deliberately and openly Do Other Things when they're all over at my house to watch the newest Suns game, and I'm more than happy to root for the other team (especially the Lakers, who apparently are the basketball-equivalent of The Iron Sheik, but keep in mind that all my friends are thoroughly Suns-biased) just to get a rise out of them.
"You're missing the part of your brain that allows you to like sports," my friends say, their tones suggesting that this is a loss I should mourn. I tend to disagree; I can certainly appreciate the hard work and athleticism that goes into playing a fast-paced game like basketball, and I "ooh" and "aah" over the particularly spectacular dunks that I occasionally see. It's also not that I'm unable to see the appeal of taking joy in the achievements of others- the whole "saying 'we won last night!' when all you did was sit at home and watch the game, which was won or lost entirely without reference to your feelings on the matter" thing- because if that were true I would be thoroughly unable to enjoy *any* works of fiction, let alone professional wrestling.
I think it's the tribalism- the whole "our flag is better than your flag!" sort of mentality. If I were to suddenly start caring about basketball, my favorite team would probably be the Lakers, since to my understanding they typically perform the best and currently have the best basketball player alive, alleged-rapist Kobe Bryant, playing for them. But my friends (who, mind you, are all rabid Suns fans) say this is a wrong decision:
"That's like those people who live in Arizona but wear Yankees baseball hats," they say. "I guarantee you that the only reason they like the Yankees is because they always win."
I don't understand this; Batman always wins, and most of my friends like Batman. If the Lakers always do well in the standings, it's probably got something to do with the quality of their basketballing... which means I'm more likely to see amazing passes and mind-boggling slam dunks if I'm following *them*.
But maybe it's not about that- maybe it's about rooting for the underdog. "Fine," I say. "Which basketball team is the worst? I'll root for them."
This, also, is apparently incorrect. "Why would you want to root for them? They suck."
(All my basketball information comes from my friends or what I absorb through osmosis when basketball is on my TV, but to my understanding the worst basketball team ever is the Golden State Warriors. This is amusing, because I'm pretty sure their franchise has previously won an NBA Championship while the Suns never, ever have... but I only point this out when I'm feeling particularly douchey.)
"You just don't get it," they say. And I don't. Liking the Suns simply because they live in the same state as I do is, to me, hugely irrational. I can't make myself blind to their faults (and given the fact that they've never been NBA champions, they clearly have some faults) or refuse to recognize the qualities of the teams they play against. Objectively, as someone who doesn't particularly care one way or the other, I've observed the Lakers to be a superior basketball team. It's just that simple.
All that said... I still love basketball videogames.
Like I said, I don't care what teams win or what teams lose, but I can enjoy a solid slam-dunk as much as anybody else. And since performing a slam-dunk from the free-throw line is something that I'm probably never going to be able to do in real life, I'm content to simulate the experience with my XBOX. Naturally, playing an NBA videogame familiarizes me, to a lesser degree, with NBA basketball... and given that the latest game, NBA 2k10, has a "home screen" that gives you up-to-the-minute updates of what's going on in the World of Basketball (so long as you're connected to XBOX Live), I find myself learning more about basketball than I ever cared to know.
All of that's forgivable, though- this is a game that wasn't really designed for me, but that I just happen to enjoy playing because I can create a tiny avatar of myself and make him slam-dunk over Shaq like some kind of long-awaited recompense for the game "Shaq Fu". What bothers me is the devotion to basketball statistics.
Here's what I mean- every player has different attribute points that are distributed in such a way to reflect their real-life basketball skills. Naturally, "real-life basketball skills" is sort of vague, so they go off of basketball statistics: if Steve Nash's 3-point average is 40%, then that translates in-game to him making roughly 4 successful 3-point shots out of 10. This sounds like a perfectly reasonable system to build a basketball videogame around, and considering the fact that these NBA 2k games have progressed all the way up to 2k10 (which, as my friend Laura pointed out, should really be called "NBA 2kX"), I'm guessing most of the core fan-base finds it acceptable.
But as a gamer, this system absolutely does not work. Oh sure, it's a fine theory to recreate the feel of a *real* basketball season... after all, not even Kobe Bryant makes a basket every time he shoots. But in practice, it means that you as a player are no longer in control of your own success or failure.
