The Report Committee for William Norman LeMasters Certifies that this is the approved version of the following report:

Representation in Action: An Overview of the Avatar/Attribute Relationship in Sports-Themed Video Games

APPROVED BY SUPERVISING COMMITTEE:

Kathryn Fuller-Seeley, Supervisor

Alisa Perren Representation in Action: An Overview of the Avatar/Attribute Relationship in

Sports-Themed Video Games

by

William Norman LeMasters

Report

Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of

The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements

for the Degree of

Master of Arts

The University of Texas at Austin August 2020 Abstract

Representation in Action: An Overview of the Avatar/Attribute Relationship in Sports-Themed Video Games by

William Norman LeMasters, M.A. The University of Texas at Austin, 2020 Supervisor: Kathryn Fuller-Seeley

Representation in video games has thus far centered primarily on the aesthetics of a digital avatar. Using sports-themed video games, we can broaden the understanding of representation to include action or the ways athletes perform within any given game by analyzing attribute allocation, the primary method of avatar differentiation within the sports genre, and how digital bodies play a role in shaping an athlete’s real-world identity. Sports-themed video games are immensely popular with the big 3 franchises,

Madden, FIFA and the NBA 2K series, routinely finishing among the best-selling titles year in and year out. Due to their popularity, scholars have turned some attention toward this genre of games although almost all articles pertain solely to the aesthetic representations of athlete avatars while comparatively few attempts have been made to breakdown the relationship between an athlete’s real statistics and how these statistics figure into the representation of their digitized body. My goal is to show why virtual athletes attributes matter by analyzing how an athlete’s digital body can play a

iii role in their real-world identity by highlighting the cases of ex-NFL player Michael Vick and footballer Adebayo Akinfenwa.

iv Table of Contents

List of Tables ...... vi

List of Figures ...... vii

Introduction ...... 1

Digitized Athletes and Attributes ...... 4

Athlete Identification ...... 7

Methodology ...... 9

MLB The Show 19 ...... 13

Michael Vick: Madden Icon ...... 22

Adebayo Akinfenwa: Strongest Footballer in the World ...... 30

Conclusion ...... 38

References ...... 42

v List of Tables

Table 1: Centerfielder Statistics by Demographic per 162 games 2016-2018 ...... 16 Table 2: MLB The Show 19 Centerfielders Attributes by Demographic ...... 18

iv List of Figures

Figure 1: SportsCenter Tweet ...... 23 Figure 2: Tom Brady Response ...... 24 Figure 3: Fan Duel Response ...... 24

Figure 4: Kaleb Earles, former MiLB pitcher for Milwaukee Brewers ...... 24 Figure 5: Comments from YouTube video “Playing Madden 2004 in 2019 – Running

with Michael Vick!” by Old Gen Gamer ...... 25

Figure 6: Fan responses to Akinfenwa from Reddit ...... 35

vi INTRODUCTION For my report, I seek to explore the representation of athletes’ virtual avatars within sports-themed video games through their attribute allocation, and to consider how their digital bodies shape their real-world identities. Sports-themed video games are immensely popular with the big 3 franchises, Madden, FIFA and the NBA 2K series, routinely ranking among the best-selling video game titles year in and year out. Due to their popularity, scholars have turned some attention toward this genre of games, although most of these articles pertain solely to the aesthetic representations of athlete avatars. Comparatively few attempts have been made b scholars to breakdown the relationship between an athlete’s real statistics and how these statistics figure into the representation of their digitized body. My main goal is to show why virtual athletes’ attributes matter by analyzing how an athlete’s digital body can play a role in their real- world identity. I do so by highlighting the cases of ex-NFL player Michael Vick and footballer Adebayo Akinfenwa.

This research projects merges together key concepts from the video game studies and communication and sports fields. Avatar identification between a player and their in- game avatar has received considerable attention, though the term itself has been criticized for being too vague (Martey & Consalvo, 2011; Shaw, 2014). However, this relationship tends to be analyzed between a gamer and characters within fictional worlds.

MMORPGs [Massively Multiplayer Online Role-playing Games] provide a particularly fruitful genre for study because of the level of control a gamer has in creating their in-

1 game identity. Sports-themed video games do not offer the extensive character customization found in the MMORPG genre, yet avatar identification is no less important to sports-themed video games. Part of the appeal of the sports genre is for gamers to play with their favorite professional athletes, identifying and creating bonds with the players they choose to play as. By sticking to an examination of athletes and sports-themed video games, we can further shed a light on avatar identification by examining how fans react toward the athletes they control within a digital space, and to a further extent, how these digital representations fit within an athlete’s career.

Anderson and Raney (2017) have shown that simply being fans of sports can make people more accepting of off-the-field issues, such as domestic violence. This is due to a tendency for fans to overlook problematic behavior in favor of an athlete’s performance on the field. In sports, success tends to take priority over ethics, so as long as players continue to perform, they may be given a longer leash when it comes to socially unacceptable behavior. Fans and gamers routinely using athletes in their digitized form potentially can also shape real-world perceptions of these players which is why attribute allocation as a process should be critiqued; rating athletes positively allows them perform better in-game, making success easier and contributing to a gamer’s evaluation of an athlete despite the process occurring exclusively within the digital realm.

Fantasy sports are a fitting comparison for reviewing how gamers view players with a history of abuse since these athletes become part of one’s fantasy team and their success on the field directly benefits the gamer’s own fantasy team. Yet, the identification that results between a gamer and their avatar is slightly different from how 2 that relationship functions with fantasy sports. Both are games and one could view the players that make up a fantasy roster as tokens or manipulatable pieces used to influence the game-state. In a video game, the actions of an avatar are directly controlled by the user whereas the success of an athlete in a fantasy sport is independent to the choices a manager makes. This direct control found within the video game medium is what leads to identification (Ng et al., 2019).

Sports-themed video games also reflect the standards within a society in which the game is created. Often, sports are seen as a masculinized domain and women are barred from entry not only within the coaching field but as sports journalists as well

(Laucella et al., 2017). This then gets reflected in video games as gamers do not have the option to use women as coaches, owners or players. In this way, gender biases get reflected in these games by portraying sports as a domain meant for men. As Srauy and

Cheney-Lippold (2019) have shown, racial biases can also enter video games during the process of creating an athlete’s digital counterpart. To provide further insight into this process, it would be useful to evaluate athletes from a different sport to determine if the same sort of biases present in FIFA (International Federation of )1 are also found within other games within the sports simulation genre. To do so, I will rely on data from and the official affiliated video game franchise

MLB: The Show to investigate the relationship between an athlete, their digitize body, and the relations between different athletes by comparing official statistics with their related attributes in the video game form.

