Andrew Rollings and Ernest Adams on Game Design

The Common Elements of Sports Games

Using the elements of a game that were established in Chapter 2, “Game Concepts,” we can observe the following characteristics of serious sports games.

Rules

The rules of a sports game are, for the most part, the rules of the sport that is being simulated. You might find that you need to relax these rules in some areas, particularly with respect to faults, fouls, or judgment errors that the player might make. Because the player is using a handheld device to manipulate an athlete onscreen instead of playing on the field himself, it's much more difficult to judge when his avatar is about to bump into someone, cross into a forbidden zone, and so on. A few games allow the player to set the level of “refereeing” ...