Look at it like this: say you're playing "Super Mario Brothers". You know all the controls, of course, and you know what to do when you run into a goombah. Sure, if you fail to hit the jump button in time and take a goombah to the face, then you know exactly what went wrong there; in the future, you'll just have to be quicker on the draw, or maybe approach the situation a little bit more carefully. Point is, there are concrete problems with your execution that can be identified, and there are steps you can take to improve your performance.
But now let's say that goombah-stomping was a real sport, and that Mario's successful goombah-stomping percentage in real life was 70%. Translated into game-form, that means that successfully stomping on a goombah's head will result in a dead goombah 7 times out of ten... but that other three times, the goombah kills you anyway. This isn't something that can be helped... it's not about jumping sooner, or approaching the goombah more carefully. It's literally just boiled down to "sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't."
This is how NBA 2k10 works.
This might sound like an exaggeration, but I promise you it isn't: the game boasts more than a few practice modes where you can work on mastering the actual controls. You shoot the basketball by pulling lightly downward on the right control-stick, holding it for a moment, and then releasing it... there's an element of timing that you do need to get the hang of. Very helpfully, the practice modes will throw a little graphic on the screen after each shot telling you how well you did- stuff like "Bad Release (Very Late)" or "Good Release (Too Early)"- so that you know if you're holding the stick too long or not long enough. These graphics also include "Perfect Release", which means that your timing is exactly perfect.
All this would be fine, but that getting a "Perfect Release" does not guarentee that you've made the basket. See, real-life statistics somehow matter to this videogame, and just because you've mastered the controls doesn't mean you actually get to take the worst team in the NBA all the way to the championships.
On the flip side of the coin, sometimes you get a "Bad Release" message... and still successfully make your shot. Again, the fact that you suck at this game isn't enough to bring down Kobe Bryant's success rate.
Think about that for a moment; this is a gameplay mechanic that seems to be going out of its way to remove you from the equation. Sure, you do need to be familiar with the controls and have a basic understanding of how the game of basketball works... but once you've reached that point, you've got maybe 35% control over whether or not your team actually wins. There are games where you do everything right, but the players just aren't scoring anything... and there are games where you constantly make poor decisions, bad passes, or hopeless shots, and still find yourself rocking a 20-point lead.
The game is hugely fun... when you're doing well. And maybe, if you're lucky, you'll manage three or four solid performances and dupe yourself into thinking that you've finally mastered the game. Then, inevitably, the other shoe drops, and all of a sudden you can't beat somebody who's playing with an unplugged controller. This creates *scary* amounts of frustration... all my friends are generally pretty level-headed, but every single one of them has found themselves slapping the armrests of their chair and stringing together unlikely combinations of consonants and vowels because traditional forms of swearing are no longer adequate to convey their blind fury.
The source of this frustration is immediately obvious: I'm playing well, so why the frak am I still doing so poorly?
No other videogames can get away with this. If you die a lot in Ninja Gaiden, you might eventually come to the conclusion that you just suck at Ninja Gaiden and can't be bothered to spend the time getting better. But imagine if you occasionally were able to beat Ninja Gaiden without losing a life or taking a single hit using the exact same strategies that you use when you find yourself unable to beat the first level. You'll find yourself constantly chasing that next good performance, filled with self-doubt and self-loathing when you think that the problem must still somehow be you, that *you're* not doing something right.... and then you adapt your behavior and do better and think, "Okay, I *finally* understand now...", and then you hit rock bottom. All your best strategies don't do *anything*. All the hours you spent mastering that "Perfect Release" are a joke. The game has evaluated the statistics and coldly decreed that You Shall Lose.
What do you do? You can climb back on the horse and rededicate yourself, totally committed to someday mastering the game. But it can't be mastered, precisely because you're not the one who gets the final say on how well you perform. The end result is a game that's about as entertaining as watching the Demo Screen, picking one of the two teams who are playing at random, and attributing their success or failure to how loudly you're screaming encouragement at the television. Given that this must be exactly what it's like to follow an actual basketball season, I can kind-of sort-of see the appeal for fans of basketball. I just don't understand why they're willing to slap down $60 for something that TNT will give them every year for free.
