Kevin Scheitrum describes the surreal transformation of college athletes into video game characters.

They, the designers of EA Sports’ “March Madness 06” video game, gave Wynn—or, rather, a digital representation called SG #20—a little too much hair in that version. In the real 2005-06 season, Wynn, then a senior at Boston University, wore more of a short crop. But everything else checked out, he says.

Kevin Gardner, #31 at BU, was the model for this video game player.

 

Wynn, a guard who graduated in 2006, is just one of the thousands of college student-athletes who are rendered into a cluster of pixels to become video game characters, allowing them the surreal experience of controlling themselves on-screen.    

Sure, role-playing games are everywhere. Games like Everquest, World of Warcraft and Second Life allow their millions of users to vacate their daily lives of limitations and ascend into the ranks of elves, charming politicians, red-carpet strutters and all sorts of higher order beings that bad genes or bad jeans have made unattainable on planet Earth. But sports games aren’t about escaping reality; rather, they aim to create a world identical to  our own—to allow you to control a version of this reality rather than an alternate one. And as cool as it can be to play youself in a game that mimics your life, the effect is a strange, occasionally uncomfortable dynamic between the creators and the created.

“You’re just exposed to the world. The designers can do what they want,” Wynn says. “What if they don’t do it well?”

For the designers, re-casting reality poses a challenge in many ways more formidable than crafting fiction. You can’t call a bluff on an elf’s crossbow accuracy from outside 60 meters, but when your virtual team has a 6-foot-10, 287-pound motel of a center, he’d better play like a guy his size actually would. More, he’d better play like that particular guy actually would. The consumers, and there are a ton of them (the video game industry pulled in almost $18 billion of revenue in 2007, according to Variety), demand that these games reflect the reality that they can watch on TV.    

Sean O’Brien, producer of the "March Madness" series, heads a team charged with replicating a portion of the world, using ratings based on real-life performance to recreate the skill set and abilities of these digital athletes. Not that they’re re-creating the daily lives of these players—as yet, there are no ratings for a proclivity for Taco Bell or tattoos—but O’Brien’s team must find a way to make these on-screen ballers evoke the real-life college ones that inspire them.    

In other words, they have the same task that’s driven historians to isolation and journalists to bourbon: to pin down reality.

To make things even trickier, the designers’ hands are tied by NCAA amateur bylaws that prohibit the use of players’ names or likenesses for promotional purposes. Players are most frequently represented by their position, jersey number and one of a few generic faces roughly spanning the gradient of skin tone and bone structure. Thus, its their ratings (speed, inside and outside shooting ability, ball handling acumen) and animation (dribbling and shooting style, hairdos) that provide the main means of recognition. And those bits had better be done right: "We have really sophisticated consumers that know what they want," O'Brien says. If you screw something up, you hear about it."

Games have come a long way from “Madden ’92,” where the ambulance for injured players would drive onto the field and actually hit others players, scattering them like street cones. That wouldn’t fly anymore. To satisfy gamers today, O’Brien says, “You’d have to show the wheels turning, the sirens, the players congregating. It’d have to be this big scripted scene—[the injured player] would have to wave to the fans to say he’s okay.”

To achieve ultimate realism, the “March Madness” team has developed a formula that takes into account players’ stats, like shooting percentage, rebounds, and steals, then compounds them with a number of variables such as games played and strength of the team’s conference . The team also works with experts such as ESPN’s Doug Gottlieb, who went to the NCAA Tournament three times with Oklahoma State, for player appraisals and solicits information about players, arenas, fans and traditions from sports information directors from across the U.S.

Two members of the “MM08” team have player authenticity as their sole responsibility, while a number of other staffers chip in to make sure that no one is letting team allegiance or personal preference get in the way of objectivity. Then, countless hours of testing—“we focus-test the crap out of our products,” O’Brien says—ensure that these digital players resemble as closely as they possibly can their living counterparts.

Of course, some players slip through. There is a hierarchy based on the amount of time users  typically spend playing with a team that determines how much attention each team gets, not that any teams are entirely disregarded. Duke, a dynasty, gets more attention than, say, New Jersey Institute of Technology, O’Brien says. Because of the number of players (326 teams in the game, an average of 12 players on each roster), O’Brien says, there are “gonna be some anomalies.”

Including the occasional misplaced afro.

Except for the hairstyle, though, Wynn’s ratings were pretty dead-on, according to the former Terrier. That’s the norm, O’Brien says—he doesn’t hear a whole lot of complaints from the real athletes. (Except for the time when O’Brien was working on “NBA Live,” and Mike Bibby, then with the NBA’s Vancouver Grizzlies, came over to the studios to plead his case that he could throw down more than just a “weak one-handed dunk,” O’Brien recalls).  

For many other players, though, being included in a game is a small sign they’ve made it. At least initially. “I thought it was the coolest thing to be in the game,” says a current sophomore player who spoke on the condition of anonymity because of NCAA compliance concerns. “Then I realized I was awful. It wasn’t as cool.”   

That player scored almost 10 points a game in his freshman season. But that prowess didn’t translate onto the screen. Since the games are generally released early in the actual season, or even before, the designers didn’t have this player’s college stats yet when they built his video game counterpart, accounting for the avatar’s bumbling benchwarming.

Another current player, a junior who also asked to remain anonymous for NCAA compliance, says it was a “dream come true” to be in the game, joking that regardless of his rankings, he had his video game doppelganger take every open shot he had on the court. But after he missed two years because of injuries, his ratings in the game dropped, hard. “The shots don’t really go in anymore,” he says.
But he says it's still “an honor” to be in the game, even if the rim isn’t as generous as it used to be.   

The games give more than just an ego trip (or a punch in the stomach). For schools like BU, which receives only regional media attention before the NCAA Tournament, if they even make it that far, the games offer players and teams a way to get their names out beyond their corner of America. “I remember a particular instance when some kid said he beat the game and said I was the MVP of the NCAA Tournament,” says Kevin Gardner, Wynn's former teammate at BU (pictured, sort of, at left). “For me it was real flattering. It was really good to see BU basketball represented like that.”   

But here’s where things get weird. Millions of people play these games, which, for players like Gardner, means pairs and pairs and pairs of thumbs controlling every movement of this version of you. And you’ve got zero say in how a kid in Des Moines or a Sig Ep brother at Delaware manipulates you. “It’s something to think about,” Wynn says, “how much you’re open to the world...It’s kinda strange, they’re controlling me.”

Despite the creepy factor, Wynn says it's worth it. "I guess it’s something you can brag about and tell your kids about later, get the archives and say ‘There’s me, I did something.’”

Kevin Scheitrum graduated from BU in May. He lives in NYC in an apartment that can hold exactly one bed, one TV and one Xbox 360. Two of them are broken.