Sports Games - Fundamentals of Game Design - page 484

This chapter discusses athletic sports, as opposed to sports such as motor racing.
Although racing games are often sold in the sports category, from a design stand-
point, they really belong in Chapter 17, “Vehicle Simulations.”
Game Features
Most sports games concentrate on simulating actual matches, but many also
include a number of management functions as well—the challenges of managing
a team or an athlete's career. A few sports games implement only this aspect of
the sport and don't allow the player to control individual athletes in matches.
Occasionally called manager games , these are particularly popular in Europe.
A NOTE ON SPORT GAMES TERMINOLOGY
Because sports games simulate other games, as opposed to a war, a race, or an eco-
nomic competition of some kind, the words player and game are ambiguous. Does player
refer to the person playing the video game or to one of the athletes playing the game on
the field? This chapter uses the following convention: Player refers to the person playing
the video game, as it does throughout the rest of the topic. The people in the game are
the athletes . Game refers to the video game. Match describes the contest being simulated
by the game. The type of match that the athletes are playing (basketball or soccer, for
example) is called the sport .
A great many sports involve a playing area with a goal at either end and athletes trying
to manipulate some object into the goal. Basketball, ice hockey, water polo, and soccer
are all examples. These are referred to collectively as soccerlike games.
Game Structure
The main gameplay mode in a sports game is match play , simulating the sport itself
as it is played. Players can usually pause the game, which normally brings up a
menu permitting them to substitute athletes, change the camera view, perform
other sorts of coaching tasks, and sometimes adjust the AI. Players can also save
the game for later or abandon it.
Outside of match play, most of the game's modes relate to other aspects of the
sport: studying the athletes' ratings and performance statistics, hiring and trading
them, deciding who the starting athletes will be, and following the sport's match
or tournament schedule on a calendar. The screen layouts tend to reflect the book-
keeping nature of these activities, often resembling tables or graphs.