ABSTRACT
Videogaming has become a part of ordinary life for many people. This has to do with the rising popularity and increasing demographic breadth of the medium, as well as the games becoming more deeply enmeshed in people's lives due to factors such as the constant updates of social media, online features, and being able to play on the go. Many games have also started to blur the line between real sports and the closed fictional circle of a videogame. Sports videogames have long been regarded as either fun, exaggerated, and abstracted transformations of a real sport or as close and realistic simulations. This chapter argues that although sports videogames can still be both or a mix of the two, basketball videogames in particular lend themselves to being extensions of the sport of basketball. Sports fans are informed about what is happening in professional basketball through various channels, among them attending live games, watching live games, recaps, and analysis on television, reading newspapers and magazines, both online and offline, discussions with other fans locally and over social media, playing basketball themselves, and purchasing basketball gear and apparel as well as merchandise such as trading cards. This chapter will show that basketball videogames cover many aspects of the aforementioned fan media channels and also bring in new aspects particular to the medium of videogames. For this purpose the central research question “In what ways can playing basketball videogames function as a fan experience?” is the focus of the chapter. The common strength of videogames, especially contemporary basketball videogames, is their function to extend and deepen individual parts of the fan experience. For this purpose I played, documented, and analyzed a series of gameplay scenarios, relying mostly on basketball videogames from the NBA 2K series (Visual Concepts, 1999–2011). All of the scenarios are designed to tie-in with real-world basketball games and events and also feature both a simulation and an individual game from the 2012 NBA Playoffs.
