The Game World
The setting of your game will be the normal venue for the sport, usually a stadium or an arena. It adds a great deal of verisimilitude to present these as accurate copies of real places. Players enjoy being able to recognize the architectural details of their favorite stadiums. Some sports, such as basketball or American football, require a playing area of a fixed shape and size, but others do not—different baseball fields famously have different effects on gameplay. Some sports, such as skiing and bobsledding, take place in venues that vary enormously and require a great deal of practice to learn.
The crowd also contributes significantly to the setting. Although you won’t want to devote a lot of graphical resources to spectators, the sounds of a crowd add greatly to the atmosphere. Increase the volume at tense moments. Let the players hear chants if it’s the kind of match at which spectators chant; add cheering after a score by the home team and a sudden silence after a score by the visitors. Horns, whistles, and vendors calling out, “Ice-cold beer here!” are all part of the experience. Television-style commentary is also essential to most serious sports games and is covered in the section “Audio Commentary,” later in this book.
Licenses, Trademarks, and Publicity Rights
Many years ago, small developers could make and sell computer games using names such as NFL and get away with it because the National Football League never knew about it. You can’t do this now. Interactive entertainment is big business, and you have to be scrupulously careful to avoid violating trademarks or personal publicity rights.
Team and League Trademarks
The exact details vary from league to league and country to country, but generally in America the professional leagues hold the license to use the names, logos, uniform designs, and other indicia of all the teams in a league, plus the name and logo of the league itself. Colleges and universities normally belong to a governing body such as the National Collegiate Athletics Association in the USA, which represents their collective interests. You or your publisher will have to negotiate an agreement with the league or governing body to use these symbols in your game. If you do not have such an agreement, you can refer to teams only by their towns (such as San Francisco or Madrid) rather than their team names, and you may not use their logos, uniform colors, or other identifying marks.
A variety of governing bodies in different countries around the world manage individual sports such as gymnastics or figure skating. The names and indicia of particular events, such as the Kentucky Derby, belong to the organizations that produce them—in this case, the Churchill Downs racetrack. In recent years, these groups have begun to exploit their intellectual property rights in a variety of ways, so they tend to come down hard on anything that seems to be an infringement. Don’t assume that just because an event has been around for decades you can use its name freely.
Personal Publicity Rights
You cannot use the name or photograph of a real athlete without permission. An athlete’s name and likeness make up part of his personal publicity rights, and of course, famous athletes sell the rights to use their names for millions of dollars when they endorse a particular product as an individual. You might need to negotiate with an organization that licenses the rights to use all the athletes’ names collectively. This might be the league in some cases; in others, however, including the NFL and Major League Baseball, you have to contact the athletes’ unions. In college sports, the rules will be different again. Unless you have the endorsement of a specific athlete, you must make sure that your game displays all athletes in approximately the same way, or endorsement could be implied. You can’t make it look as if an athlete has endorsed your game when that’s not the case.
Photographs present further difficulties. You must obtain a license from the person in the photograph and also the photograph’s copyright holder (usually the person who took the photograph). Again, some governing bodies use special clearinghouses for these kinds of things: NFL Photos, a special department of the NFL, licenses still photos for all the photographers who are accredited to take pictures at NFL matches. The license from the copyright holder, however, does not grant you the personal publicity rights of the athlete in the picture; you have to obtain those separately. You can also license photos from the trading card companies, as well as from journalistic bodies such as the Associated Press, and from private photo libraries.
In short, the whole issue of rights in sports games is a legal minefield. Nowadays, even the stadiums might claim special rights, and many stadium owners auction the name of the stadium to the highest bidder, as with AT&T Park (the San Francisco baseball stadium). As a designer, you probably won’t have to deal with obtaining all these licenses yourself, but you should know that it’s not safe to specify simply that a game will use all the team and athlete names and photos. Obtaining them and the right to use them is a very costly and time-consuming business. It’s best to design the game in such a way that it doesn’t depend on having these things unless you’re certain that they will be available. It doesn’t matter if you’re a student making a school project, but any game for commercial release must address these issues.
Audio Commentary
Most sports games try to reproduce the experience of watching the sport on television. An important part of that experience is hearing the announcers’ commentary, or play-by-play. Most TV and radio sports broadcasts include at least two people, the play-by-play announcer and the color commentator. The play-by-play announcer describes the action on a moment-by-moment basis. The color commentator, usually a retired coach or player, offers insights into strategy and tactics, as well as background material on the teams or individual athletes. To make the player feel she’s right there in the stands, you might include a third voice, that of the stadium announcer over the public address system. His remarks tend to be quite formulaic, although they do occasionally include requests to move badly parked cars, retrieve found children, and so on.
To study what kinds of things your audio commentary will need to do, record a TV broadcast of a real match and then transcribe everything that is said and who said it. Do this for two or three matches, and you will begin to notice patterns in the play-by-play: The announcers tend to read out the score at particular times, they use certain repetitive language, and so on. As you watch the match on videotape, take note of the different kinds of events that occur and the different remarks these events elicit from the commentators. The events that provoke a reaction from the color commentator aren’t necessarily the same events that trigger a response from the play-by-play announcer. The color commentator speaks at more dramatic moments or when an athlete has done something particularly spectacular (or particularly bad). For example, in tennis, you might have a color comment such as, “She’s having a terrible time with those double faults!” when an athlete commits four double faults in a single game. Remember, a commentator would use this line only once, not after every subsequent double fault.
When you need to create commentary for a set of match events, sit down with the programmers and discuss the events to make sure the software can detect them. Some, such as a strikeout in baseball, will be uncomplicated, but many events will be judgment calls. A dropped pass in football that the athlete really should have caught, for instance, is not so easily detectable; you can detect the dropped pass, but what determines whether the receiver should have caught it? The probability of the receiver’s catching the pass must be calculated from such things as the receiver’s dexterity rating and the accuracy with which the quarterback threw the pass in the first place—provided that the ball wasn’t tipped away by a defender. It’s always best to err on the side of caution in these cases: Don’t design judgment calls that the player is likely to disagree with, or she’ll think you’ve delivered a stupid game. As the saying goes, “It’s better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to open one’s mouth and remove all doubt.”
Don’t forget the introductory and wrap-up material at the beginning and end of the match—commentary such as, “Welcome to Sports Authority Field for today’s game between the New England Patriots and the Denver Broncos. It’s a cold and windy day.” Finally, don’t expect to be able to duplicate exactly what real human broadcasters do, and don’t spend time on the commentary at the expense of making the game playable and fun. If you’re working on a small project, a few lines for the most important events will be enough.
For more detailed information on writing commentary scripts, including the many tricky issues associated with assembling commentary out of speech fragments, read Chapter 13, “Interchangeable Dialogue Content,” of Game Writing: Narrative Skills for Videogames, edited by Chris Bateman.