1 In the context of this paper FIFA is used as an abbreviation of the FIFA video game franchise 3

DIGITIZED ATHLETES AND ATTRIBUTES Previously, researchers have focused on how digital bodies are represented in the video game format largely from an aesthetic perspective. Arguments centered around representation, particularly the “hypersexualized female caricature that is, essentially, eye-candy for male players” (Ray, 2004), present within a wide range of video game genres including sports-themed games – if they are even present at all (Leonard, 2006).

Representation of black athletes also receives attention, thereby forcing one to focus on sports-themed video games because this genre is where the majority of Black video game characters are present (Williams et al, 2009). However, even when Black players are present, the representations are of racialized bodies that adhere to stereotypes such as the hypermasculine aggressive black male athlete (Leonard, 2004).

Analyzing representation from this perspective is important, however it fails to account for the medium specificity of the video game format. Video games are about action, and discussions of representation need to move beyond aesthetics toward realistic representations of action (Galloway, 2006). Within the sports genre, representation of action typically means a proper simulation of the game and mechanics which the video game is attempting to replicate. Shot trajectory, player movement, weather effects, momentum, etc. become the focus when talking about the realism of sport-themed video games. What receives less attention, however is the representation of avatars in action.

More specifically, what can be studied is the translation of the real-world talent and

4 statistics of professional athletes into their digitized bodies, along with the relationship between where an athlete ranks in the game in comparison to their peers.

Srauy and Cheney-Lippold (2019) used this approach by looking beyond game aesthetics and instead considering the attributes of players in the Ultimate Team game mode of FIFA. Ideally, players’ ratings should reflect their real-life performances, but the manner in which EA Sports decides on ratings, relying on data contributors who watch and rate players in-real life, provides the possibility for unconscious biases to enter the game. Four main attributes were studied: a) Strength, b) Vision (a proxy for intelligence), c) Aggression, and d) Agility, and these four attributes were compared among Black, White and Latino athletes. They found that across the board Black athletes were rated higher than their Latino and White counterparts in Strength, Aggression and

Agility while their vision stat, a proxy for intelligence in-game, was noticeably lower than that of White and Latino players. The findings support the fact that the stereotype of the Black athlete (hypermasculine, strong, and aggressive) can be found within FIFA through the attributes of players.

These issues are not isolated within the video game medium. Sports journalists and commentators commonly describe Black athletes in terms of their innate physical ability while white athletes are, “praised for either their hard work or perceived intellect and leadership” (Grainger, Newman & Andrews, 2006). It seems this ideology has been incorporated into the FIFA video games as the three attributes in which Black athletes outscore White and Latino athletes are associated with the “natural ability” narrative, while the higher vision stat focuses more on the intelligence and hard work of the player 5 – words which were found to be used more often when commentators speak about white athletes. By praising the hard work of the white athlete while attributing black athletic success to natural ability, FIFA feeds into the mainstream media’s narrative that devalues the work and success of Black athletes.

Compared to soccer, baseball should be an easier sport in which to quantify the contributions of players. The sport has a long history of statistics keeping dating back to the introduction of the box score by Henry Chadwick in the 1800s. Chadwick’s system would become the main way of evaluating real ballplayers until the recent sabermetric revolution spearheaded by the Society for American Baseball Research with Bill James as a front man. Using sabermetrics, statisticians believe they can more accurately gauge the skill of players by utilizing either different or new information that was not available in the past. Following the release of Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game, the sport quickly adopted sabermetrics; in 2002 there were about five sabermetricians working in the MLB while ten years later nearly every team had at least one employee who spent the majority of their time working on analytics (Baumer and Zimbalist, 2014).

During this same time, statistics became a new way for fans to engage with baseball and their favorite sports, especially through fantasy sports, a game centered around creating a team with the best stats. This “statistical plane of fandom” places the stat, and the pursuit of knowledge through statistics, at the center of fan engagement (Burroughs, 2018).

Central to this statistical turn, on the fan and professional side, is the belief that these new stats, built from a vast amount of data, are an objective metric for evaluating players – or at least a more objective process than the previous methods used. However, 6 these stats have their own issues, evidenced by the fact that the two most popular statistics sites, Baseball Reference and FanGraphs, have different methods of calculating the Wins Above Replacement (WAR) stat that has become one of the common ways of comparing the value any given player provides to his team. In short, although one expects this new reliance on statistics to provide greater objectivity to baseball evaluation, there are still variables that cannot quantified. Within these statistical gaps, the possibility arises for real world biases to enter into baseball themed video games, much like what happened in FIFA, while adhering to the promise of realism.

ATHLETE IDENTIFICATION When playing with a character, the gamer manipulates the actions of the avatar to accomplish the goal in the game. In a sports simulation, the win-state condition consists of scoring more points than the other team, and the best way to do so is to play using talented characters. Selecting what players to input into a game and how to quantify their attributes affects the teams and athletes a gamer chooses to play with. By giving a player unique attributes or making them extremely talented, the developers incentivize using these players, and repeated use of these characters heightens the attachment a gamer feels towards that athlete both in-game and in real life (Ng, Khong, & Nathan, 2018). Sports fans already have an affinity to overlook off-the-field issues of athletes (Anderson and

Raney, 2017), and by pairing this with the identification process in sports-themed video games, video games have the potential to heal the fractured image of an athlete by encouraging gamers to use the athlete during gameplay.

7 On some level, video game developers understand this process and have restricted the use of problematic athletes to disrupt any possibility of identification. Most recently,

EA Sports removed the icon from the Ultimate Team game mode after he used a Nazi phrase during a television broadcast of a soccer match (Washington Post,

2019). However, this seems to be a rare case, as there continues to be a number of athletes available with troubled pasts, particularly those associated with domestic violence (possibly due to the general misogyny in sport culture [Anderson and Raney]).

This pattern of keeping athletes in the game almost encourages gamers to identify with them despite their controversial past.

As the popularity of video games continues to grow, it is essential to critically analyze the various mechanisms that have become standard in the industry. Using attributes to rate and categorize players seems harmless; these decisions, however, have real-world implications and as such must not be taken lightly. What we need is a critical inquiry into the attribute allocation process to uncover the systemic biases that seep into the video game medium. To do so, scholars must grapple with questions such as: How do developers create systems to judge and rate players? What role can a video game avatar have on the real-world athlete’s celebrity? What effect might a video game rating have on gamers’ and fans’ perception of an athlete?

