EA Uber Alles : NFL Edition

This was written in response to ClockworkGrue's post over at Game Girl Advance regarding EA Games obtaining an exclusive license to the NFL and its players for the next five years. To summarize, he asks whether the move will actually encourage innovation in sports games.

Annual sports titles are first and foremost sims, and the most visible attribute of a sims' accuracy are the names of organizations/persons inside of it.

Imagine a World War 2 sim where you had the option of being a general under the black-on-red division symbol flag of the Nutsies or the stripes-on-stars Alloys.

It's the same as leading Urlich Bearlocker of the Chicago Beaters against Manfred Painton and the Indianapolis Golds. We know who they represent, but there's an inherent discrepancy from the record.

Part of the fun of a sim is to break the linear nature of time and see what could have happened (or can happen). If the Bears hadn't lost Rex Grossman and Mike Brown or had played Hutchinson from the start, could they have been in the playoff hunt right now? Could D-Day have been successful at high-tide? Revisionist fantasies are the reason in the first place people have a video game library with 10+ iterations of Madden.

In an age where licenses are expected in sports games much less sports sims, the EA-NFL agreement -if anything- will discourage innovation.

The Sega Sports line, although of consistent quality, was already struggling. A few years ago they decided to pull sports titles from Nintendo systems, minimizing their titles' exposure and giving EA full control of the Gameboy/cube market in hopes (i'd allege) that an increased profit percentage would allow them to pull a stunt like this year's cost-cutting move. $30 less than the competition with a comparable if not superior-in-some-ways product, Sega was able to garner a 40% market share. Impressive, but it needed repeat business to make the effort worthwhile. This is where we're at now; EA and the NFL have disallowed Sega from earning from its success. All of this to say: With their trump card burned, is it worth the risk for a beleagured Sega Sports to produce a football sim for the next five years in hopes of reobtaining a license?

The competition between EA and Sega was waxing, forcing each to develop new features to keep ahead of the other. If the two had been left in direct conflict, eventually, truly monumental developments would have come. Although, it seems neither had a clear notion of what type of feature could truly be momentous, and that, in part, is why the battle has been waged on the economic/legal field recently.

Without a clear competitor, I'd anticpate the Madden series to become incredibly sterile over the next five years.

Arcade-style, violent football games like Midway is seeking to produce may do alright, but that's not innovation. It sounds like the same game we've seen in Blitz or Street but with heads rolling.

Sure, I'd love to see Sega Sports obtain a license to Bloodbowl and create a quality "sim" out of it, but they were never barred from that in the first place.

The tragedy here is to sim players, many of whom are discontent with the Madden series. Even those who are ambivalent suffer, no longer able to *choose the game with better playbook design or a more intuitive control scheme. We are back to the dark ages where if you want a decent NFL **sim**, Madden is your only choice.

As a gamer with a Gamecube my only console, I've lived in this hell since Sega pulled out. Believe me, it's not fun.

Higher Education

For them, the academy does not foster thoughtful discussion of thorny issues, but harbors the potential at any time to unleash the visceral reactions of their superiors to what students think are their own reasoned political positions. For students, the risk of speaking up is much the same as it is for me: They risk losing the respect of professors and perhaps endangering their long-term aspirations.

A bit from the Chronicle of Higher Education about a conservative prof's sense of identity in a liberal academic environment. The Chronicle churns these out now and again, and while most of it seems a sort of pandering to the minority by the publication, there is a distinct chord struck in the question of academic authority.

Why is it that first term freshmen are vocal and/or confrontational about politics while older students are more quiet about these subjects? Maybe it's not an assumed growing maturity but simply evidence of opinions being driven underground. True, freshman generally don't have a clue to what they're talking about, but it's an inherent criticism any place on the spectrum.

In a classroom, a professor shouldn't openly assault their students' viewpoints but encourage the students to seek evidence and reasoned arguments to develop and strengthen their views. If a stance is ridiculous and incoherent, a student will only discover this when it is engaged, not pounded at.

If nothing else, such an approach signifies fairness in a prof's often subjective grading role.