Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
college sports, the rules will be different again. Unless you have the endorsement
of a specific athlete, you must make sure that your game displays all athletes in
approximately the same way, or endorsement could be implied. You can't make it
look as if an athlete has endorsed your game when that's not the case.
Photographs present further difficulties. You must obtain a license from the person
in
the photograph and also the photograph's copyright holder (usually the person
who
took
the photograph). Again, some governing bodies use special clearing-
houses for these kinds of things: NFL Photos, a special department of the NFL,
licenses still photos for all the photographers who are accredited to take pictures at
NFL matches. The license from the copyright holder, however, does not grant you
the personal publicity rights of the athlete in the picture; you have to obtain those
separately. You can also license photos from the trading card companies, as well as
from journalistic bodies such as the Associated Press, and from private photo libraries.
In short, the whole issue of rights in sports games is a legal minefield. Nowadays, even
the stadiums might claim special rights, and many stadium owners auction the name
of the stadium to the highest bidder, as with AT&T Park (the San Francisco baseball
stadium). As a designer, you probably won't have to deal with obtaining all these
licenses yourself, but you should know that it's not safe to specify simply that a
game will use all the team and athlete names and photos. Obtaining them and the
right to use them is a very costly and time-consuming business. It's best to design
the game in such a way that it doesn't depend on having these things unless you're
certain that they will be available.
Audio Commentary
Most sports games try to reproduce the experience of watching the sport on television.
An important part of that experience is hearing the announcers' commentary, or
play-by-play. Most TV and radio sports broadcasts include at least two people, the play-
by-play announcer and the color commentator. The play-by-play announcer describes
the action on a moment-by-moment basis. The color commentator, usually a retired
coach or player, offers insights into strategy and tactics, as well as background material
on the teams or individual athletes. To make the player feel she's right there in the
stands, you might include a third voice, that of the stadium announcer over the public
address system. His remarks tend to be quite formulaic, although they do occasion-
ally include requests to move badly parked cars, retrieve found children, and so on.
To st udy what k inds of things your audio commentar y w ill need to do, record a T V
broadcast of a real match and then transcribe everything that is said and who said
it. Do this for two or three matches, and you will begin to notice patterns in the
play-by-play: The announcers tend to read out the score at particular times, they
use certain repetitive language, and so on. As you watch the match on videotape,
take note of the different kinds of events that occur and the different remarks these
events elicit from the commentators. The events that provoke a reaction from the
color commentator aren't necessarily the same events that trigger a response from
