How Much 'Realism' Do We Really Want in Our Sports Games?

From Steph Curry to Jayson Tatum to a majority of the Cleveland Cavaliers starting lineup, the NBA playoffs are having another run of injuries that are swinging games one way or another. This has had me thinking a lot about “realism” in sports video games and what my limits for “realism” would be if I had unlimited power to choose what’s in our games. With that in mind, this week I’m going to include the e-mail to reach out to me directly below rather than at the end of the newsletter because even more than usual I’d love to hear from y’all with your own thoughts and feedback on the topic.

Reach out to me with “mailbag” questions whenever you want. I grew up reading Page 2 Bill Simmons during the rise of the internet, and so I give you the means to hit me up with comments, thoughts, musings, questions, or whatever else you got. Whether you want to tell me about the sort of realism you want or don’t want in a sports game, explain why no one can ever top Bo Jackson in Super Tecmo Bowl, or talk about why Tin Cup is underrated as a sports movie, all are welcome. If I get enough responses, I’d love to feature them in future newsletters or in “mailbags” of our own.

Here is the e-mail: [email protected] (and bonus points if you also include your city, name (or alias), and some sort of subject to go along with your thoughts.

If you’ve ever visited OS or have been a part of the community for a long time, realism is obviously a hugely important idea and topic. I love talking about realism almost any time it comes up, but we’re not always on the same page as a community — which is also why it can be fun to discuss on the forums and elsewhere. Fun and realism can absolutely smash into each other and cause issues, and so I think that’s where the disconnect can arise, even if “fun” and “realism” are obviously both largely dependent on how you’re defining them.

For just about anyone, I think there is an upper limit to realism before it gets in the way of fun, but not everyone has that same limit.

Injuries And Wear And Tear

I mentioned the NBA playoffs at the start, so I’ll start there. Injuries are their own entire sub-forum in terms of the amount of topics that have been created for them on OS over the years. I think we’re all mostly in favor of having the option to have a “real injuries” roster option when we start our franchises so guys like Tatum are out all year if need be. It’s also why we tend to like having 30-team control in stuff like MLB The Show so we can manually injure players in franchise mode if they go out for the season in real life.

So the “limit” here is more what level of injuries do we want in our actual games? I would contend injury sliders are obviously an option, but sometimes they’re not that effective. Also, should we manually raise the injury sliders when we get to the playoffs, or is that something the game should do for us? And even if injury sliders are effective, it’s not just injuries that are in play here.

My favorite sports website to read these days is Defector (it’s made up of a lot of the old Deadspin folks who started their own site), and they had an article this week talking about playoff physicality and everything that entails (that’s a gift link below so you should be able to read the article even if you don’t pay for the site each month like me).

Yes, players get injured in the playoffs, but it’s more than just that. Playoff runs impact your longevity, your effectiveness, and your chances at injuries down the line. Tatum’s injury happened these playoffs, but it was a non-contact injury. Did it really happen in that game against the Knicks, or was it more due to multiple long playoff runs, a trip to the Olympics, and everything else that goes into being a superstar in the NBA?

“Wear and tear” was a game mechanic that was added to College Football 25 this past season. It was unclear at times how much “wear and tear” mattered, or why some players would lose lots of ratings while others did not. It theoretically impacted you more during games if you took lots of hits, and some of the effects did continue to stick around week-to-week. The visual clarity involved with the mechanic could use some help (digging through the depth chart to figure out who is dinged up isn’t ideal), but either way not everyone loved this feature. There were some complaints about ratings being impacted and how it really could turn some players into useless meatballs. If your QB was suddenly unable to put much zip on the ball, that really could destroy your offense. Some thought that was cool, and others thought it was even unrealistic.

Along those same lines, do we want things like long playoff runs and past injuries to impact the aging curve? We have many topics with various games where users get frustrated with a progression system where an aging veteran just nosedives in overall rating even after a stellar statistical season. The game is judging things off the “real” aging curve, but it’s not making exceptions for the production on the field.

So what if we not only had to worry about that “normal” aging curve, we had to also worry about our 27-year-old superstar forward being at risk for a major injury because our team has had multiple years of deep playoff runs? Again, I’m theoretically on board for this sort of depth, but time investment is something that shouldn’t be overlooked.

Speaking on the topic of physicality and time investment, when it comes to the refs, playoff games are also called somewhat differently than during regular season games.

This idea of playoff intensity and refs swallowing their whistles translate to most sports. Whether it’s the ongoing NHL playoffs or NBA playoffs, it’s common to hear something along the lines of “they call the game differently in the playoffs.” The more likely thing that is happening is that players are fouling/committing penalties more often, and so they’re daring refs to make calls far more often. Even if fouls or penalties go up in the playoffs, it’s still likely true that even more are going uncalled.

Whatever the reasons might be, it may sound like it could be fun to have that sort of gameplay variation once we get to the playoffs, but would it be fun? We get used to calling money plays, or having certain things we go to in order to secure a first down when we need one. If we suddenly were getting bumped or thrown off our spots by clear fouls that went uncalled in the biggest games of the year, wouldn’t we just be pissed? “That’s just baseball” is a pejorative phrase that gets thrown around in the MLB The Show online space to complain about perfect-perfect outs and stuff that might be realistic but feel unfair in a competitive online game. In essence, we’d be pursuing those sorts of gameplay goals in more situations, and even if I think I’m probably on board, it feels like there is some risk there — even without factoring in the development time to implement such things.

