Chapter 12. Sports GamesSports games set an unusual challenge for the game designer. Unlike most other games, which take place in a world the player knows little about, sports games emulate a world the player knows a lot about: sporting events as they are in real life. No one has ever really led an army of elves into combat, and only a small number of people know how it feels to fly an F-16 fighter jet, but a great many people know what professional football looks like and how the game is played . Sports games belong to a small number of genres that permit a direct comparison with the real world. Not all sports games are ultrarealistic, of course. Some, such as Electronic Arts' old Genesis game Mutant League Football , are fantasy games, even if they are based on real sports. Others, such as Midway's arcade game NFL Blitz , simplify a sport and deliberately make it more extreme for dramatic purposes. Most of these kinds of games are designed to appeal to kids , who might not know much about the real sport. But for aficionados, the game must be a reasonably accurate depiction of the real thing, and they will see any deviation as a flaw. This chapter discusses athletic sports, as opposed to sports such as motor racing. Although racing games are often sold in the sports category, from a design standpoint, they really belong in Chapter 13, "Vehicle Simulations."
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