How Come Sports Games Are Not Considered for Video Game of the Year?

The calendar now reads December and as the temperatures drop video gamers will be logging more hours than ever on their video game systems to avoid the bitter cold. While they play their first person shooters or third person shooter or some other genre (have they invented a fourth person shooter yet?) the mind will wander, look back at the previous year and think about the video game of the year. The two games that would garner the most votes would probably be Mass Effect 2 or Red Dead Redemption, and I have no problem with either choice this particular year, but every year I have to wonder why are sports games never considered for video game of the year?

Every year sports video games are treated like the animated movies of the Academy Awards. Sports games are cute little games but they can't compare to the big games. Sports video games might occasionally even get a nomination for the game of the year but is never really considered. Sports video games are often seen as inferior and not as smart because they are for "jocks" and not nerds, much like animated movies are just for little kids. This notion is silly. Sports video games are as good as all the other genres in every way.

One of the aspects that every video gamer enjoys is the graphics. Sports video games are constantly bringing top notch graphics to the consoles and the movements of the players are far better than some of the clunky movements of characters in other genres. When a football player grabs their opponent by the facemask and pulls them down the player's head actually jerks like a real player would. Sporting games feature the actual stadiums of that sports and to great detail and every version gets more and more realistic looking.

Sports video games have top notch sound as well. They might not have the musical scores that some game of the year candidates but they match any genre in sound effects while college games contain the fight songs of the teams and the pro sports games include popular music.

There is no genre of video game that has more replay value like a sports game. Fans of sports video game series like NBA Live, Madden and NHL play one version of the game all the way up to the next game. The only games that come close to sports game in replay value are games that allow players a two-player or online mode but sports games were way ahead of the curve on multiplayer games. Which brings up another point, video games today are all about multiplayer but college students would crammed in their dorm playing Tecmo Bowl or RBI Baseball long before Halo or Call of Duty. Sports games are the reason multiplayer became popular in the first place.

The one argument that could be made against sports games for game of the year is that the stories aren't as good but I don't think that is true either. Every game, every season is a story in itself. Will you be able to succeed after the star quarterback graduates? What will you do when your ace pitcher is injured for 280 games? If your starting goalie gives up three goals then should you yank him? The big thing now in video games is a world where your decisions impacts the world that the character lives in but again, sports video games have been doing this for years. Ever since the season mode in sports was invented a decision that you make can impact the world that you are playing.

No matter what your definition of a great game is, sports video games are able to match any other genre of video game. Again I'm not saying a sports video game should be the game of the year in 2010 but there have been years in the past when Madden, NCAA Football and NHL were the best games of the year.