GAME REPORT: MADDEN NFL 2005 Madden NFL 2005 is a name well known as the most authentic football simulation available in the video game market today. Considered an improvement over the revered Madden NFL 2004, this game has definitely forged its way ahead in continuing with the 15 year old legacy of EA Sports dominating this segment. Customization for the game provides incremental activity: Tony Brunos fictional radio show: EA Sports Radio Create-a-fan feature. Create-a-team feature Create-a-player feature Create-a-playbook Rosters This is a welcome change from the serious nature of football simulation. There are a couple of new additions to the defensive suite in Madden NFL 2005. The Hit-Stick feature requires PC owners to own a good dual analog game-pad. To handle the multitude of controls via the normal WSAD keyboard layout is disastrous and alludes to Madden fans preferring consoles like the PS2, Gamecube and the X-Box. Another addition is the defensive hot route system which allows dynamic designation of defense players assignment at the touch of a button. Thus, resulting in a far more userconfigurable defense that actually makes playing defense much more enjoyable and strategic. There are 5 basic game modes: Franchise Mini-camp 2-Minute Drill Practise Situation Network Game For a beginner like me who has never played American Football, the Ask Madden option is really helpful in learning game-play rules, understanding formations and implementing the various strategies. A combination of this with the Practise and 2 minute Drill modes expedite the learning curve for the game. Preseason and regular season games provide the best platform for honing ones game-play skills. Gamers can select from the AFC and the NFC conference to play football matches during season.
Storyline Central is a Franchise Mode feature that is tied with EA Sports Radio that allows one to keep track of NFL media coverage. Of interest is the fact that the local papers actually feature the licenses of the big city papers in the game. Player profiles have key elements such as morale, trade of stars from a team and player personalities. Storyline Central accurately depicts media attention and personality driven drama that the NFL is associated with. This feature isnt necessarily the most useful, but serves as a smorgasbord of trivia. Overall, extremely enticing for those inclined towards professional team management, drafts and other such. The owner mode caters to people interested in maintaining a good team. Rewards in Madden are in the form of high attendance, plenty of sellouts and subsequent upgrades to the stadium. Graphically, Madden has a fairly consistent feel to it. A lot of effort has been put in trying to capture the real stadium experience. For instance, Heinz Field has been recreated with meticulous detail and helps players identify with regular season games by instilling in them that sense of belonging home and away. The kicking game is a little difficult to use. The speed of the kicking meter appears to vary on nearly every kick and requires an investment in time to master. The tackling animations give an incredible sensation of how hard the hit is actually being delivered. The high-end resolution of display of a PC makes certain flaws more prominent. The quality of sound effects is pretty good, given the fact that there is not much to hear. To compensate for the lack of sound, game players can choose from audio perspectives modes such as: Madden Classic In the booth On the field In the stands User/Custom Its new defense tactics coupled with fluid game-play make for Madden NFL 2005 superb football experience to the novice and the expert. In effect this makes the game more tactical keeping in mind that the offensive Playmaker Controls have been retained from last year. Truly, a case in point where the reward lies in playing the game and not just finishing it. Game Report Overview of Entertainment Technology Entertainment Technology Center, Carnegie Mellon University Arnab Basu 7th December, 2004

Simulation or Simulacrum? The Promise of Sports Games
Ron Scott and Judd Ethan Ruggill
When MADDEN copies the camera works and commentaries of televised football matches, its not just a clever postmodern strategy. Its satisfying the basic desire of a game player: Wouldnt it be cool if I could be in charge of the game playing out on my TV? You could probably devise a football interface that gives better tactical control, if the point of the game is simply to beat the computer. But its unlikely MADDEN 2005 will sport a jet-fighter-like HUD with GPS and radars. The role-playing at the heart of the game is not about strategy and tactics, or even athleticsits about the life on the little screen. Steve Theodore (48)
Despite the fact that there are arguably more than 40 different genres of computer games, American gamers are remarkably passionate about sports games1. In 2003, for example, nearly twenty percent of all console titles sold were sports games (The Entertainment Software Association), and the granddaddy of them all, Madden NFL Football, became the first franchise ever to be honored and exhibited at the Pro Football Hall of Fame (EA Sports Madden). Players passion for sports games can be seen in the big money tournaments hosted by Microsoft and Sony, the formation of professional gaming leagues such as Major League Gaming2, the thirty million copies of Madden NFL Football sold over the last fourteen years (EA Sports Madden), and the growth of Electronic Arts into a multi-billion dollar company that in 2003 alone boasted almost $2 billion in sales (Hoovers Inc.). What is particularly striking about Americans passion for sports games, however, is that it is a passion fuelled by a curious promise: sports games such as FIFA Soccer (2004), ESPN Major League Baseball (2004) and NHL 2004 (2004) claim at once to authenti-
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WORKS AND DAYS

