The most beloved basketball video game of all-time is NBA Jam, which animated the metaphorical cartoonish energies of the sport into a literal cartoon. Players could score so much the basketball morphed into a fireball (for this is what it feels like to watch Steph Curry effortlessly drain three-pointers), and pogo toward the arena ceiling before somersaulting down for a ferocious dunk. Fun has rarely been so affordable — a couple quarters in the arcade, a few dollars to take it home, should you own the appropriate console.
NBA Jam was also easy to learn thanks to the spartan controls: just three buttons for all the shooting, passing, blocking, stealing, and sprinting one might need to do. Even non-gamers could master the whole thing in an hour. This simplicity was on my mind this week when I attended the launch party of NBA 2K19, the latest installment in the basketball gaming franchise, now celebrating its 20th anniversary. The NBA 2K series is the best-selling basketball game of all time, owing to its plush marketing budget, incrementally modernized gameplay, and novel additions such as a mode where you could play through an alternate reality in which LeBron James willingly joined the New York Knicks.
And yet, for a game I’ve been playing half my life (!), I am grossly shitty at it. This, I’ve come to accept, is by design. The controls of 1999’s NBA 2K, the first installment I ever picked up, weren’t much more complicated than NBA Jam. As the years went on, the creators introduced increasingly complex controls meant to mirror the actual game of basketball. Jiggling the right analog stick on a standard PlayStation controller used to only bring up a play menu; now, a couple dozen potential actions are mapped onto the stick, allowing you to perform all kinds of intricate crossover moves and layups. You can do everything you can in a real basketball game… if you’re a good enough gamer to learn how, and practice enough so that the controls become muscle memory.
I was given a refresher on this complexity at the launch event, where a few dozen consoles had been set up with the new game, allowing attendees to futz around with the new rosters. Each console was equipped with two controllers, allowing friends and strangers to compete against each other while working out the kinks of the new game. These ordeals, of which I have attended many, all have a similar feel. They’re usually set up in a remote, renovated warehouse with lots of exposed brick and sexy lighting; a DJ plays a deafening mix of current pop and rap hits; aspiring models doubling as waiters and waitresses circle the venue holding platters of dime-sized gourmet food. There’s always some kind of novelty photo booth; here, one could take home a game case customized with their face on the cover, actual game not inside. Everyone dresses for the club and ends up standing around, watching some dudes exert themselves gaming.
This all is not un-fun, especially if you’re enticed by the few legitimate reasons to go: 1) to beta test the game (diehard 2K fans) 2) to get drunk for free (me) 3) to network (everyone else). But there are worse ways to spend a few hours, and we’d been told NBA legend Kevin Garnett was going to show up. After 20 minutes inside, I was halfway through my first drink, and had played an unsuccessful quarter of basketball as the revamped Los Angeles Lakers, controlling LeBron James — the best basketball player in the world — with the grace of a horse barreling into a wall. There was really nothing else to do besides drink and game, so after walking around the premises, I set up at another console, this time selecting the Golden State Warriors to face off against the Boston Celtics. About 30 seconds after I started playing, actual Boston Celtic Jayson Tatum came over to the console next to me, and initiated a new game against a companion.
Tatum is listed at 6-foot-8, but he appeared to be slouching, and thus not that much taller than me. I only noticed him because his arrival was accompanied by a hornet’s nest of photographers and fans trying to snap a shot. He may have been assessing the game in the open to fill his press obligations, but judging by the way he confidently futzed with the controls, he’s played NBA 2K for his entire life. This is probably true: Tatum is a towering basketball savant who nearly took the Celtics to the NBA Finals in his rookie season, but he’s also just 20 years old, the same age as the franchise itself. If the intricacy of games like these and Madden are truly appealing to anyone besides frat boys, it’s the players themselves, who can actually simulate the kind of in-game scenarios they’re likely to face in real life, and familiarize themselves with the appropriate plays.
So Tatum was naturally very invested as he began playing against a friend (who selected the Indiana Pacers), and within a few minutes he was winning by 10. I had grown bored very quickly, and was still struggling to master concepts like “shoot the ball on time.” But when a legitimate famous person is standing next to you, you stick around and see what happens. And what happened is that I stood in the eye of the tornado as attendee after attendee invaded my personal space, stretching their arms across my television and jostling against my body just to take a photo of Tatum. At one point, a man in a basketball cap tapped my ribcage, bluntly asked “to let me get through,” and planted himself right next to Tatum, seemingly with the hopes of exchanging phone numbers. (It seemed that they each other, but Tatum didn’t appear interested in engaging too seriously.) Only one person apologized for their proximity: an official photographer for the event, who cracked a knowing smile when I took my own photo to take a photo of him taking a photo of Tatum.
