Devlog 5

In discussing how a sport can be translated into a video game, there’s a particular mechanic in FIFA 2022 that I think is important to look at as an example. Since FIFA is a reflection of professional soccer, there is a mechanic called “Career Mode” where players of the game can follow a player or a manger through a fifteen-year long career. While most players of this game wouldn’t have real-life experience as professional soccer players, this part of the game is likely reflective of their knowledge of how long-term professional soccer careers work. Unlike in the article “The Slow Grind”, where the author states that skateboarding video games at the time “did not really represent skating for [him]” (Sharp), FIFA 2022 was always intended to appeal more to fans of professional soccer rather than the players themselves. After reading that article and comparing it to FIFA 2022, I found that the experience that the author had with the game 720° and how it “did not reflect” (Sharp) the skating culture at the time doesn’t really account for something like FIFA 2022 and how it portrays professional soccer. Like the existence of Career Mode implies, FIFA 2022 represents the world of professional sports and players’ careers. At the time of the author of “The Slow Grind” was heavily involved in the skating world, skateboarding was not an organized sport with professional leagues, but rather the focus was on the street culture. This isn’t true for professional soccer, and FIFA 2022 wasn’t made to represent an underground alternative movement, unlike the early days of skateboarding culture with its “the outsider diehard skater mindset” (Sharp). Thus the dissonance between the culture of skateboarding and the video game played by the author doesn’t apply in the case of FIFA 2022, because the game is meant to portray professional soccer and not the average player. Overall, a very mainstream sport like professional soccer and its adaptation into video game form has much less dissonance from its intended audience than early skateboarding games as described by “The Slow Grind”. This is helped along by the fact that there is not a tight-knit community of alternative folks with unique experiences among soccer fans, at least not to the extent of the early skateboarding community. To be fair to games like 720°, games like FIFA 2022 benefit greatly from superior funding and from professional structure of the actual sport being represented.