"You're missing the part of your brain that allows you to like sports," my friends say, their tones suggesting that this is a loss I should mourn. I tend to disagree; I can certainly appreciate the hard work and athleticism that goes into playing a fast-paced game like basketball, and I "ooh" and "aah" over the particularly spectacular dunks that I occasionally see. It's also not that I'm unable to see the appeal of taking joy in the achievements of others- the whole "saying 'we won last night!' when all you did was sit at home and watch the game, which was won or lost entirely without reference to your feelings on the matter" thing- because if that were true I would be thoroughly unable to enjoy *any* works of fiction, let alone professional wrestling.
I think it's the tribalism- the whole "our flag is better than your flag!" sort of mentality. If I were to suddenly start caring about basketball, my favorite team would probably be the Lakers, since to my understanding they typically perform the best and currently have the best basketball player alive, alleged-rapist Kobe Bryant, playing for them. But my friends (who, mind you, are all rabid Suns fans) say this is a wrong decision:
"That's like those people who live in Arizona but wear Yankees baseball hats," they say. "I guarantee you that the only reason they like the Yankees is because they always win."
I don't understand this; Batman always wins, and most of my friends like Batman. If the Lakers always do well in the standings, it's probably got something to do with the quality of their basketballing... which means I'm more likely to see amazing passes and mind-boggling slam dunks if I'm following *them*.
But maybe it's not about that- maybe it's about rooting for the underdog. "Fine," I say. "Which basketball team is the worst? I'll root for them."
This, also, is apparently incorrect. "Why would you want to root for them? They suck."
(All my basketball information comes from my friends or what I absorb through osmosis when basketball is on my TV, but to my understanding the worst basketball team ever is the Golden State Warriors. This is amusing, because I'm pretty sure their franchise has previously won an NBA Championship while the Suns never, ever have... but I only point this out when I'm feeling particularly douchey.)
"You just don't get it," they say. And I don't. Liking the Suns simply because they live in the same state as I do is, to me, hugely irrational. I can't make myself blind to their faults (and given the fact that they've never been NBA champions, they clearly have some faults) or refuse to recognize the qualities of the teams they play against. Objectively, as someone who doesn't particularly care one way or the other, I've observed the Lakers to be a superior basketball team. It's just that simple.
All that said... I still love basketball videogames.
Like I said, I don't care what teams win or what teams lose, but I can enjoy a solid slam-dunk as much as anybody else. And since performing a slam-dunk from the free-throw line is something that I'm probably never going to be able to do in real life, I'm content to simulate the experience with my XBOX. Naturally, playing an NBA videogame familiarizes me, to a lesser degree, with NBA basketball... and given that the latest game, NBA 2k10, has a "home screen" that gives you up-to-the-minute updates of what's going on in the World of Basketball (so long as you're connected to XBOX Live), I find myself learning more about basketball than I ever cared to know.
All of that's forgivable, though- this is a game that wasn't really designed for me, but that I just happen to enjoy playing because I can create a tiny avatar of myself and make him slam-dunk over Shaq like some kind of long-awaited recompense for the game "Shaq Fu". What bothers me is the devotion to basketball statistics.
Here's what I mean- every player has different attribute points that are distributed in such a way to reflect their real-life basketball skills. Naturally, "real-life basketball skills" is sort of vague, so they go off of basketball statistics: if Steve Nash's 3-point average is 40%, then that translates in-game to him making roughly 4 successful 3-point shots out of 10. This sounds like a perfectly reasonable system to build a basketball videogame around, and considering the fact that these NBA 2k games have progressed all the way up to 2k10 (which, as my friend Laura pointed out, should really be called "NBA 2kX"), I'm guessing most of the core fan-base finds it acceptable.
But as a gamer, this system absolutely does not work. Oh sure, it's a fine theory to recreate the feel of a *real* basketball season... after all, not even Kobe Bryant makes a basket every time he shoots. But in practice, it means that you as a player are no longer in control of your own success or failure.