There are multiple avenues through which fans can connect to their favorite celebrities. From watching a sport or following an athlete’s social media account, a parasocial relationship begins to form based on what content is available to fans. While not entirely a real version of an athlete, avatarial representations in video games create 8 another avenue through which fans can interact with and quite literally embody their favorite athletes. This relationship between gamers and athletes remains an overlooked aspect of fan/athlete interaction, and this report seeks to contribute to the discourse regarding this relationship.

METHODOLOGY This project consists of two parts: gauging the accuracy of an athlete’s in-game attributes relative to their real-world performances and analyzing fan responses to player- avatars mediated through a sports simulation game. Both sections deal with the larger goal of this report which is to stress and re-center the attribute in the discussion about video game representation. To do so, we must understand the process of digitization and its efficacy as well as the effect attributes have on gamers’ interpretation of athletes. For the first part, I have chosen MLB: The Show 19 as the game to analyze players’ avatars and will use the website Baseball Reference, a baseball data collection website, for information regarding athletes’ real-world performances. The reason for choosing baseball is because it is the “most objective” sport and as a result has a well-developed statistical analysis culture, as noted above. In baseball, every event is relatively independent, meaning that it is far easier to assign credit or blame for successes and failure when compared to a sport like American football, where 11 players must work in unison to attempt to best their opponent (Baumer and Zimbalist, 2014). In theory, this should make a video game simulation of the sport more accurate in terms of attribute allocation than any other major sport. Thus, if research uncovers inconsistencies between

9 the real athlete and their digital representation in a baseball game, then this effect would likely be amplified in the other best-selling games like the Madden and FIFA franchises.

An MLB roster consists of 25 professional players, and at the time of its release on March 26, 2019, MLB The Show 19 developers only coded in players that had already played games in the MLB. Thus, while it may not feature the 2019 opening day rosters, there are real-life counterparts for every player featured in the game. There are three different position designations that lead to a different set of attributes: fielder, catcher and pitcher. A fielder has 18 different attributes, and catchers have one extra attribute, blocking, which will be ignored due to the fact that its value is simply not given to non- catchers in the game. Pitchers have the same set of attributes plus all of the values given to determine their effectiveness as a pitcher (six attributes in total plus three for each unique pitch in their repertoire). For this study, only those 18 attributes which every player shares will be examined. Though they are not known for their hitting prowess, pitchers will also be included. As players, this group is not expected to be talented at anything besides pitching, which is why I feel this group may yield interesting evidence determining the biases present in the game. In MLB, if an American League team is the home team (1215 games a season, half the total number of games) then pitchers do not have to hit. As a result, pitchers that have spent a majority of their careers in the

American League would have far less data for San Diego Studios to use when allocating athlete attributes, which should make evaluations, I expect, far less accurate than athletes at other positions. Additionally, not every stat coded into the game has a quantifiable real-world counterpart, with Batting Clutch being a particularly divisive attribute. 10 Sabermetricians have routinely noted that a hitter cannot be clutch. With the large sample size given by the 162 game MLB season, things merely even out over a long stretch of time; a seven year MLB player who hosts a lifetime batting average of .250 hitter is not more or less likely to make clutch hits. It is only a game of percentages and no matter how “clutch” they are the chances of succeeding, like the rest of their at-bats, should fall somewhere at about one in fouur. For these reasons, Batting Clutch is an attribute that one cannot really track and developers would have to rely on less objective methods when distinguishing these between two players.

The second goal of this report is to illustrate the effect attribute allocation can have on athlete’s careers by showing how fans and gamers respond to notable athletes in sports simulations. I intend to demonstrate this by analyzing the discourse surrounding two athletes and their digital manifestations: ex-NFL player Michael Vick and footballer

Adebayo Akinfenwa. One unique quality of video games is their ability to allow a gamer to take control of and manipulate the actions of the in-game avatar in an active form of engagement vastly different than those found in traditional media. In this process, gamers start to feel attached to characters as both gamer and avatar strive to achieve the same goal: beating/winning the game (Ng, et al.). In sports simulations, attribute allocation then becomes a tool that developers can use to coerce players to use or not use certain athletes/teams, ultimately influencing real-world perceptions of these players. In both

Vick and Akinfenwa’s cases, I will provide a brief trajectory of their careers and indicate the role that video games have played in either rectifying their image, as is the case with

Vick, or elevating their image, as is the case with Akinfenwa, in the eyes fans of the 11 game. Additionally, I collected and analyzed gamers’ responses to the players on social media and forums dedicated to their respective games. In the case of Michael Vick, this primarily comes from Twitter because of the massive following the official Madden

Ultimate Team account has cultivated whereas responses to Akinfenwa incorporate more niche websites created exclusively for soccer because of his microcelebrity status.

Repeated use of these players fosters the conditions for team identification to occur. “Sports team identification” defines how a fan of a team attaches to a team or player, which creates an intense emotional response connected to the performance of that player or team. During periods of success, a fan becomes increasingly attached to either that team or player. This phenomenon is referred to as “basking in reflected glory”, a concept borrowed from social identity theory which states that fans tie their self-esteem to the success of their favorite players or teams. When players who fans identify with perform well, the performance is used by fans to bolster their self-esteem and reinforces their identification with the player (Wann, 2006). As Wann states, another consequence of team identification deals with how fans remember past performances of a team. Fans tend to overemphasize periods of success while downplaying periods of repeated failure.

Additionally, Wann finds that highly identified fans overlook the negative behaviors of fellow fans to maintain a positive impression of those other fans. Both of these tendencies within social identity theory show how fans can maintain a positive view of players even if players exhibit negative behaviors, as fans will over remember one identity of an athlete over the other – e.g., placing an emphasis on athletic performance while downplaying any off the field issues. When a gamer uses either a player like 12 Michael Vick or one like Akinfenwa, success becomes attached to these athletes, which influences fans’ perception of them despite interacting with them solely through an experience mediated by video game format.

Identification in video games studies has a slightly different meaning than its usage with sports team identification. Identification with games is conceptualized as a process through which a gamer takes on the mind-set of a character (Shaw). Sports- themed video games allow gamers to simultaneously draw upon both versions of identification which are used to reaffirm one’s attachment to their favorite team or athletes while also drawing the gamer deeper into the game space. In this second section, then, I will examine sports-themed video games as public relations tools which help curate how an athlete is perceived by a particular fanbase. By analyzing the career of

Michael Vick, a talented dual-threat considered to be the greatest video game athlete of all time – but whose career was hampered by his conviction for dog fighting, we can see how a video game avatar and a unique set of attributes contribute to forgiveness. It does so by forcing the gamer to interact with Michael Vick the athlete as opposed to Michael Vick the criminal.

