Sports and simracing games' (lack of) storytelling
Game Design | Sport
Game Design | Sport
Oct 27, 2025
Oct 27, 2025
Theo Garnon
Theo Garnon
Sports games have forgotten what makes the heart of sports beat: storytelling
Sports games — and racing games in particular — mostly pride themselves on their simulation quality, highlighting aspects like physics, weather, tires, telemetry — everything is there. Yet they completely overlook the most important part: the actors.
Athletes and fans alike, real sports aren’t just about performance; they’re about stories. What draws the crowds isn’t only technique or scores, but the surrounding dramatic tension: pressure, resilience, failure, redemption.
Every victory or defeat opens a new narrative branch, reignites a rivalry, creates hope or revenge — a new story arc.
A match is an episode.
A season is a series.
Athletes as main characters, with their archetypes, flaws, and values.
Netflix understood this perfectly with Drive to Survive. Viewers don’t just cheer for Verstappen overtakes, but for Ricciardo’s doubts, Alonso’s 33rd race, internal rivalries, and the impossible choices engineers must make. Storytelling has become the engine driving sports media.
Simulations without consequences
Yet in video games, this aspect is almost entirely absent. Titles like EA FC, NBA 2K, F1, Assetto Corsa, EA WRC all offer career modes built around a simple loop: match → result → reward.
The problem with this loop is that it only simulates a sequence of scores, without memory or narrative impact. Developers have forgotten the rest — the part that ultimately matters most to sports fans, who are the primary players of these games: storytelling.
Victories can pile up, you could injure fifteen players or be out for fifteen months, anything could happen, and the game world remains frozen, indifferent to your triumphs or failures. Results trigger neither drama, nor tension, nor emotional evolution.
It’s ironic: these games claim to be “simulations”, yet they forget the most essential aspect of professional sports — emotion. In reality, sports are machines for telling stories: every performance impacts fans, rivals, and an athlete’s career. In video games, everything stays mechanical. But why?
A triangle with two corners
In game design, there’s the Gameplay / World / Narrative triangle. What is it?
This triangle connects three axes: the player’s actions (gameplay) impact the narrative, which justifies and fuels gameplay. Narrative and gameplay, in turn, influence and evolve the world, which explains the other two points.
When constructed correctly, this triangle creates synergy, enabling immersion and coherent internal logic within the game.
For these simulation games, gameplay is usually the most developed and polished element, as it’s the main selling point. The world is also present, with its rules and framework.
But it’s around the narrative that the triangle falters. What should be the dramatic core, the link between actions and consequences, is either completely missing or purely decorative:
It does not feed or justify gameplay: matches or races never change in dramatic tone depending on the situation; sensations are always the same.
It does not respond to results: no consequences, no branching paths, no memory.
It does not provide symbolic motivation: your actions are guided only by numerical progression (rankings, trophies), never by human tension or personal stories.
Without narrative, the triangle loses its internal tension. The game becomes a sequence of mechanical loops with no dramatic stakes.
Sports as shared fiction
In short, a solo sports game that aims to be a “simulation” should not just reproduce real-world physics.
It should also simulate the emotional imagination that fans project onto reality. Because a sport only truly exists through the stories we tell about it.
Thank you for reading. If you want to discuss more about this topic, feel free to reach out I'd happily exchange. I will soon address a more specific problem in racing games: sensory drama.
Sports games have forgotten what makes the heart of sports beat: storytelling
Sports games — and racing games in particular — mostly pride themselves on their simulation quality, highlighting aspects like physics, weather, tires, telemetry — everything is there. Yet they completely overlook the most important part: the actors.
Athletes and fans alike, real sports aren’t just about performance; they’re about stories. What draws the crowds isn’t only technique or scores, but the surrounding dramatic tension: pressure, resilience, failure, redemption.
Every victory or defeat opens a new narrative branch, reignites a rivalry, creates hope or revenge — a new story arc.
A match is an episode.
A season is a series.
Athletes as main characters, with their archetypes, flaws, and values.
Netflix understood this perfectly with Drive to Survive. Viewers don’t just cheer for Verstappen overtakes, but for Ricciardo’s doubts, Alonso’s 33rd race, internal rivalries, and the impossible choices engineers must make. Storytelling has become the engine driving sports media.
Simulations without consequences
Yet in video games, this aspect is almost entirely absent. Titles like EA FC, NBA 2K, F1, Assetto Corsa, EA WRC all offer career modes built around a simple loop: match → result → reward.
The problem with this loop is that it only simulates a sequence of scores, without memory or narrative impact. Developers have forgotten the rest — the part that ultimately matters most to sports fans, who are the primary players of these games: storytelling.
Victories can pile up, you could injure fifteen players or be out for fifteen months, anything could happen, and the game world remains frozen, indifferent to your triumphs or failures. Results trigger neither drama, nor tension, nor emotional evolution.