cally represent both sport and the commodification of sport, or rather competition and how that competition is packaged in and by the media (e.g., football and NFL football). The problem is that they rarely fulfill this promise, or at least rarely do so fully. The user experiences that sports games offer are distillations and conflations of the experiences they are meant to simulate. While abstraction is inherent to simulationespecially for computer games because of hardware limitations and playability issuesthe abstractions found in many sports games mean that the games themselves are less simulations than simulacra. Games such as Madden NFL Football not only conflate and distill football and NFL football, but in so doing create an experience that mimics neither. The purpose of this article is to delimit the curious promise of sports games, as well as what it is they actually deliver. We will begin by analyzing the realism sports games claim to offer, and describe the ways they purport to simulate the play and management of sport. We will then show how this realism is in fact better understood as realism, a wholly commodified version of sport that in fact has very little to do with the real-life socio-economic phenomenon. The Promise Sports games have certainly come a long way since Mattel first introduced Football and Auto Racing in 1977. The red blips and two-inch screen that were so revolutionary during the me decade now seem quaint (if not downright prosaic) compared to the photorealistic graphics and audiophile-quality sound of contemporary offerings such as ESPN NFL Football (2004), ToCA Race Driver 2: Ultimate Racing Simulator (2004) or even Mario Kart: Double Dash!! (2003). Yet current sports games offer more than just stunning aesthetics; indeed, they trade in customizability. Not only are there now multiple types of sports games, including street (e.g., NBA Street [2001]) and adult (e.g., Dead or Alive Extreme Beach Vollyball [2003]), but many games also allow players to select from an astounding array of clothing, shoes and other gear with which to equip and personalize their avatars. So customizable, in fact, are contemporary sports games that they often exceed the realism of the environments they are designed to simulate. Street games provide an especially good example of this hyperrealism. In titles such as NFL Street (2004) or NBA Street Vol. 2 (2004), players select teams from among rosters of current and classic professional stars such as Ricky Williams, Barry Sanders and Nate Archibald. Players can also select from among both real and fictional fields upon which to play (e.g., Rucker Park, da roof, etc.). The attraction of street games (and perhaps computer games in general) is that they allow the player to mute her/his ego ideal (that part of identity formed during the mirror phase that works in conjunction with the superego to police the self) with an ideal ego (an idealized, omnipotent vision of the self)an ideal ego embodied by the celebrity professional athlete3. Street games conflate

Scott and Ruggill

nostalgic remembrances of childhood with the appeal of inhabiting the virtual bodies of performers who are capable of far greater athletic exploits than anything remotely possible by gamers themselves. These electronic versions of pick-up basketball or street football thus become powerful carriers of desire and identification, combining nostalgia with celebrity to produce an emotional cocktail that fuels an enormous market. However, inhabiting the bodies of world-class athletes is not necessarily easy or even desirable. Many players instead choose to manage these athletes, playing games in Manager Mode (MVP Baseball 2004), Owner Mode (Madden NFL Football 2004) or GM Career Mode (ESPN Major League Baseball). Rather than emphasize what most computer gamers (and indeed most people in general) cannot actually dorun the 40 yard dash in 4.4 seconds, hit a 97 mile per hour fastball, take a slam into the boards from a 220 pound left wing, or do a bicycle kick for a goal past three defendersbecoming management enables players to do what they already think they can. Management decisions, such as picking the right players or calling the right play, are tasks that many sports fans do every day while arguing around the office water cooler or on sports talk radio about the decisions made by real-life coaches and general managers. In many ways, this is perhaps the boldest promise made by sports gamesnot only can players master sport, but capitalism (or at least the form of capitalism embodied by professional sports). Madden NFL Football 2004s Owner Mode, for example, is devoted to the business side of owning a professional football team (Prima 2). As Primas Official Strategy Guide for the game explains,
were not just talking about player contracts and free agent signings. You have to manage your bank account like a real owner, by monitoring ticket prices, special events, coaches salaries, concessions, and much more. Watch your pennies, and youll have cash for signing bonuses, contract extensions, and eventually a new stadium. (2)
Thus in order to go from doormat to dynasty (Prima 2), a Madden NFL Football 2004 player must successfully navigate the socio-economic context that shapes professional football as a game and a business. We turn now to that context in order to describe what it is that sports games actually deliver. The Reality If nothing else, sports games promise authenticity. NBA Live 2004, for example, claims to deliver the definitive basketball experience:
Step up your game with NBA LIVE 2004. With brandnew 10-Man Freestyle, authentic gameplay, and stunning graphics, NBA LIVE 2004 delivers the definitive
basketball experience. Whether running the point with one-button Quick Plays, spinning free in the lane for a vicious dunk, or locking down on D, our revamped EA SPORTS Freestyle Controller puts you in total control. With a dramatically enhanced Dynasty Mode, the ability to take the court at all NBA arenas, and all-new commentary from Marv Albert and Mike Fratello, NBA LIVE 2004 is all about authenticity. (EA Sports NBA Live)