The final point on this topic I’d bring back to the forefront is the aforementioned “time investment” issue. I like to believe I’m a rational guy, but consider that we might play 17, 82, or even 162 games to get to the playoffs. If the game we had played for hours on end suddenly changed via more injuries, gameplay, and AI refs, would we think it was glitching? Would we be pissed the game was suddenly “screwing us” after potentially hundreds of hours to reach this point? Every person reacts differently to that sort of thing, but I can understand why developers might be concerned to lean too much into changing things too much once the playoffs roll around.

The Ugly Side Of The Game

There are also things in real sports that may be part of the game but everyone hates. “Foul baiting” is something that has gone through various permutations in the NBA during the last 10-20 years. Two of the biggest offenders and players who come up most often today are Jalen Brunson and Shai Gilgeous-Alexander.

Brunson’s signature move is stopping on a dime and sort of jumping back into trailing defenders. Shai is an all-world seller by using a very forceful neck snap to accentuate any contact he might have received. Those guys are just building on things that players like KD/Harden/CP3 had done before them to bait calls. And those guys were just building on what someone like Manu Ginobili did before that. And Manu was just building on what guys like Reggie Miller and even Vlade Divac did before that with flopping or kicking out their legs to draw fouls.

All those players would be fantastic whether they foul baited or not, but most fans hate that sort of stuff. Still, it’s part of the game (even if it’s unethical!), so shouldn’t it be in our sports games?

Do we want soccer players feigning injuries to get rest for their teammates? Do we want there to be roughing the passer calls even if the QB is barely touched? The NBA is probably the easiest example to use for this topic since there is a flop button in 2K and there are ways to jump into defenders to get foul calls, but 2K could go even further. 2K in part got to where it is today by being the best in the business at nailing “signature style” but that technically could include the more unethical parts of a superstar’s game as well.

Overall, I think this is an easier sell for a lot of people even if there might be some frustration (many of us on OS were so impressed and into being able to jump into aggressive defenders when it was introduced years and years ago). It’s also probably more straight forward to implement overall than some of the more abstract “wear and tear” concepts.

Futility And Sadness

The last two categories I want to run through go more towards the stats side of things, but I want to begin with the Colorado Rockies. They stink again, but this time they’re stinking at a historic pace.

Single-game records are being broken, and season-long records that could be broken are already being discussed. None of those records are positives for the Rockies, but is there a limit to what we would expect from a sim engine? We have those classic “if this would have happened in X video game” threads on OS that point out when something absurd happens in real sports and how we would have reacted if it happened in our video game, and this a version of that. If the Rockies got off to a 7-36 start that included a 21-0 ass kicking in your franchise mode, would you suspect something was wrong with the sim engine?

I think a lot of time and energy gets spent on the totality of what the simulated stats look like at the end of seasons in our sports video games, and I think it’s fair to say we want those stats to mimic real life, but what about the outliers? I wonder how hard it is to get a 21-0 game to even occur in MLB The Show’s sim engine. How long does it take to make the 2024 White Sox only win 41 games or make the 2001 Mariners win 116? We have a tendency to focus on the aggregate, but really we do that because it means the simulation engine is slightly off the mark enough times throughout the course of a season to make certain stats look unrealistic. An extra complete game here or an extra passing TD there, and suddenly way too many QBs are throwing for gaudy TD numbers or too many starting pitchers are getting to 6+ complete games. Still, those numbers in individual games probably don’t look very out of the ordinary.

So while we clearly care about season stats, I’m not sure we share that same obsession for outliers that usually also exist in real sports. I think we miss out on these sorts of things too often in sports video games right now because simulation engines — or even sometimes gameplay engines — don’t have enough flexibility to allow the weird and wacky to occur. I think the only reason folks on OS don’t talk about it more is they simply don’t notice it while focusing instead on the overall statistical trends.

The Limit Does Not Exist!

No matter where anyone falls on any of the previous topics, I’m super confident 99 out of 100 OSers would be on board with as much realism as possible as it relates to all things “business” in sports games. From contracts to the drafts to free agency, this is where the limit does not exist. Assuming there’s a way to automate things in case you don’t understand the finer points of the salary cap — or just don’t want to worry about some feature of a collective bargaining agreement (CBA) — almost no one is going to turn down realism on this end of the spectrum.

Ironically enough, even though I think so many “easy wins” exist in this area, this is the place sports games have shied away from getting too realistic. NBA 2K has tried to squeeze as much as possible from the CBA and the rules committee into its game, and The Show is trying harder to pursue real budgets and stuff like realistic arbitration results, but the business side of things seems like such an easy area for video games to attack even more. It’s tons of binary decisions and binary options because either things comply with the CBA/salary cap or they don’t. Why every major sports game isn’t going full speed ahead is somewhat strange to me.

If we think back to the early 2000s when owner modes started to appear in some sports games, it seemed like it was a foregone conclusion that owner mode would be the next evolution of franchise mode. Instead, it kind of fizzled out and some sports games barely acknowledge anything that goes into affording and running a team. Now, in part that was because stuff like setting the price of hot dogs was ultimately uninteresting on its own, but hot dogs should have just been part of the growing network of things that tied into whether your team could afford to retain Superstar X or go out and sign Free Agent Y.

There’s still time to revive owner modes because the business of sports has only become more mainstream since the early 2000s, but I think this is the only area where there would be near 100 approval for limitless realism. When it comes to some of the other topics I’ve mentioned, I think a clear limit does exist, and that’s why I hope to hear from some of you to get your thoughts.

Until next time y’all. And, as always, thanks for reading.

-Chase