MLB THE SHOW 19 The sample for this approach consists of 754 MLB players represented in the video game

MLB 19: The Show. Each team has a roster of 25 players, however because of injuries some all-star players, such as Shohei Ohtani, were listed as part of the AAA affiliate. In

13 these cases, I included these players on the MLB roster as well elevating the total number of players sampled to 754. The demographic breakdown of players remains relatively consistent with previous data. In a research project on baseball demographics, Armour and Levitt (2016) catalogued the distribution of baseball players among 4 different demographic categories: African-American, Asian, Latinx and White. Leading into the

2016 year, the distribution was 6.7% African-American, 2.1% Asian, 27.4% Latinx, and

63.7% White. Using a similar approach, I found MLB The Show to be fairly representative of their findings with 7% of players being African-American, 1.8% Asian,

28.9% Latinx, and 62.2% White.

A leaguewide comparison of attributes is impractical and would only yield misleading results. White players maintain a plurality in nearly every position, and as a result, have a large share of pitchers which would warp the perspective of the offensive attributes for White MLB players. Fortunately, the distribution of centerfielders is relatively equitable for 3 of the demographic categories. There are 14 of both African-

American and Latinx centerfielders and 18 White centerfielders represented in MLB The

Show. Because of this distribution, I find that it is the best starting point for the comparison between how MLB players get represented in the video game form and the relationship between their real-life statistics and in-game attributes.

To create a baseline for comparison, I averaged out the stats from all of the players from the 2016-2018 MLB seasons, including the number of games played, and equalized them across a 162 game season as White players averaged (100.7) four more games played than both African-American (96.5) and Latinx (96.7) players. I should also 14 note that such a small sample size of n=46 is not ideal and allows certain outlier players, such as Mike Trout who is on pace to be one of the greatest players of all time, to get overrepresented in the data. However, this is not meant to be a definitive look at the attribute distribution of athletes in video games, but rather a starting point to more critically engage with the representation of characters in games.

As sabermetrics has matured, player evaluation has become increasingly complex, with many of the traditional stats getting replaced by newer ones which take into account factors beyond what ends up on the stat card. However, at the present, these are exploratory statistics which perhaps represent the future of baseball evaluation, but they are not considered when creating the attributes for MLB The Show players. San Diego

Studios supposedly uses the past 3 years of players stats when determining the attributes of players; some inconsistencies, however, emerge when comparing the actual stats of players and the ratings as determined by SDS.

15 Table 1: Centerfielder Statistics by Demographic per 162 games 2016-2018

Black/162 Latinx/162 White/162

Games Played 162 162 162

Plate Appearances 590.22 605.43 587.04

At-Bats 525.26 548.62 524.8

Runs 79.89 78.05 78.52

Hits 131.13 147.68 134.69

2B 23.6 26.62 28.07

3B 4.9 4.67 4.5

Home Runs 12.98 14.15 18.51

Runs Batted In 51.29 56.14 62.6

Stolen Bases 28.14 15.73 16.18

Caught Stealing 6.35 7.1 5.15

Base-on-Balls 52.97 44.86 48.22

16 Strikeouts 137.76 113.57 138.89

Batting Average .250 .269 .257

On-Base .323 .329 .327

Percentage

Slugging .387 .412 .433

On-Base plus .711 .741 .760 Slugging Total Bases 203.49 226.08 227.29

Grounded into 7.90 9.87 8.27 Double play Hit by Pitches 5.58 6.08 8.5

Sacrifice Hits 3.36 2.25 2.2

Sacrifice Flies 3 3.35 3.25

Intentional Walk 1.59 2.29 3.71

17 Table 2: MLB The Show 19 Centerfielders Attributes by Demographic

AVG/CF/Black Median/CF/Black AVG/CF/Latinx Median/CF/Latinx AVG/CF/White Median/CF/White

Overall 72.14 73 72.71 73 73.06 73

Contact v 53.93 56.5 62.64 61 58.57 57 Right Contact v 53.76 52 64.29 60 63.21 69 Left Power v 47.14 45 44.21 39.5 56.43 53.5 Right Power v 44.76 41.5 45.79 44 53.71 54 Left Bunting 60.64 61.5 59.57 58 45.07 39 Ability Drag 44.71 40.5 44.86 43.5 34.14 31 Bunting Plate 51.57 54.5 61.71 67 49.64 50 Vision Plate 63.26 61 51.93 57 58 57 Discipline Batting 53.79 52 59.79 56 58.07 61 Clutch Durability 76.14 78.5 84.76 86.5 80.21 81.5

Speed 78.5 81 72.43 73.5 73.43 72

Arm 66.71 64.5 70.71 70 68.57 68 Strength Arm 68.36 66 68.76 70.5 68.43 68 Accuracy

18 Reaction 77.07 78 71.93 72.5 75.43 74.5

Fielding 67.14 68.5 68.5 70.5 73.26 69.5 Ability Stealing 49.14 45.5 28.21 23 31.79 28.5

Baserun- 65.07 64.5 51.71 46.5 50.43 52 ning Ability

19 Upon first glance, we can see some of the ways the natural black athlete myth gets reified in MLB The Show. The one attribute that sticks out the most is the speed statistic in which Black athletes maintain an average five points higher than either White centerfielders or Latinx centerfielders. In total, this difference makes sense because the stolen bases for Black centerfielders nearly doubles that of the other groups. However, when looking at individuals some inconsistencies arise. Take Mike Trout, a White centerfielder for the Los Angeles Angels. Over the course of the 2016, 2017 and 2018 season, he stole 30, 22 and 24 bases in 159, 114, and 140 games respectively which grants him 83 Speed, 75 Stealing and 70 Baserunning Aggressiveness ratings in MLB

The Show. On the other hand, David DeShields Jr., a Black centerfielder for the Texas

Rangers in 2019, stole 8, 29 and 20 bases in 74, 120 and 106 games resulting in 95

Speed, 66 Stealing and 81 BR Aggression. During the comparable seasons (2017 and

2018), DeShields accumulated more steals yet has a remarkably lower stealing rating.

There may be other reasons SDS made this choice beyond statistics. For instance, Mike

Trout is the best MLB player in the league so he may receive bumps in certain stats that others in the game do not have the privilege of receiving. The main takeaway from this, however, is that there are inconsistencies among attributes in MLB The Show, not to mention there are inherent issues in relying on stats mostly outside of a players control

(RBIs for instance) in the calculation of attributes for a video game.

