They got (video) game; NBA finals can wait
A growing number of young men would rather play video games than watch sports, a shift that has professional leagues scrambling.
Darko Milicic of the Detroit Pistons had given his team a 1-point lead with a "sensational move" to the hoop, according to Marv Albert's play by play. Now Bruce Bowen of the Spurs was bringing the ball upcourt. Unable to pass, he heaved the ball up from midcourt in a desperate 3-point attempt.
Swish. The Spurs won, 72-70. And in the Bushwick neighborhood of Brooklyn, five young friends gathered around a 54-inch television after school went wild, cheering and high-fiving one another.
"The shot just looked good all the way," said Albert Arce, 14.
This was not Sunday night's Game 5 of the National Basketball Association finals on ABC; that game went to overtime before the Spurs pulled out a 96-95 victory to take a 3-2 lead in the series, with Game 6 scheduled for tonight.
It was "NBA Live": a graphically sumptuous, statistically detailed video game that is part of the new face of mass-market sports. Albert and his friends consider themselves sports fans. But they, like a growing number of young men weaned on interactivity, would rather play a sports video game than watch the real thing on television--a shift that has professional leagues scrambling to maintain their hold on their lucrative core audience.
"When you watch on TV, it's just boring," said Dennis Rodriguez, 12, who was playing one afternoon last week in Bushwick. "I like the games better because you can do what you want to do. Like, I can make the player pass it or shoot it. But when you see it on TV, you're just watching."
The media, sports and marketing industries have always cast professional athletes as stars to emulate, most recently with the elevation of LeBron James to celebrity status and perhaps most aggressively with Gatorade's "Be Like Mike" ad campaign in the early 1990s, starring Michael Jordan. Now, video games allow young sports fans to cut the "like" out of the equation; they can simply "be" their own stars.
To Joshua Alvarado, 16, who said he usually spent at least six hours a day playing video games, the point seemed obvious. "I love sports," he said. "But why would you rather just watch it on TV when the video game lets you control it?"
Millions of young American men seem to be asking the same question. Since 2000, television broadcast ratings for almost all major sports have fallen among male viewers between 12 and 34. Even NASCAR, whose ratings have generally been hailed by the industry as healthy, has suffered a modest decline, according to Nielsen Media Research.
Over the same period, sales of sports video games in the United States have risen by about 34 percent, to more than $1.2 billion last year from slightly less than $900 million in 2000, according to the NPD Group, a market research company. Young men are also the core market for video games.
For the lords of sports, the attitude toward the video game revolution seems to vacillate between appreciation for the licensing revenue that video games can bring (the National Football League, for instance, reaped an estimated $300 million from a recent five-year licensing deal with Electronic Arts, the leading video game company) and concern about whether these games are forcing the cash cow of television onto an unwelcome diet.
"I was on a panel recently where someone asked me what my worst fear was," said David Stern, the NBA commissioner, in a telephone interview. "It was that as video games got so graphically close to perfection, and you could create your own players--their hairdos, their shoes--that there might be a battle between seeing games in person or on television and seeing it play out on a video game."
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Stern said he was speaking "mildly tongue in cheek," but added, "The competition for eyeballs is so intense now that if our consumers are not consuming us on television, we would rather have them consuming us on a video game than doing something else."
In that vein, many young people who enjoy sports games do become fans of sports franchises. The friends playing in Bushwick, for instance, could rattle off their favorite teams and players. Of course, they would rather inhabit the stars than simply watch them. "I like Kobe, OK?," Albert Arce said, referring to Kobe Bryant, the Los Angeles Lakers star. "But I like to play him because I can make him pass to the other guys. When I see him on TV, it's like he doesn't know how to pass."
Passing is also a big part of the undisputed champion of sports games, the "Madden" series of NFL games, created by Electronic Arts and named for the football coach John Madden. The games have sold more than 43 million copies since 1989 and have turned Madden into an icon
for a generation of fans who hardly care about the 1970s Oakland Raiders teams that he coached or even about the real-life games that he describes as a television commentator."John Madden's Q score is in the Top 10 in all of sports and higher than any current football player, and a lot of that is due to the video game," said Sandy Montag, Madden's agent for the last two decades, referring to a statistical measure of pop-culture clout. "Lots of young people will walk up to John and just say, 'Hey, Madden!' and he knows that when someone calls him by just his last name it's a video game guy."
Montag added: "Television ratings were high 10 years ago, but the culture and lifestyles have changed. We've become a society that's more interactive, and people, especially young people, want to help create their entertainment experience instead of just sitting in front of a box and passively watching."
Peter Grunwald, president of Grunwald Associates, a research company in Bethesda, Md., that studies children's media consumption, said: "These kids are not couch potatoes letting a show wash over them. Kids are in a stage of their life where they are interested in self-expression, in trying on different identities as they figure out, literally, who they are. With the proper supervision, technologies like the Internet and video games can really encourage and accommodate that."
Back in Bushwick, Shawn Hernandez, 13, and his friends said they were all convinced that in the future, sports video games would be more popular than sports television. "The graphics on the games are just getting better and everything is getting more realistic," he said. (When Shawn and his friends truly crave realism, they play actual sports.)
And it is not just fans who are embracing the video game era in sports. Brian Billick, coach of the NFL's Baltimore Ravens, said he was hoping to use video game and virtual reality technology in his team's training. "I can hardly get my guys to stop playing video games anyway," he said in a telephone interview.
Billick said that when he was looking for a new assistant coach recently, an applicant said he was qualified because he had mastered all of the NFL defenses through intense study of the Madden games. "He was totally serious," Billick said. He did not, for the record, get the job.
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