Look at it like this: say you're playing "Super Mario Brothers". You know all the controls, of course, and you know what to do when you run into a goombah. Sure, if you fail to hit the jump button in time and take a goombah to the face, then you know exactly what went wrong there; in the future, you'll just have to be quicker on the draw, or maybe approach the situation a little bit more carefully. Point is, there are concrete problems with your execution that can be identified, and there are steps you can take to improve your performance.
But now let's say that goombah-stomping was a real sport, and that Mario's successful goombah-stomping percentage in real life was 70%. Translated into game-form, that means that successfully stomping on a goombah's head will result in a dead goombah 7 times out of ten... but that other three times, the goombah kills you anyway. This isn't something that can be helped... it's not about jumping sooner, or approaching the goombah more carefully. It's literally just boiled down to "sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't."
This is how NBA 2k10 works.
This might sound like an exaggeration, but I promise you it isn't: the game boasts more than a few practice modes where you can work on mastering the actual controls. You shoot the basketball by pulling lightly downward on the right control-stick, holding it for a moment, and then releasing it... there's an element of timing that you do need to get the hang of. Very helpfully, the practice modes will throw a little graphic on the screen after each shot telling you how well you did- stuff like "Bad Release (Very Late)" or "Good Release (Too Early)"- so that you know if you're holding the stick too long or not long enough. These graphics also include "Perfect Release", which means that your timing is exactly perfect.
All this would be fine, but that getting a "Perfect Release" does not guarentee that you've made the basket. See, real-life statistics somehow matter to this videogame, and just because you've mastered the controls doesn't mean you actually get to take the worst team in the NBA all the way to the championships.
On the flip side of the coin, sometimes you get a "Bad Release" message... and still successfully make your shot. Again, the fact that you suck at this game isn't enough to bring down Kobe Bryant's success rate.
Think about that for a moment; this is a gameplay mechanic that seems to be going out of its way to remove you from the equation. Sure, you do need to be familiar with the controls and have a basic understanding of how the game of basketball works... but once you've reached that point, you've got maybe 35% control over whether or not your team actually wins. There are games where you do everything right, but the players just aren't scoring anything... and there are games where you constantly make poor decisions, bad passes, or hopeless shots, and still find yourself rocking a 20-point lead.
The game is hugely fun... when you're doing well. And maybe, if you're lucky, you'll manage three or four solid performances and dupe yourself into thinking that you've finally mastered the game. Then, inevitably, the other shoe drops, and all of a sudden you can't beat somebody who's playing with an unplugged controller. This creates *scary* amounts of frustration... all my friends are generally pretty level-headed, but every single one of them has found themselves slapping the armrests of their chair and stringing together unlikely combinations of consonants and vowels because traditional forms of swearing are no longer adequate to convey their blind fury.
The source of this frustration is immediately obvious: I'm playing well, so why the frak am I still doing so poorly?
No other videogames can get away with this. If you die a lot in Ninja Gaiden, you might eventually come to the conclusion that you just suck at Ninja Gaiden and can't be bothered to spend the time getting better. But imagine if you occasionally were able to beat Ninja Gaiden without losing a life or taking a single hit using the exact same strategies that you use when you find yourself unable to beat the first level. You'll find yourself constantly chasing that next good performance, filled with self-doubt and self-loathing when you think that the problem must still somehow be you, that *you're* not doing something right.... and then you adapt your behavior and do better and think, "Okay, I *finally* understand now...", and then you hit rock bottom. All your best strategies don't do *anything*. All the hours you spent mastering that "Perfect Release" are a joke. The game has evaluated the statistics and coldly decreed that You Shall Lose.
What do you do? You can climb back on the horse and rededicate yourself, totally committed to someday mastering the game. But it can't be mastered, precisely because you're not the one who gets the final say on how well you perform. The end result is a game that's about as entertaining as watching the Demo Screen, picking one of the two teams who are playing at random, and attributing their success or failure to how loudly you're screaming encouragement at the television. Given that this must be exactly what it's like to follow an actual basketball season, I can kind-of sort-of see the appeal for fans of basketball. I just don't understand why they're willing to slap down $60 for something that TNT will give them every year for free.
