The Decline of the Sports Video Game Genre and the Age of Warcraft

Looking at the evidences of the decline of the sports game genre over the last few decades of video game history, my first thought was that it reflected the decline of interest in sports among younger age cohorts.

However, it may also be a matter of changes in what games could offer players, and what people look for in their video games changing along with it. In an age of simpler gaming technology a little distraction was what people expected of their games--and a sports game was as good a way of getting it as any. Meanwhile a good many other genres were new and fairly primitive, especially those that like the first-person shooter, the role-playing game, the adventure game that combined role-playing elements with action. But the latter got better--a lot better, the worlds larger, the features more numerous, the tasks more varied, the flow more intuitive, all as the enhancement of the graphics and sound gave them a sensational appeal. The result was that games increasingly had the potential to be immersive experiences--immersive experiences in another world often more attractive than the player's own world. Thus did it become a common joke among gamers that life is a badly designed video game, where you only get the one life, can't customize your character, can't choose the difficulty setting. Thus did observers like Edward Castronova argue that, if the medium through which we experienced it was technologically primitive compared to the promises, in a significant way the age of virtual reality was already here, and many people increasingly choosing the virtual over the real. In the process that experience, and the genres supplying it, seem to have become the foundation of hardcore gaming--and supplanted the lighter entertainments (the sports games, and the puzzlers, and even the Guitar Hero-type entertainments so popular in the '00s), certainly to go by the content of the bestseller lists.