It’s Game Time: Speed, Acceleration, and The Digital Sports Game

Abstract

This essay takes up the relationship between sport and time through the lens of the digital sports game. As the digital sports game industry has aspired to develop increasingly accurate simulations of professional sport, it has confronted the temporality regimes inherent in real world sport in a variety of different ways. As much as the digital sports game continues to simulate the digital athlete’s relation to time within individual contests with an increasing fidelity, the genre’s relationship to time has also been extended to simulating the athlete’s virtual career. The essay considers the time-sport relation through a ludological analysis of two recent digital sports games: the American football simulation, Madden NFL’17 and the baseball simulation, MLB The Show’16. As different as these sports might be in their construction of time, these sports games share similarities with respect to their treatment of time for the digital athlete and for the player’s time.Drawing on social theorist, John Tomlinson, and his notion of “the culture of speed” and its preoccupation with immediacy, the essay takes up ways in which these games position players with respect to accelerated time and considers the potential consequences of this acceleration for how time is perceived and experienced in the consumption of other forms of mediated sport.