This remains a broad overview of the attributes from MLB The Show 19, and as the data shows, some of attributes seem to conform to certain racial stereotypes.

However, some can be explained away, such as the overrepresentation of a demographic 20 in certain positions. This is the case with African-American center fielders. Teams typically want their fastest players to be in centerfield, and when 26% of African-

American players main position is centerfield, compared to 4% for White players and 6% for Latinx players, one would expect the group’s average Speed attribute to be higher than other groups.

These points indicate perhaps larger issues with the baseball pipeline where certain players are pushed towards certain positions based on their ethnicity. The NFL historically has similar issues with the overrepresentation of white athletes at the quarterback position while black athletes dominate the “skill” positions (Leonard, 2017).

We also see some discrepancies within certain attributes which need further investigation.

For instance, the Speed rating is supposed to be based off the players’ top sprint speed from the previous season. However, some players with the same top sprint speed have different speed ratings, albeit only small differences.

As far as sports go, baseball undoubtedly has the best evaluative metrics. Yet even with the vast swaths of data collected for each game, developers still seem to have to make decisions which impact the importation of real-world stats into the digital sphere.

If baseball has not achieved consistency, then other professional sports themed video games likely also contain their own biases which need to be studied to further understand how representation through action occurs within this popular .

21 MICHAEL VICK: MADDEN ICON In 2003, EA Sports chose Michael Vick as the cover athlete for their upcoming

Madden NFL 2004 video game. However, it is the digital manifestation of Michael Vick which fundamentally changed the nature of how gamers played Madden. Essentially,

Vick was a game-breaking quarterback whose presence almost ensured victory for whichever player opted to use the Atlanta Falcons. Only a few athletes have achieved this level of notoriety within any (e.g., Bo Jackson in Tecmo Bowl and

Mike Tyson in Punch Out). However, once achieved, this mythical status as a game- breaking video game avatar funnels back into the real-world construction of the athlete’s identity. In the case of Michael Vick, this plays out through a nostalgia for his 2003 player avatar and video game identification, which plays a role in how fans remember him as an athlete and their willingness to forgive him after being convicted for dog fighting in 2007.

What made Vick so special within the context of Madden NFL 2004 was his running ability. The three stats that contributed to this were his speed (95), agility (95), and acceleration (94) with the max in each rating being 99. Now, other athletes in game have better running stats, but they typically played alternative positions. Randy Moss, a wide receiver, could rival Vick’s speed with ratings of 99, 97, and 99 respectively.

However, as a wide receiver Moss’s ability to dictate a game relied on the ability of the quarterback to get the ball to him. With Vick, every play allowed the gamer to utilize one of the fastest players in the game, who was also adept enough to throw the ball well with a throwing accuracy rating of 84 – not elite by any means, but solid enough to rival

22 other in the game. This resulted in the creation of a player who was almost unstoppable. He had the speed to outrun nearly every player in the game, and if under pressure, his passing was capable of making incredible throws on the run.

Nowadays, gamers look back to this iteration of Michael Vick with fondness.

When questions arise about video game athlete-avatars, Vick is always brought into the conversation. Recently, SportsCenter asked its followers to decide which Madden QB they would want to play with if the game was on the line. Followers overwhelmingly chose Vick with Tom Brady even chiming in show his support for the retired quarterback.

Figure 1: SportsCenter Tweet

23 Figure 2: Tom Brady Response

Figure 3: Fan Duel Response

Figure 4: Kaleb Earles, former MiLB pitcher for Milwaukee Brewers

YouTube videos show the amazing feats Vick was capable of within Madden 2004, with the comments section filled with fans of the franchise reminiscing about the athlete’s

24 dominance and playing with him in the game as opposed to other, more controversial areas of his life.

Figure 5: Comments from YouTube video “Playing Madden 2004 in 2019 – Running with Michael Vick!” by Old Gen Gamer

Some recognize his dominance by comparing him to another game-breaking athlete, Bo

Jackson, with comments like, “Vick is like the bo Jackson of tecmo bowl in this gm!!![sic] Loved this madde[n] and 05” or just simple statements of adulation like,

“Michael Vick was the man.” Fans of the NFL on reddit even created a March Madness style bracket to determine the best virtual football player ever. Can you guess who finished in first? Even the developers of the game recognized how unfair Michael Vick was in the game and attempted to nerf [weaken] him before the release by giving him a low carrying rating, a stat which determines the rate at which a player is likely to fumble

25 the ball. Yet this still was not enough to stop the dominance of Michael Vick within the game. So, with the release of the next Madden, EA Sports placed an emphasis on making the defensive play more effective to directly combat Vick (Good, 2013). It is no understatement to say that the 2004 version of Michael Vick quite literally altered the trajectory of the Madden franchise.

Despite retiring in 2015, Vick’s presence in Madden continues through the

Madden Ultimate Team (MUT) game mode. As they did with FIFA, EA Sports implemented MUT starting with Madden NFL 2010, and despite not reaching the popularity of FUT, MUT contributes to a significant portion of EA’s revenue, alongside

FIFA 20 and The Sims 4. With this game mode comes a different way of playing

Madden, relying on piecing together the best possible team by analyzing the attributes of players to complement particular styles of play. While the goal is fundamentally the same as FUT, the structure of American football produces new strategic methods that gamers have to take into consideration when constructing a team. For example, the offensive lineman’s blocking effectiveness is split between run-blocking and pass- blocking, and gamers must make trade-offs such as these when playing Madden which simply do not exist within FIFA or, at the very least, exist in different ways. However, like real life, the quarterback position reigns supreme, and Michael Vick routinely represents one of the best options at the position. Madden continues to use the likeness of certain retired players in MUT which makes up their “legends” category, and Vick is one of those perpetual players who gets released every year. In 2019, a particularly special version of Vick was released as part of the Ultimate Legends program. These 26 cards obviously mean to allude to the 2004 version of Michael Vick. The picture used to represent him on the card features him wearing an Atlanta Falcons uniform meaning to stir up a gamer’s nostalgia for the ’04 Vick. This process then inevitably repeats itself each year, as Electronic Arts tries to tempt gamers to spend more money on the game mode with notable and “meta” players (a term used to describe players emblematic of the best way to play the game at the current moment). Michael Vick, with his ties to being widely known as the best Madden athlete-avatar of all time, has become the perennial addition to the game that players look forward to each year.