So too, in fact, are ESPN NHL Hockey (2003), EA Sports Fight Night 2004 (2004), and even ESPN College Hoops (2003), which combines all the tradition, pride and competitive spirit of real college basketball with real college gameplay (ESPN Videogames). No matter how faithfully these and other sports games claim to embody sports, however, they can only approximate the authentic sports experiences they promise4. For one thing, sports games trade on total control, something exceedingly rare in real-life sports where climatic and biorhythmic fluctuations, plain old bad luck, and a host of other forces affect athletic performance. Sports games do away with vitiating elementse.g., bad weather, nerves, insomnia, uncomfortable uniforms, game-related superstitions5, low morale caused by losing streaks, etc.that plague professional and collegiate athletes alike. Sports games instead offer a purer form of sport, one in which athletic ability alone (rather than Murphys Law or the vagaries of the human condition) determines victory or defeat. And yet, this purer form of sport too is abstracted, with the computer acting less as a facilitator than a mediator. The movements, strategies, and skills essential to real-life play are at once simplified and combined according to developer taste, playability issues, hardware and software limitations, and business concerns. NBA Live 2004, for example, reduces what is arguably the most difficult and complex position in basketballpoint guardto a series of one-button Quick Plays. While these shortcuts certainly enhance game play (and are actually essential in the sense that feature richness must often be sacrificed in some way to insure intuitive and immersive play6), they ultimately make the sports game experience much different from the authentic sports experience the games purport to offer. Sports games are ciphers; they provide the look of sports but not the substance or complexity. In addition, while sports game players might well spend as much (if not more) time immersed in the world of games as real-life athletes, coaches, and team staffs, that time is spent developing very different skills. In a world dominated by mathematical algorithms, predicting a players rate of success is based on criteria other than actual physical appearance, a key index real-life coaches rely on. The ability to see in a person an athletes intangibles (e.g., desire, work ethic, intensity, leadership, etc.), and then use those intangibles to determine how the athlete will perform on a specific team or in a given situation, requires a connection to the physicality of sports that computer games do not yet (and may never be able to)

