6/22/2005
Video Games Carving Into Real Sports' Ratings
Male teens control the action, rather than watching it on television
By SETH SCHIESELTHE NEW YORK TIMES
With six seconds remaining, things looked grim for the San Antonio Spurs.
Detroit Pistons forward Darko Milicic had given his team a one-point lead with a "sensational move," according to Marv Albert. Now the Spurs' Bruce Bowen 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 cheered and high-fived one another.
"The shot just looked good all the way," said Albert Arce, 14.
This was not last night's Game 6 of the NBA Finals; 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 said they consider themselves sports fans. But they, like a growing number of young men, would rather play a sports video game than watch the real thing on TV -- 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 pro athletes as stars to emulate, perhaps most aggressively with Gatorade's "Be Like Mike" ad campaign 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 males seem to be asking the same question. Since 2000, TV ratings for almost all major sports have fallen among male viewers ages 12-34. Even NASCAR, whose ratings have generally been considered 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 firm.
For the lords of sports, the attitude toward the game revolution seems to vacillate between appreciation for the licensing revenue that games can bring (the NFL, for instance, reaped an estimated $300 million from a recent five-year licensing deal with industry leader Electronic Arts) and concern about whether these games are forcing the TV cash cow onto a crash diet.
"I was on a panel recently where someone asked me what my worst fear was," said NBA commissioner David Stern. "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."
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 nonetheless 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 (Los Angeles Lakers star) Kobe (Bryant), OK?," Albert Arce said. "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, EA's NFL Madden series, named for former 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 don't seem to care about the Oakland Raiders teams of the 1970s that he coached or even about the real-life games that he describes as a TV commentator.
Peter Grunwald, president of Grunwald Associates, a research firm in Bethesda, Md., that studies children's media consumption, said that the increasing popularity of sports video games, perhaps at the expense of sports TV ratings, reflected a broader shift in how young people related to media and entertainment.
"These kids are not couch potatoes letting a show wash over them," he said. "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."
By SETH SCHIESELTHE NEW YORK TIMES
With six seconds remaining, things looked grim for the San Antonio Spurs.
Detroit Pistons forward Darko Milicic had given his team a one-point lead with a "sensational move," according to Marv Albert. Now the Spurs' Bruce Bowen 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 cheered and high-fived one another.
"The shot just looked good all the way," said Albert Arce, 14.
This was not last night's Game 6 of the NBA Finals; 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 said they consider themselves sports fans. But they, like a growing number of young men, would rather play a sports video game than watch the real thing on TV -- 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 pro athletes as stars to emulate, perhaps most aggressively with Gatorade's "Be Like Mike" ad campaign 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 males seem to be asking the same question. Since 2000, TV ratings for almost all major sports have fallen among male viewers ages 12-34. Even NASCAR, whose ratings have generally been considered 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 firm.
For the lords of sports, the attitude toward the game revolution seems to vacillate between appreciation for the licensing revenue that games can bring (the NFL, for instance, reaped an estimated $300 million from a recent five-year licensing deal with industry leader Electronic Arts) and concern about whether these games are forcing the TV cash cow onto a crash diet.
"I was on a panel recently where someone asked me what my worst fear was," said NBA commissioner David Stern. "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."
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 nonetheless 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 (Los Angeles Lakers star) Kobe (Bryant), OK?," Albert Arce said. "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, EA's NFL Madden series, named for former 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 don't seem to care about the Oakland Raiders teams of the 1970s that he coached or even about the real-life games that he describes as a TV commentator.
Peter Grunwald, president of Grunwald Associates, a research firm in Bethesda, Md., that studies children's media consumption, said that the increasing popularity of sports video games, perhaps at the expense of sports TV ratings, reflected a broader shift in how young people related to media and entertainment.
"These kids are not couch potatoes letting a show wash over them," he said. "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."