What exactly does this accomplish for Michael Vick? For one, for fans of the

MUT game mode, Michael Vick becomes more closely attached to his persona as a football player. Now, there is not a monolithic representation of Michael Vick among fans of football or fans of MUT. Some fans may focus on his stardom as a record- breaking NFL quarterback, while others focus on his dog-fighting charges. Others still may approach Vick-the-person with ambivalent feelings. But, what I am positing is that the perpetual inclusion of Michael Vick into Madden – which repeatedly creates him as one of the best quarterbacks in the game – has implications for how fans judge Michael

Vick. Continued use of the Vick avatar, which is undoubtedly tied to his real-life persona, makes the gamer more sympathetic toward the real life Vick. This happens through an affective response tied to avatar identification.

To use Caillois (2001) taxonomy of games, Football is mostly an agon

(competitive] game. Winning is the ultimate goal of the sport, and using the best players provides a gamer with the best chance of winning. At times, this means using players 27 with troubled pasts, producing a sort of cognitive dissonance in the gamer, and allowing them to overlook certain troubling aspects of an athlete’s life to justify their use in another area such as fantasy sports or, in this case, in a video game. The use itself, and winning by using certain players, fosters positive feelings about the player, which has implications for how a fan responds to the actual player. We see this phenomenon repeat time and time again when it comes to real sports. Simply being a fan of sport indicates that a person may be more likely to judge an athlete charged with domestic abuse favorably (Anderson and Raney, 2017), and because of in-group identity, fans are more likely to judge the actions of players on their own team more favorably than players on other teams (Wann, 2006).

This does not make Michael Vick immune to criticisms for his past actions nor am I trying to ignore his attempts to make up for his past. Black athletes typically have harder times earning the public’s forgiveness for controversies, even ones that are not exactly crimes, than white counterparts (Leonard & King, 2011). Vick served his time in prison and since then has lobbied for legislation to strengthen the punishments for spectating animal fighting (O’Toole, 2011). Yet, despite these attempts at redemption,

Vick is still struggling to fully achieve it, evidenced by the online petition to remove Vick as a captain of the 2020 NFL Pro Bowl which was signed by over 800,000 participants.

At the same time, some players with histories of domestic assault like Tyreek Hill, who have been punished to a lesser extent than Vick, participate in the Pro Bowl without any backlash from fans, further bolstering the findings of Anderson and Raney. Being a perennial avatar within Madden Ultimate Team is not an avenue which can grant Michael 28 Vick full forgiveness, but it certainly plays a role in the forgiveness process. For one, it continually frames Vick as an athlete first, erasing the problematic areas of his past.

Additionally, repeatedly using the character, and winning, fosters positive feelings between the gamer and avatar. Since the avatar is a stand-in for Michael Vick, this effect creates a more positive understanding of Vick, helping to lead to redemption in the eyes of a certain kind of fan.

To some extent, video game developers already understand this relationship and have taken efforts to remove players that are involved in questionable behavior. San

Diego Studios, creator of the MLB The Show franchise, made Pirates pitcher Felipe

Vazquez a free agent in their Ultimate Team equivalent game mode Diamond Dynasty following Vazquez’s arrest in 2019 for statutory sexual assault (Graves, 2019). This decision effectively removes Vazquez from the game and deters the motivation to use him in the online game mode. In the same year, EA Sports removed Marco Van Basten as an icon in FIFA 20 after he was overheard using a Nazi greeting during a television broadcast. However, EA eventually reneged on this decision by bringing Van Basten back to the game. From a publicity standpoint, these developers can show they do not condone the behavior of players like Vazquez or Van Basten. However, restricting the usage of these players further helps to deter creating any positive associations with them through gaming identification. The application of this process by developers is inconsistent, however, as they continue to incorporate iconic players from bygone eras with a history of racist behavior, such as . In addition, they also continue to use other players involved in domestic abuse cases, such as closing pitchers Aroldis 29 Chapman and Roberto Osuna, who are both among the best rated players in MLB The

Show 20. Clearly these companies are not trying to stake strong moral positions, but by taking some caution concerning who gets to be recreated in digital form and how they perform in game they are, on some level, cognizant of how identification can be problematic for problematic athletes.

In contrast to the study of Vick in which his avatar helps to repair his image, with

Akinfenwa, we see a case where attributes of a video game avatar work to enhance the career of its real-life counterpart. In the case of Michael Vick, his video game avatar and the nostalgia surrounding the “greatest Madden character of all time” work towards repairing his fractured public image due to the 2007 dog-fighting scandal. The continued presence of Vick in MUT is not the only way through which he has sought or achieved redemption, but it is a piece in understanding how the path to redemption has unfolded.

All of this above discussion aims to stress the importance of how attributes are allocated in sports-themed video games, particularly those with massive fan followings like FIFA,

Madden, NBA 2K, and MLB The Show. Methods such as the one utilized by FIFA fail to accurately evaluate players and, as a result, allows platformed racism to enter into the game itself (Srauy & Lippold-Cheney, 2019).

ADEBAYO AKINFENWA: STRONGEST FOOTBALLER IN THE WORLD As far as footballers go, Akinfenwa is likely a name many people do not know.

Lionel Messi and are household names even if one is not a soccer fan, and you may even know the likes of Neymar, Mbappe, or . Yet, even though

30 Akinfenwa has not achieved superstar status, within a small community of people, he is a legend. This status is not for anything he has achieved on the field, but because a video game company decided to bestow upon him the title of “world’s strongest footballer” in the massively popular FIFA franchise. This seems like such a small feat though it certainly affected Akinfenwa’s actual professional career in drastic ways.

In order for Akinfenwa to capitalize on this status, video game attributes needed to be publicized to cultivate an interest in feats such as being the strongest football player in a video game. The release and boom of FIFA Ultimate Team created such an opportunity and led to a new marketing practice publicizing upcoming sports video game releases by advertising the unique attributes of athletes in the new game. The rising popularity of video games makes these announcements newsworthy, and high-profile accounts such as @ESPN feel the need to comment on the ratings of NFL stars and up- and-coming rookies within the Madden video games (Twitter, 2019). This trend reached new heights in 2013, as Electronic Arts started to advertise for FIFA 14. FIFA 14 was released in the midst of a video game platform transition from the generation dominated by the Wii, 360, and PlayStation 3 to the as of now current generation consisting of the Xbox One and PlayStation 4. However, it also featured a maturing gametype which has turned into a cash cow for Electronic Arts: Ultimate Team. Originally released as

DLC for FIFA 10, Ultimate Team quickly became a key feature of the FIFA franchise to the point where in 2019, the game mode and the microtransactions associated with it made up 28% of Electronic Arts’ net revenue (Game Central, 2019). The goal of this game mode is to craft the ultimate team by buying and selling athletes. As such, every 31 attribute point gains relevance and affects the strategies that gamers use while playing with the athletes on the pitch. As a reflection of the importance of attributes, EA started to release lists of the top players in certain attributes leading up to the release of the game. Initially, this consisted of just showing fans who the top 50 rated players were, but eventually evolved into lists of the top goalkeepers, top free kick takers, and ultimately the top 20 strongest players in FIFA 14. An athlete from the fourth division of English football topped the list: Adebayo Akinfenwa.