reproduce7. The promise inherent in sports gamesthat the management skills required to win not only already exist within the player but are the same as those needed in the real worldis impossibly false. Conclusion Though capable of creating environments that completely immerse their participants, sports games never fully deliver the authenticity they promise, an authenticity that in large part lies at the heart of their appeal (or rather, at the heart of the ways that appeal is created and cultivated by game publishers). Sports games provide both a surfeit and a profound of lack of realism; many titles are supremely customizable yet collapse the complexity of modern day sports down to a kind of quintessence. Sports games, in other words are simulacra, not simulations. They offer all of the spectacle yet little of the substance of real-life sports. And yet, in a sense, sports games actually do deliver something very authentic. As simulacra, they mirror American sports today, where much of the meaning of sport itself has been papered over in the commodification of athletes and the games they play. Not only have professional and collegiate athletes become walking billboards for Nike, Riddell and other apparel companies, but sports arenas are filled to the gunwales with advertising signage and goods available for purchase (e.g., memorabilia, concessions, clothing, etc.). The games, too, have become less about sport than consumption. TV timeouts and other breaks in play designed to create additional advertising space have made modern-day sporting events exercises in ancillary consumption rather than sport. A case in point: many people now watch the Super Bowl for the commercials rather than for the game itself. The failure of computer games to deliver the authenticity they promise is definitely something to keep an eye on, especially as games become increasingly sophisticated. Despite some gamers desire for adopting the actual physical corpora of real-world celebrity avatars, simulation too close to reality might lessen the immersive qualities of sports games. Much as a recent article in Slate chided game developers for using high-end graphics to attempt to fool the human neurological system with too-real portrayals of actual people (Thompson), sports games may be doomed to failure as they grow closer to delivering authentic sports simulation. In attempting to recreate actual human bodies virtually, developers may inadvertently be bypassing basic physiological human responses, resulting in player distaste for the game experience. Perhaps maintaining the distance between athlete and fan, rather than attempting to break the code of the human body critical to such distance, is the key for sports games, keeping Theodores life on the little screen in its place, as a simulacrum rather than a simulation.
1While game scholar Mark Wolf has created a taxonomy which includes over 40 computer game genres, many of the games occupy multiple categories, suggesting: a) that his taxonomy should be expanded, or b) that perhaps his classification system should be condensed. Legendary game designer Chris Crawford, by contrast, utilizes a taxonomy that contains only twelve categories. This may be somewhat limited, given the remarkable growth and proliferation of the game medium in the twenty years since Crawford wrote The Art of Computer Game Design. Regardless of the classification system, however, there are clearly many different kinds of games, which makes Americans passion for a single typesports games all the more remarkable. 2See http://www.mlgpro.com/index.shtml for more information about Major League Gaming. Also see the Cyberathlete Professional League Homepage at http://www.thecpl.com/league/. 3For more on the mirror phase, the ego ideal and the ideal ego, see Jacques Lacans Ecrits: A Selection. 4Authenticity, of course, is a deeply problematical concept, even without accounting for contemporary societys ability to digitally, biologically or mechanically reproduce all manner of artifacts, experiences, stories, objets darteeven living creatures The definition and value of the concept is the subject of a great deal of debate throughout the academy, from American Indian Studies to Zoology. We have chosen to forgo unpacking the term and the discourses that surround it for reasons of space, not lack of interest. 5Professional athletes are notoriously superstitious. Michael Jordan, for example, reputedly always wore University of North Carolina athletic shorts underneath his Bulls uniform to insure good luck. Former big league slugger Wade Boggs likewise had a special game day diet, and pitcher Turk Wendell supposedly brushes his teeth between innings. So common are sports superstitions that they even figure prominently in sports movies (e.g. Bull Durham, Major League, etc.). 6See Crawford. 7Interestingly, games such as ESPN College Hoops (2004) allow players to scout and recruit talent. Players can review stat sheets, get reports from assistant coaches or even play games as potential recruits. They cannot, however, watch recruits in action, as real coaches and scouts do.

Works Cited

Crawford, Chris. The Art of Computer Game Design (1982): 8 chapters. 22 April 2004 <http://www.vancouver.wsu.edu/fac/ peabody/game-book/Coverpage.html>. EA Sports. NBA Authenticity. NBA Live 2004 (2004): 12 pars. 27 May 2004 <http://easports.com/games/nbalive2004/home.jsp>.
_____. Madden NFL 2004 to be Unveiled and Displayed in Pro Football Hall of Fame: Storied EA SPORTS Franchise of 14 Years Recognized and Honored. Madden NFL 2004 (2004): 1 paragraph. 21 April 2004 <http://www.easports.com/games/ madden2004/hof.jsp#>. Entertainment Software Association. Industry Sales and Economic Data. Media Center (April 2004): 10 pars. 21 April 2004 <http://theesa.com/pressroom.html>. ESPN Videogames. College Excitement. ESPN College Hoops (2004): 12 pars. 27 May 2004 <http://www.espnvideogames. com/choops/> Hoovers, Inc. Electronic Arts Inc. Hoovers Company Capsules (2004): 3 pars. 20 April 2004 <http://80-web.lexisnexis.com/ ezproxy.library.arizona.edu/universe/document?_m=1604faef52 de450ed7ee7eb69317f8e8&docnum=2&wchp=dGLbVtbzSkVb&_md5=dae4933dad95bd8c8c88e29fb7e4d28c>. Lacan, Jacques. Ecrits: A Selection. New York: W.W. Norton, 1977. Prima Games. Playmaker Control Tips. Primas Official Strategy GuideMadden NFL 2004 (2004): 17 pp. 21 May 2004 <http://files.ea.com/downloads/sports_videos/madden2004/prim a_franchise.pdf>. Theodore, Steve. Beg, Borrow, and Steal. Game Developer 11.5 (2004): 47-48. Thompson, Clive. The Unreal Zone: Why high-end graphics make humans look creepy. (2004): 11 pars. 9 June 2004. Slate <http://slate.msn.com/id/2102086/>. Wolf, Mark J. P. Genre and the Video Game. The Medium of the Video Game. Ed. Mark J. P. Wolf. Austin: University of Texas, 2001. 113-34.