Welcome to the Silo
Almost all team sports games have a franchise mode now. The player functions as general manager, head coach, and can also play the games for his team if he wishes. It's a mode that tends to be a mile deep and an inch wide, and that's what I want to talk about today.I've said this before about sports text sims, but it's true of graphics-based sports sims as well--they all generate gigantic amounts of data, but almost none of it is ever presented to the player in a useful manner. Many times, it's available (somewhere), but the player has to go pull the information, and that's not going to happen for very long.
Job security? A graph on a screen. Standings? Separate screen. League leaders? Separate screen. Fan support? Separate screen. Team chemistry? Separate screen. Team needs? Separate screen. League news? Separate screen. Injuries? Separate screen. Trades? Separate screen.
See what I mean? All the information about the game world is in such disparate locations that we all tend to go pull only what we absolutely have to know, and only when we absolutely have to know it. We'll know everything about our team, and almost nothing about the rest of the league. We'll know almost nothing about the rest of the world.
Welcome to the silo.
This is a huge design issue. Why create a detailed, deep game world when none of the players are ever going to see it? The problem is that franchise mode has become so standardized across developers that no one compares the experience to what it should be--they only compare it to last year's game.
Here's how it should work, at least in my mind. Instead of forcing us to pull every piece of information we get about the game world, certain categories should be pushed to us on a regular basis, and the amount of information that gets pushed to us should be user-selectable.
While we were playing a league game, for example, we could break away for fifteen seconds during timeouts to see a highlight from another league game being played that night. At the end of the day's schedule, we could see a nightly highlight wrap-up of league action. Visual Concepts took a big step in this direction with the weekly SportsCenter in NFL2K5, and it was fantastic, but the idea just vanished.
How much fun would it be to play an NCAA game and see highlights from other games in your conference at halftime? Or Top 25 games? It's a feature that could easily be done (like I said, VC's already done it, and that was two years ago), everyone would love it--and it doesn't even seem to be on anyone's radar screen.
What about all that team and league information that appears on separate screens? Where should that information be found?
In a newspaper or on a website, of course. That's where we find all our information.
So you open up the weekly newspaper, and there are sections for the league, the conference, and your team (national, regional, local). Headlines tell us if a team has terrible chemistry, and could even tell us which players dislike each other the most. If our job is in jeopardy, we'd see that in a headline. Local fan support. Outstanding performances. Winning streaks. Injuries. Trades. Free agent signings.
Here are a few of the top-level examples:
Punches Thrown after Blazer's 102-93 Loss
Owner Vanderbilt Refuses to Comment on Head Coach Job Security
Attendance Dropping as Blazers Lose Sixth Straight
Bird scores 38 as Pacers Drop Knicks
Knee Will Sideline Johnson for Four Weeks
Those are easy, and there could be half a dozen or more variations on each headline. You could also embed images in the stories, and if you clicked on the image, you'd get a game highlight (in the above headlines, there'd be one for Bird's 38 point night).
Is your team weak in one area? A local columnist would have an article titled To Contend, Blazers Must Improve Post Play.
The premise of all these headlines is that information about the game world should be delivered to you more organically than through a bunch of bar graphs. It's the same information--it's just delivered in a far more immersive manner this way, and it feels far more natural. And real.
The headlines don't even need to be accompanied by story text--the headlines alone can convey the information.
If I had a "Sunday sports section" that was "delivered" to my desktop each week, I wouldn't ignore the rest of the league. I'd look through the whole thing to find out what was happening. I'd have a sense that I was part of something, not just a guy in a silo.
Best of all, it would make the metric ton of data that gets generated by a sports sim relevant.
Until then, we're all sitting in the silo.
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