Representation in action : an overview of the avatar/attribute relationship in sports-themed video games

Representation in video games has thus far centered primarily on the aesthetics of a digital avatar. Using sports-themed video games, we can broaden the understanding of representation to include action or the ways athletes perform within any given game by analyzing attribute allocation, the primary method of avatar differentiation within the sports genre, and how digital bodies play a role in shaping an athlete’s real-world identity. Sports-themed video games are immensely popular with the big 3 franchises, Madden, FIFA and the NBA 2K series, routinely finishing among the best-selling video game titles year in and year out. Due to their popularity, scholars have turned some attention toward this genre of games although almost all articles pertain solely to the aesthetic representations of athlete avatars while comparatively few attempts have been made to breakdown the relationship between an athlete’s real statistics and how these statistics figure into the representation of their digitized body. My goal is to show why virtual athletes attributes matter by analyzing how an athlete’s digital body can play a role in their real-world identity by highlighting the cases of ex-NFL player Michael Vick and footballer Adebayo Akinfenwa.