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Nick Capozzoli did an excellent long piece for Waypoint on the politics of sports games, specifcally their story modes. Since they've introduced what people might call RPG elements with a narrative and options for players to do actions with their player off-court, it is peculiar that the politics of sports and being black under white supremacy are omitted. Capozzoli then contrasts this with the blackness of basketball and Colin Kaepernick and how such an experience might be simulated in these story modes in sports games.

In NBA 2K17 there is no option to have your player take a knee during the anthem, of course. Whatever the views of their real life counterparts, the virtual athletes will always stand, mutely reverent, in this scene that nobody ever actually watches because you can skip it with a button press. Its inclusion is an obeisance in its own right: Along with the reproduced commentary and hype reels that play occasionally before tipoff, it signals the video game's faithfulness to the real product.

It's not as though the team behind NBA 2K17 had Kaepernick or Abdul-Rauf in mind when they advised, in one of the game's preview blogs, "Remember…what you do off the court MATTERS." When developers promise that actions in their video games will "matter," they're usually just referring to a kind of reserved space for the player's input on things—to roleplaying, essentially.

[...] This all means that the NBA 2K's pivot away from staid simulation and towards the individual, towards characterfulness, is also a move towards a version of basketball that's more recognizably, self-assuredly black. The effect is most pronounced in MyCareer, where it's manifest in everything from dialogue, to setting, to theme. For as long as I've been playing the mode, it's only ever used black voice actors, the player character's script always tinged with AAVE. It's something that's instantly noticeable when you create a white character.

Here's the rare genre in which the white experience is not default, couldn't be default, not without gerrymandering so blatant that we'd cease to recognize the shape of reality beneath it. Not when the league is three-quarters black, by recent count. And within that, worlds of difference between backgrounds, styles, and personalities.

In this environment, the reticence of the video games' sociopolitical commentary stands out. Not just because you can't kneel during the national anthem—even ubiquitous, benign league programs like the NBA Cares charity, or its recent player/police town halls, don't feature. Chalk it up to the practiced apoliticism of AAA video gaming.

And consider the Spike Lee directed 2K16 MyCareer mode, "Livin' Da Dream" an eccentric outlier. The following year's entry pared things back, with a story told via clipped snapshots of NBA banality: hallways deep under the bleachers, locker rooms, practice gyms (all have the added benefit of being graphically untaxing). There's little semblance of a dramatic arc between the games, so what you're left with is a series of platitudes: putting nose to grindstone, doing the blue collar work, etcetera. "We're just focused on the next game" writ large. So basically, the Tim Duncan of basketball narratives (an effect completed by the intentionally frumpy default clothes, designed to incentivize real-money transactions to upgrade)

Which brings us back to the matter of kneeling. What if you could? One imagines that you might discover, to your horror, that the channels through which the video games pipe in realistic banter can chamber hate just as easily. The spoof twitter feeds, which normally abstracts fan feedback with a couple milquetoast tweets, would suddenly spool into an unmanageable thread of hate speech. Texts would light up your in-game phone, notifying you of censure from coaches and management. Maybe your agent would call to tell you that you'd lost endorsements, a thing that happened to Brandon Marshall the day after he joined Colin Kaepernick's humble little protest.

Then you'd simulate the offseason of your free agency, find no offers had been forthcoming, and the game would delete itself from your hard drive.

Much, much more at the link: https://waypoint.vice.com/en_us/art...-kaepernick-and-the-lie-of-apolitical-stardom

 

[Mihael Mello Keehl]

The other day I was on Facebook when they unveiled the madden story mode and many white people were praising EA saying good they didnt make the story mode racists like 2K or good the created character doesnt sound black. It was like I was in the twilight zone.

 

[Architechnophile]

Thank you for the kind words!