FIFA 14 was the first time EA broke down and advertised attributes in this manner, highlighting exceptional players for a variety of stats. However, they did not do this for every stat, so the company was articulating to the fanbase through these announcements which attributes were and were not important based on if they received a special list before the release of the game. Strength was selected as one of the attributes and helped to elevate Akinfenwa to microcelebrity status within the FIFA fandom. Bayo

(as he was nicknamed) plays into this title by adopting, “Officially The Strongest in

Fifa14,” as part of his Twitter bio following the release of the game. This identity is not merely forced onto Akinfenwa by the game, he actively participates in constructing himself as the strongest footballer in the world. On his YouTube channel, he has a video titled, “Proof I’m the Strongest Footballer in the Universe,” depicting him bench pressing weight up to 180 kg. Even the name of his channel, “Adebayo da BEAST Akinfenwa” uses his nickname, The Beast, which he received because of his bulky stature which ultimately helps to reinforce his strength.

32 Adebayo Akinfenwa’s celebrity does not necessarily stem from his prolific football skills, although this is not meant to diminish the talent and work he has put in to make a career out of football. He has never played for a team above the third tier of

English football, and over the course of the last seventeen years, he has bounced around teams from the League One (Third-tier) and League Two (Fourth-tier). Despite this,

Akinfenwa has cultivated a massive fan following for a footballer from the lower divisions of football. On Twitter, he has over 200,000 followers, an extremely high number for someone playing 3rd tier football, and has started his own clothing line, named Beast Mode On, built around his identity as the strongest footballer in the world.

If this is not enough to highlight the publicity he has received because of his strength, in

2015, Akinfenwa was one of the soccer stars invited to the launch of FIFA 15 along with

Premier League stars Rio Ferdinand, Harry Kane, Wilfried Zaha, Andros Townsend and

Nacer Chadli (Snelling, 2014). While it is possible other third-division footballers were present, the fact that Akinfenwa’s presence warrants mention by name is notable. If you were to translate this to the United States context, it would be like a Double-A baseball player receiving publicity among the best MLB players which simply does not happen.

Strength has always been a key part of Akinfenwa’s game. Throughout his career, the press has noted his abnormal physique for a soccer player, likening him more to an NFL player than a footballer; they also have emphasized his weightlifting abilities

(BBC, 2015). FIFA reflected his real-world persona by consistently ranking him among the world’s strongest players with the exception of FIFA 05 where his strength rating was only 42 (a fluke that would be corrected the following year with his strength rating 33 shooting up to 88). He would remain among the strongest players in FIFA until FIFA 12 where Akinfenwa officially claimed the title of “strongest player in FIFA.” He has yet to relinquish that title after nine new iterations of the franchise.

In truth, the difference between Akinfenwa’s strength rating in any given FIFA game compared to second place has little impact on actual gameplay. But the legitimacy granted to Bayo’s claim through FIFA has important implications to his real-world identity. Based upon his own reactions to the game, it seems if Akinfenwa would rather hold on to his title as the world’s strongest footballer than see other upgrades to his FIFA counterpart. In a YouTube video by Spencer FC, for example, Akinfenwa gets his stats from FIFA 17 revealed to him on video. Of the six skills featured in the Ultimate Team game mode, which are amalgamations of a number of other attributes, Akinfenwa received downgrades to his pace, passing, dribbling and physicality which obviously he disagreed with based on his reactions in the video. This is a common trope within the stat reveal video genre as athletes rarely agree with how developers decide to rate their skills, but Bayo specifically highlights how he feels his dribbling skills get underrated, echoing how black athletes in general tend to have their athletic feats undercut by the natural black athlete myth. Conversations about Black athletes’ talents tend to center around physicality which serves to delegitimize other areas of their expertise (Hill-Collins,

2012). In this case, that means Akinfenwa’s strength and body become the defining features of his avatar in-game while dribbling and shooting take on a secondary role.

Srauy and Lippold-Cheney (2019) show how this myth gets incorporated into the FIFA franchise and likely affects the evaluation of Akinfenwa’s contribution to his soccer 34 team. Ultimately, Akinfenwa’s strength rating remained the same between FIFA 16 and

FIFA 17, a near perfect 98 rating, which was enough to once again claim the rating for the strongest player in FIFA. Upon receiving this news and following a few seconds of celebration, he exclaims, “you see FIFA, I like what you did, you took it away and then gave it back to me,” indicating that even though he felt he received unfair downgrades to other attributes, this was okay because FIFA maintained his status as strongest in the world.

The status as strongest footballer has made Akinfenwa beloved by fans across the world who typically would pay little attention to a third division footballer, and

Akinfenwa recognizes the effect FIFA has had on his career.

Figure 6: Fan responses to Akinfenwa from Reddit

In an interview with ESPN, he states, “I don’t like the FIFA celebrity status thing…But I didn’t realize how big FIFA, or the gaming community is. What that has done for me as an individual and for my profile is mind-boggling, it’s hard to put into words” (ESPN,

2019). Some fans even travel halfway around the world in order to watch Akinfenwa

35 play third-tier football in England (ESPN, 2020). The FIFA franchise has brought recognition to Akinfenwa in ways that would be highly improbable thirty years ago before the video game franchise took off. Although the popularity of his FIFA character at times overshadows his feats on the pitch, the opportunities this unique attribute affords

Akinfenwa shows the power behind the ratings in video game. While Akinfenwa is the best example of this phenomenon, given his continued presence as the strongest FIFA character and as a result one of the most popular lower division footballers, other athletes have also become associated with their exceptional stats in the FIFA games. For a stretch of releases, English forward Theo Walcott was listed as the fastest player in the FIFA games, and Venezuelan midfielder Juan Arango for a time was among the highest-rated players in both long shots and free kick accuracy. However, Akinfenwa played into the title of World’s Strongest Footballer in ways that Walcott and Arango failed to capitalize on.

