Digitalising Real Life in Video Games

Ever since the first computer and the first attempt at creating a video game, one of the main directions in which a significant part of game developers went was to translate what happens in real-life into the digital world. Hence a large number of reality-imitating games has been released, and you see this trend even in games that are completely unrealistic, based in fantasy worlds or that have magic, which we’ll get to later on.

First, we’ll take a look at the reasons why this trend has been so popular and why it guided the development of so many games, and then we’ll take a look at some good examples.

Why This Trend?

Physical Limitations

Most of the realistic-driven games are usually sports-oriented. Many people don’t have the stamina to play certain sports, or are physically limited (in extreme cases even disabled) in how much they can play said sport. This doesn’t mean that they don’t like the sport, or that they wouldn’t want to try to play it, if they could, which created a need in the market to design video games which would simulate these sports for people that otherwise can’t play them.

Skill Level

As we touched on in the previous section, even the people that have fully-functional bodies can sometimes be limited in which sports they can play, especially if they aren’t very fit or they’re clumsy, for example (which is a large number of people). This creates a so-called “skill floor” which is too high for some people to even try to improve in certain sports, because all of their friends with which they could be playing it have much higher skill.

Games don’t have these types of limitations as they can usually always match you with similarly skilled players from all over the world. There is also a lot of room for gaming improvements when it comes to the “skill ceiling”, meaning you have more room to improve than you could with traditional sports.

Wider Community

This brings us to the point about community. You need other people to play these types of games, both in real life and in-game. However, the game doesn’t physically limit the amount of people that you can contact to only those that you’ve met and know and who live not too far away from you. In game, you can be matched with completely random people from all over the world, meaning that at any point in time, and wherever you are, you are sure to be able to play the game that you want. This isn’t something that you can do in real life, and is one of the main reasons why these types of games became so popular.

“Unrealistic Realism”

This is a weird term, but it does make sense. For example, there are some games which mainly focus on real-life elements, even sports, but add a little bit of magic – and this can literally be magic that’s being added to the game. You can have a real life sport such as rugby, and tweak it a little, add flying broomsticks – and create a sport such as quidditch! There are no limits, so the room for creativity and personal taste opens up, which is another big reason why you see this trend in so many games.

Examples

Football/Soccer

Probably the most famous VR sports games are those that emulate real life football or soccer (depending on where you live). The two best examples are FIFA, along with its little less popular cousin PES. Both of these have a wide community and a very dedicated fanbase. They grab millions of dollars each year for releasing a new version of the game that only introduces minor and iterative upgrades as opposed to the previous ones, and yet still large amounts of people will still gladly buy it and enjoy a good game of digital football with their online friends.

Basketball

If you aren’t a huge fan of football, but would like to test your mettle in basketball instead, there is probably no place better to start than the NBA 2k series of games. This series has been around for 20 years, with the first iteration of the game being launched way back in 1999. With such an amount of experience and time for improvement, it’s no wonder that every new iteration of the game brings more and more fans into the already enormous community that enjoys this title.

Chess

Did you know that chess has been applied for the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo? The controversy over whether chess is a sport or not has long been settled with the conclusion that it is indeed a legitimate sport discipline, however what prevented it from appearing in the Olympics beforehand was only the distinction between amateurs and professionals.

Nevertheless, this sport has long been adapted in the digital world, with many operating systems coming with a chess game preinstalled nowadays. Therefore, if some more common sports aren’t really your thing, you might want to try yourself in a game of chess. Or a couple of them.