It was all very amusing. But what was actually interesting, besides Tatum’s proficiency at running the virtual pick and roll, was his ability to tune out the surrounding sensory experience of flashing and clicking and many people trying to get up in his shit. The unspoken deal of living in New York City is that if you see a celebrity in public, it’s beyond gauche to pointedly acknowledge their presence, even if your first instinct upon seeing Steven Van Zandt exit a limousine in the West Village is to yell, “Hey, Sopranos!” (As once unfortunately happened to me.) But that was not happening here.
I imagine this was not a new feeling. Athletes spend so much time being filmed and photographed — during the basketball season, Tatum has a camera trained on him for nearly the entirety of every game he plays. He has to tune it out, lest he become hyper-conscious of how everything he does is being logged for the record. That he spends a not-small portion of his life in this aggressively filmed state perhaps makes people more comfortable with shoving their phones in his general vicinity — either that, or the type of person at this launch event was so fame hungry they’d rather transgress the social bargain instead of remembering their manners.
I started thinking about what was going on in Tatum’s head. Was he really tuning it out, or was he trying hard not to be uncomfortable? What had his night been like, anyways? Was he flown into New York just for this? Escorted to the event in a stretch limo? Did he get paid for his time? Should he have been practicing instead? Were there texts he was ignoring? Waiting for? Was he annoyed with the hanger-on trying to chat him up? Was he looking over my screen, and watching me attempt to shoot Kevin Durant threes over a digital him? What was it like, in this moment, to be Jayson Tatum?
The promo tag for NBA 2K19 claims the series has spent “20 years ... redefining what sports gaming can be.” But sports games are categorically unoriginal. Those 20 years have only presented us with a gradual refinement of the same original concept, newly adapted to modern technologies. I began craving a more experiential game, aimed at simulating the actual experience of being an NBA player, one that goes through the boring, human shit that nobody sees. You’d try to catch flights and complete in practice; you’d dodge over-eager selfie takers, or indulge them; you’d agree to product endorsements and reject proposed magazine profiles; you’d try to find an airplane seat that accommodates your long legs; you’d worry about finding love, as a celebrity; you’d stand in public, surrounded by fans, aware of their prying eyes. (Jayson Tatum’s anxiety levels are MAXED OUT!)
Maybe you’d play in the actual basketball games here and there. You’d spend just as much as time on Twitter, checking your mentions and getting into flame wars with ESPN hosts. The game would treat basketball as entré into a very bizarre and sometimes charmed life, not as the object itself. Millions of people play basketball; the video game is just a different version of something they’ve experienced themselves. But not nearly as many people know what it’s really like to be inside Tatum’s head, given the life he leads. That, surely, would be more innovative than wasting hours trying to boost his offensive awareness stat to 99.
Why not broaden the ongoing attempt to justify video games as art, and make a game like this? Well, because it wouldn’t be as fun, and would probably require computer processing more complicated than what we currently have in order to truly simulate reality. (No “Press X to pay respects, please.”) But surely some enterprising indie games developer could tackle a text-based, pixelated version of this experience. What’s more interesting: animating an accurate reverse layup, or animating an accurate portrayal of Tatum’s thought process when someone he doesn’t recognize walks up to him with a big smile and says, “It’s been forever!” Come on, let’s really probe the limits of simulated consciousness. If you’re a coder with some time to spare, I’m here to write the script.
Eventually I got bored playing the game; I was losing by a lot, as I couldn’t make the players do anything but bump into each other and fire off-balance threes. I had somewhere else to be, and so with mild reluctance vacated my spot, allowing one of the surrounding photo takers to swarm in, and overtake it. In the distance, I saw Kevin Garnett’s seven-foot frame looming over a gaggle of photographers and fans, lights going off, a practiced smile on his face as he talked to an interviewer I couldn’t see. As I walked away, I looked back at Tatum, still playing the game. I would’ve given anything to know what he was really thinking about.