As the popularity of sports-themed video games rises, not only are attributes receiving increased attention due to game modes like Ultimate Team, but the announcement of attributes are also becoming notable media events for sports journalism.

One version of these announcements consists of athletes having their ratings revealed to them, so fans can receive their real-time reactions to these stats. On the Youtuber

Spencer FC’s channel, Akinfenwa participated in one of these announcements. In this case, the video only features Akinfenwa, though Spencer FC has other videos of stat reveals for other players, and EA Sports and NFL Rush have their own videos featuring a number of different NFL players reacting to their Madden stats. Often times the players 36 appear upset based on the rating and feel they should be rated higher. This new trend reporting on and asking athletes about their video game attributes indicates two recent developments in the sports-themed video game genre. First, we see the increased visibility and integration of video game content into large sports organizations and media outlets. ESPN finds it newsworthy to make posts about the release of players Madden ratings, and the NFL itself has started to sponsor and lend support to eSports leagues built around the Madden franchise. Secondly, this indicates the coming of age of a generation of athletes that grew up alongside the development of these video game franchises like

FIFA and Madden. This generation cares about how the athletes are rated in-game because many actually play these video games.

Fifteen years ago, the media was not asking players like Tom Brady how they felt about their rating in Madden NFL 2005. Now, athletes coming into the NFL, NBA, MLB and top-tier FIFA leagues stem from a generation of gamers. Star athletes such as Juju

Smith-Schuster (NFL) and Trevor May (MLB) stream regularly on Twitch, and in the

2018 World Cup Final, Antoine Griezmann celebrated a goal using a dance from the popular game Fortnite. Asking players how they feel about attributes reflects the legitimation of video games in popular culture, and additionally, shows how athletes are affected by attributes. While they may not lose sleep over being unfairly rated, it can nonetheless offer a source of legitimation for many athletes, as it has in the case of

Akinfenwa.

True, objective evaluations of an athlete’s skill level cannot fully be realized, and video games will reflect this impossibility. However, that does not mean accuracy does 37 not matter because, as illustrated above, the implications of how an athlete is reified within a video game has real-world effects. By examining the career of Akinfenwa, we can see how a difference of one or two points in any given attribute can be the difference between being a recognizable and nearly universally beloved figure within the FIFA community and obscurity. While it is not entirely fair to give full credit to the FIFA franchise, it is clear the game has elevated the status of Akinfenwa as a player which has afforded him more opportunities than if he did not hold the title of strongest footballer in the world as reinforced by his FIFA avatar. Although overall FIFA has made a positive impact on Akinfenwa’s career, his FIFA avatar simultaneously adheres to the stereotype that emphasizes the physical attributes of Black athletes as opposed to the hard work and skill that has gone into making their career successful.

Attributing some of Akinfenwa’s successful career to the FIFA franchise is not meant to diminish his accomplishments on the field; he still must be a talented footballer to continue to play professionally after a 17-year career. However, the added attention afforded to him given the gimmick of being the strongest footballer certainly has played a role in his social media presence ultimately, broadening his influence beyond what is typically given to a footballer who has yet to ascend beyond the third tier of English football.

CONCLUSION Sports-themed video games consistently rank among the most popular video games each year, though academic scholarship tends to be lacking on this topic. This gap

38 between the scholarship and the phenomenon itself has created a gap in video game studies, and while it is understandable – as the genre is not exactly making innovations within the video game medium in terms of gameplay mechanics, narrative, or graphics – there is a considerable amount of information to be gained from this genre. Srauy and

Lippold-Cheney took a unique approach to studying video games, looking not towards the mechanics of a game or its aesthetic representations, but instead critically analyzing

FIFA and the process of translating an athletes’ real world performance into a set of attributes and considering the inherent biases which can come with evaluating athletes in such a manner. I have taken their initial idea and applied it to a different video game,

MLB The Show 19. Although the data does not show extreme biases, which is to be expected in comparison to the FIFA franchise, as evaluating baseball performances is a more objective process, this does not entirely absolve The Show. At times, as I illustrated in this report, ratings of players do not reflect the stats they have accumulated; additionally, the reliance on situational statistics to create ratings is an inherently flawed process. For example, when a player hits in the batting order has a great effect on their chances to earn RBIs or to impact their average with runners in scoring position. A player cannot control when they are put into these situations, and as such, using RBIs or

BA w/ RISP only provides an inaccurate evaluation of an athlete’s capabilities.

While on the surface these decisions feel inconsequential, they do have an impact on the real-world celebrity of athletes and thus have material consequences. In the careers of Michael Vick and Adebayo Akinfenwa we can start to see how their digital representations tie into their present-day identities and affect their locations within the 39 cultural memories of video game fans. However, in both Vick and Akinfenwa’s cases, we are looking at the attributes as the developers coded them into the game. With each of the major sports video games featuring a franchise mode where gamers can play ten or twenty years into the future, developers must also make decisions about the max potential of different athletes. In doing so, they are shining a spotlight on particular athletes not based on current statistics but off of a best guess of what their future may hold. From the start, the myth around these athletes begins not from their actual accomplishments. EA

Sports offers legitimization based upon what they may become. By turning these athletes into valuable commodities for game modes in their game, developers help to cultivate the fanbases for athletes before they earn consistent playing time at top-flight football clubs.

This can make these athletes more marketable as celebrities and offer them greater financial opportunities than other athletes not afforded this extra attention.

The COVID-19 pandemic has created an interesting spotlight on sports video games. With the cancellation or postponement of professional sports leagues, sports fans were forced to turn to alternative media sources to get their sports fix, and video games were up to the challenge. SNY, the New York Mets affiliate, has live-streamed simulations of MLB games via YouTube on days in which the real-life game would have happened if the season was not interrupted by COVID-19. The MLB also created a players’ league where one player from each team was chosen to compete in an online league. Those chosen then controlled the team they were a member of and competed in an abbreviated season to determine a champion with each game live-streamed on Twitch.

In both instances, we are seeing a convergence between the real-life sport and its video 40 game counterpart with athletes and official MLB networks using video games to fill a void created by the cancellation of sports everywhere. As these games increasingly enter the cultural mainstream, we must critically re-evaluate the power of the attribute within the sports video game genre. This genre is about simulation, replicating the processes of the sport. Action becomes the framework under which these games should be evaluated, and attributes have a direct impact on the action of gameplay. This ultimately impacts the teams and athletes that gamers engage with, the relationship between the gamer and who they choose to play with, and the process of identification.

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