The gaming ecosystem for sports: from Roblox to Animal Crossing
This is clear to everybody: while live sports are missing, eSports enable sport organisations to explore new opportunities. We are talking about an ecosystem that this year could reach a 1.5 billion turnover, leading to the creation of a dedicated observatory (Oies) in Italy for the development and the awareness about this huge phenomenon involving sports, technology and gaming. But, when it all began? From what this long and relatively slow revolution originated?
“I wrote this back in 1989 while I was designing Monkey Island. It is now the futuristic year of 2004 and we are all driving around in flying cars and wearing sliver jumps suits. A lot has changed for Adventure Games as well, but unfortunately not in the right direction. Adventure Games are officially dead.”
(Ron Gilbert, creator of Monkey Island and ideator of SCUMM, graphics engine developed for LucasArts)
The story started in 1990 with the pirate Guybrush Ulysses Threepwood, the protagonist of the saga ideated by Ron Gilbert, opening the new gaming era. Ron started producing the game for LucasArts, the LucasFilms company owned by George Lucas, developing and improving the SCUMM interface (Script Creation Utility for Maniac Mansion) created to simplify the graphics of Maniac Mansion, a 1987 video game in which it was possible, for the first time, to play different final scenarios of the game and with characters with particular skills.
As a matter of fact, the peculiarity was that George Lucas felt the strong need to contaminate himself and contaminate the other areas of entertainment, going from cinema to gaming. In collaboration with Atari, he began producing video games.
From Monkey Island to Star Wars’ MMORPG
A major breakthrough, representing the basis of all the environments we are used to interact with nowadays, took place in 2003 with the development of the MMORPG system (Massive(ly) Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game) allowing role-playing games in multiplayer, thanks to the creation of the first environments and games of the Star Wars Saga.
It was the time of a young internet that, however, aimed already to a shared entertainment, to a vision of a community united by the need not to play alone, but in virtual realities where it would have been possible to make relationships with other people with the same passion, a passion able to gather the interests of thousands of people at the same time.
The characters, interpreted by players, were able to interact each other and to interact with the virtual world they were immersed in. Since 2016, all the rights of the Saga are shared property of Disney and Electronic Arts, the company that developed FIFA. Probably it is no coincidence if today we talk about the origins of gaming and we look for correlations and perspectives with the Sport Industry.
Ron Gilbert, with his quote from 2004 opening this article (that you can find in his blog Grumpy Gramer), declares the end of the adventure games. Probably, instead, those games, based on the experience of the single player in an environment that the user could change, are not dead: they simply evolved into something more complex and available to everyone. I find in this expression a constructive parallelism of what we are living today from the technological standpoint, and I imagine that the same push that in the early 2000s was the engine of change for video games world, today it is for eGames and the sport industry that is trying to intercept new environments where to decline contents.
Roblox and the experience of FC Barcelona
Also Roblox, that today has 90 million of users, was born in 2005, not so long from the development of the MMORPG system, introducing a specific genre: MMOG, that is Massively Multiplayer Online Game, allowing thousands of people to interact with an immense virtual world, having the chance to create own and personalised environments and generate, through object oriented programming, more games into a single game, manipulating the original environment.
If from one side the gaming experience recalls the one that will be adopted by Fortnite several years later, from the other side there’s the possibility not only to create sub-environments but also to monetize, selling the items generated and used by the avatars, both through Robux, the virtual coin of the community, and through the revenues that the developers/players share with Roblox itself. Roblox, as a virtual customisable and connected ecosystem, it is able to host virtual events and so to incite the creativity of whoever wants to add side platforms in their strategies in this social distancing era.
With the first experience of FC Barcelona also Roblox starts to be the experimental platform chosen by sport to attract a well defined target, an audience willing to buy skins, features and kits to interact in the virtual environment. Players can play in different versions of the virtual environments created in Roblox, with two avatars wearing a Barça jersey that, for the first time, features a checkered style instead of the usual Blaugrana stripes. Doing so, the club has the chance to move closer to millions of teenagers across the world, giving them a creative and unique experience in their natural entertainment environment.
And this is the perfect link to talk about Fortnite: we have already dealt with its dynamics, trying to understand how revolutionary is the impact of this ecosystem, a perfect MMOG example that is also an opportunity to virtually host events. The discussion is whether Fortnite is part of the eSports category or not since there are not the prerequisites of competitiveness, but the truth is that the revenue possibilities of the platform, as well as the opportunity to host live events, such as the Fortnite Party Royale concerts by Diplo and Major Lazer, can become a new revenue dynamic for the Sport Industry.
Animal Crossing by Nintendo and the sports sociality of fans
Animal Crossing: New Horizons seems to have become so successful that it has relaunched the sales of Switch, Nintendo’s hybrid console, to even more interesting numbers than the first global distribution in March 2017. You may wonder why an ecosystem that revolves around an island is so captivating, where a character spends his time collecting branches, catching fishes and butterflies and exploring every corner of his territory: of course the possibility to play in MMOG and find other islanders and make a community. The incredible thing is that phenomena that seem to remain closed in their small vertical world, are contaminating real life especially in times of social distancing, reaching sports.
It is no coincidence that Kosuke Hiraiwa, a Japanese former sports commentator, has published a series of videos in which he comments the life of the island as if it was a football match. But not only. In Animal Crossing, after unlocking a series of steps and building a “three-star island”, every player has the opportunity to build a football pitch, a basketball court, a baseball one, a gym and a locker room, all in their own island, having the opportunity to make it a small oasis of sport to share, of course, with their friends, invited to play together in this little virtual sports college. That’s not all that happened. In the absence of sports many NBA and NFL fans have entered the platform, which wasn’t a usual appealing place for them. But, thanks to the ability to upload graphics to customize the outfit to wear on the island, fans have filled the game with evocative clubs’ jerseys, organized meetings of supporters, then sharing the images from the game on social media and involving the teams in conversations.
Virtual worlds become a shelter in global lockdown. Many fans of Animal Crossing have stated that the atmosphere of the game, where there is no Covid-19, helps them to tolerate the isolation and becomes a non-place to meet people, friends, teammates, the people we used to go to the stadium with and live, in any case, even if in a virtual way, relationships and passions, also the sports ones.
Clubs will begin exploring these new micro digital worlds and, with creativity and a forward-thinking approach, will be able to connect with their fans exactly where fans expect to be reached by their clubs. The paradigm is reversed, and stadiums will perhaps remain empty for a long time: it will not be the fan to go into the clubs’ houses but the latter will have to commit to recover the contact with their fans in their new virtual homes.
