Hockey Video Games: Better Than Real Thing?

It's the middle of the second period at GM Place and Salim Visram and Oliver Dempsey are transfixed by the action. Visram is wearing a Vancouver Canucks jersey autographed by several of the team's players, and his eyes dart as he follows the puck. His pal Dempsey furiously stuffs handfuls of popcorn into his mouth between breaks in play. The two pee-wee hockey players watch intently as Canucks captain Markus Naslund glides past two defenders and rings a wrist shot off the goalpost. Then, with seconds left to play, one of Naslund's linemates tears down the ice and rips a shot past the opposing goalie for the winning goal, and Visram raises his arms in celebration.

His reaction isn't tied to the action on the ice. He has tuned that out a long time ago. Instead, Visram and Dempsey are playing a hockey video game located at a Sony PlayStation 2 display on the upper concourse of GM Place. The pair finds the action generated by a video game more interesting than the 4-0 drubbing the Canucks are receiving at the hands of the Colorado Avalanche elsewhere in the building. "We're losing so bad on the ice, we don't really care," Dempsey says.

Eventually, the two young friends return to their seats to watch the Canucks lose 9-2 to their division rivals. Halfway through the third period, Canucks forward Todd Bertuzzi sucker punches Avalanche centre Steve Moore, who suffers a concussion and two fractured vertebrae in his neck. The incident will go on to receive worldwide attention, yet another in a long list of PR nightmares for the NHL.

Financial losses reported by teams, sinking attendance, abysmal U.S. television ratings, complaints about a lack of scoring, and the threat of a work stoppage next season have the league's future appearing bleaker than ever.

But as the NHL flounders, video-game producers at world-renowned Electronic Arts Canada, makers of the popular EA NHL series, are watching their industry gain strength. Next year, if the league decides to close shop, the only professional hockey that fans can see may be in games like the one produced at EA's downtown Vancouver studio.

Sports video games have evolved into a billion-dollar industry worldwide, and the EA Sports brand has emerged as a clear-cut leader, producing many of the top sellers. According to the company, this year's edition of its NBA Live sold two million copies, EA's Madden Football sold more than three million, and its FIFA Soccer sold four million--plus. EA NHL 2004 doesn't rival those top sellers, but it has racked up respectable numbers, selling more than 500,000 units in its first month of release.

Where most video games create fictional worlds, sports games aim to replicate real people and places. Realism is an important selling point, according to EA producer Todd Batty, who works on NBA Live. "We're constantly compared to reality, and the reality is on TV every single night," Batty says in his office at EA Canada's Burnaby headquarters. "It's on the highlights every single night. Any slip-up where our game differs from reality is where we're instantly going to hear criticisms." The company's producers provide a level of detail that borders on the absurd. In the "dynasty mode" of EA NHL 2004, users can oversee every aspect of their own pro-hockey franchise, from negotiating contracts with players to hiring medical staff to scheduling practices to buying new furniture for the GM's office.

Due to a competitive marketplace and demanding customers, EA producers are required to constantly improve their product. "At the end of the year, we evaluate the game we've created and look for ways to make it a more fun experience," says Dave Warfield, a producer for EA NHL, in a phone interview. "We want a beginner to pick it up and have a good time but [we want it to] also be challenging enough for the hard-core guys."

Some of those advancements have come thanks to a new generation of gaming consoles. When the Sony PlayStation 2 and Microsoft's Xbox were released in 2000, they opened a whole new world. The Xbox, for example, features the kind of power seen in personal computers: a 733-megahertz Intel main processor and 233-megahertz graphics processor, 64-megabyte RAM, an eight-gigabyte hard drive, an Ethernet adapter, and a DVD drive. Previous systems such as the first PlayStation could only read CD-ROMs that stored about 650 megabytes of information, compared to DVDs with the capacity to store 4.7 gigabytes, about seven times the amount of space previously available. Newer DVD formats will be able to store eight gigabytes in future game systems.

Since the advancements made in 2000, game programmers have made further improvements. "We're getting to know those systems better," Warfield says. "As you get to know the hardware and how to store things, you get to know how to generate things that look even more detailed than what you'd done the previous year. New technology allows you to compress things so you can fit even more in and really improve the things that people notice."

EA PRODUCERS PAY close attention to fan reaction, reading e-mail from users as well as comments posted on various fan Web sites, sometimes incorporating their suggestions into games. And although EA claims to have the best-selling hockey video game, it faces tough competition from Sega and Midway. Last year, EA watched as Sega's NHL2K3 game cut into its market share because many users preferred what they considered to be its more realistic game play. EA NHL 2003 was criticized among gamers for being too much like an arcade game and less like a real simulation of an NHL season. In the 2004 edition, producers countered by boosting its dynasty mode, which now allows users to manage a team for as many as 30 seasons and gives them greater control over players.

Each EA NHL disc features more than a dozen "engines": specific sections of programming that drive a particular area of the game. NHL 2004 features a powerful graphics engine that renders every physical detail of a player--from his facial features and body type down to his skin tone and hair--as well as accurate 360-degree replicas of all 30 NHL arenas. The new consoles allow for a palette of more than a million colours and much greater resolution than previous games, Warfield says. The PlayStation 1 could process 360,000 "polygons" per second; the PS2 can process 20 million. On today's systems, a player's glove has more polygons than an entire player model had on the original PlayStation.

Once the graphics have been set up, an animation engine puts them into motion. EA utilizes motion-capture animation to re-create movements on the ice. To design the unique actions of a hockey player, producers film several NHL and junior players of different sizes and skills every year at ice rinks. That information is computerized and then coordinated with an audio engine that features music, sound effects, and words by Canucks play-by-play broadcaster Jim Hughson and former NHLer Craig Simpson. The game stores more than 35,000 bits of their speech and stitches them together to form a running commentary that matches the action on the ice.

The level of detail is good enough to impress even NHL players, who know the game better than anyone. "I'm a big fan of the game," Canuck defenceman Mattias Ohlund tells the Straight after a team practice at GM Place. "I used to play it all the time....It's definitely getting more detailed. It's unbelievable how good they are now compared to a few years ago. Obviously, it's improving each and every year."

EA producers also receive input from Canucks head coach Marc Crawford, who has worked as a consultant for EA since 1997, when he coached the Colorado Avalanche. Crawford works with the producers on the artificial-intelligence system that drives all the players the gamer isn't controlling. Based on coaching strategies and the style that a team plays, artificial intelligence dictates where secondary players will go and what they will do at any given time.

One of the biggest tasks facing EA producers is assessing the skill of each player. The company consults with NHL players like Vancouver's Markus Naslund, Ed Jovanovski, and Ohlund, among others. EA also has scouts who watch many hours of NHL games and rate players in 30 categories. Players are graded on a scale of one to 100 based on skills like acceleration, top speed, aggressiveness, and the accuracy, power, and release speed of their shot.

The evaluations of NHL players by EA's team are often more detailed than those done by teams' own scouts. "They [NHL scouts] break things down to much simpler terms because of the fact that they're looking for a two-sentence description of a player," Warfield says. "We're looking for a lot more detail than that."

EA Sports producer Pierre Hintze, a former semipro soccer player and native of Germany, says in a phone interview that the level of detail is now probably the most important aspect of gaming. "Personally, I believe we've come to the point where this is the next battleground. Capturing the emotions and capturing the abilities of athletes and explaining them correctly to the user and making a connection with the user's imagination--I think that's going to be the key."

IF EA'S SCOUTS aren't accurate in their assessments, they're likely to hear about it from the players. "Year-to-year, we get feedback from a number of players," Warfield says. "Usually they say, 'Hey, I can skate faster than that. I can hit harder than that.' "

Complaining about their video-game depictions may seem petty, but many athletes know that those games can affect how fans perceive them. Philadelphia Flyers forward Jeremy Roenick can attest to that. In EA's NHLPA '93 game, Roenick was by far the best player in the game, scoring and beating on opponents at will as a Chicago Blackhawk, making him a legend among gamers. His dominance was even immortalized in a scene in the 1996 cult film Swingers, where Trent, played by actor Vince Vaughn, trounces his friend at video hockey and explains: "It's not so much me as it's Roenick. He's good."

Roenick's video dominance has spilled into his real life; fans constantly compliment him--or, rather, his pixelled version. "I've been to all-star games," JR recently told NHL.com, "I've been to the Stanley Cup finals, I've scored 50 goals, but the one thing that comes across my door pretty much daily is my superstar status from that video game."

Such exposure is good not only for players but also for the NHL, particularly in nonhockey markets in the U.S. and abroad. Producer Hintze developed a passion for hockey through video games. "The very first sports game I played was EA Sports Hockey on Sega Genesis," Hintze says. "I learned to appreciate the beauty of the sport 10 years ago without ever having skated before in my life....Everything I know about hockey I learned from that game."

Video games can give neophyte fans a skewed perspective of the NHL. Although producers work hard to make things as realistic as possible, they also fine-tune reality to make it more entertaining for users. EA and most other NHL video games feature end-to-end action, bone-jarring hits, spectacular saves, and high-scoring games that are often settled in the final minutes. That sort of drama can make real NHL games, which are often bogged down by clutch-and-grab defensive tactics and neutral-zone traps, look like they're being played in slow motion.

In a weird way, companies like EA have made computer-generated hockey more interesting than the real thing, at least judging by Salim Visram and Oliver Dempsey, two young fans who preferred to play a video game while attending a live NHL game. If there is a work stoppage next year, hockey fans like them may not miss the real NHL at all. "In the [video] game, hockey is always exciting," Visram says. "Sometimes in real life, it can suck a bit."