It’s ironic: these games claim to be “simulations”, yet they forget the most essential aspect of professional sports — emotion. In reality, sports are machines for telling stories: every performance impacts fans, rivals, and an athlete’s career. In video games, everything stays mechanical. But why?
A triangle with two corners
In game design, there’s the Gameplay / World / Narrative triangle. What is it?
This triangle connects three axes: the player’s actions (gameplay) impact the narrative, which justifies and fuels gameplay. Narrative and gameplay, in turn, influence and evolve the world, which explains the other two points.
When constructed correctly, this triangle creates synergy, enabling immersion and coherent internal logic within the game.
For these simulation games, gameplay is usually the most developed and polished element, as it’s the main selling point. The world is also present, with its rules and framework.
But it’s around the narrative that the triangle falters. What should be the dramatic core, the link between actions and consequences, is either completely missing or purely decorative:
It does not feed or justify gameplay: matches or races never change in dramatic tone depending on the situation; sensations are always the same.
It does not respond to results: no consequences, no branching paths, no memory.
It does not provide symbolic motivation: your actions are guided only by numerical progression (rankings, trophies), never by human tension or personal stories.
Without narrative, the triangle loses its internal tension. The game becomes a sequence of mechanical loops with no dramatic stakes.
Sports as shared fiction
In short, a solo sports game that aims to be a “simulation” should not just reproduce real-world physics.
It should also simulate the emotional imagination that fans project onto reality. Because a sport only truly exists through the stories we tell about it.
Thank you for reading. If you want to discuss more about this topic, feel free to reach out I'd happily exchange. I will soon address a more specific problem in racing games: sensory drama.
Sports games have forgotten what makes the heart of sports beat: storytelling
Sports games — and racing games in particular — mostly pride themselves on their simulation quality, highlighting aspects like physics, weather, tires, telemetry — everything is there. Yet they completely overlook the most important part: the actors.
Athletes and fans alike, real sports aren’t just about performance; they’re about stories. What draws the crowds isn’t only technique or scores, but the surrounding dramatic tension: pressure, resilience, failure, redemption.
Every victory or defeat opens a new narrative branch, reignites a rivalry, creates hope or revenge — a new story arc.
A match is an episode.
A season is a series.
Athletes as main characters, with their archetypes, flaws, and values.
Netflix understood this perfectly with Drive to Survive. Viewers don’t just cheer for Verstappen overtakes, but for Ricciardo’s doubts, Alonso’s 33rd race, internal rivalries, and the impossible choices engineers must make. Storytelling has become the engine driving sports media.
Simulations without consequences
Yet in video games, this aspect is almost entirely absent. Titles like EA FC, NBA 2K, F1, Assetto Corsa, EA WRC all offer career modes built around a simple loop: match → result → reward.
The problem with this loop is that it only simulates a sequence of scores, without memory or narrative impact. Developers have forgotten the rest — the part that ultimately matters most to sports fans, who are the primary players of these games: storytelling.
Victories can pile up, you could injure fifteen players or be out for fifteen months, anything could happen, and the game world remains frozen, indifferent to your triumphs or failures. Results trigger neither drama, nor tension, nor emotional evolution.
It’s ironic: these games claim to be “simulations”, yet they forget the most essential aspect of professional sports — emotion. In reality, sports are machines for telling stories: every performance impacts fans, rivals, and an athlete’s career. In video games, everything stays mechanical. But why?
A triangle with two corners
In game design, there’s the Gameplay / World / Narrative triangle. What is it?
This triangle connects three axes: the player’s actions (gameplay) impact the narrative, which justifies and fuels gameplay. Narrative and gameplay, in turn, influence and evolve the world, which explains the other two points.
When constructed correctly, this triangle creates synergy, enabling immersion and coherent internal logic within the game.
For these simulation games, gameplay is usually the most developed and polished element, as it’s the main selling point. The world is also present, with its rules and framework.
But it’s around the narrative that the triangle falters. What should be the dramatic core, the link between actions and consequences, is either completely missing or purely decorative:
It does not feed or justify gameplay: matches or races never change in dramatic tone depending on the situation; sensations are always the same.
It does not respond to results: no consequences, no branching paths, no memory.
It does not provide symbolic motivation: your actions are guided only by numerical progression (rankings, trophies), never by human tension or personal stories.
Without narrative, the triangle loses its internal tension. The game becomes a sequence of mechanical loops with no dramatic stakes.
Sports as shared fiction
In short, a solo sports game that aims to be a “simulation” should not just reproduce real-world physics.
It should also simulate the emotional imagination that fans project onto reality. Because a sport only truly exists through the stories we tell about it.
Thank you for reading. If you want to discuss more about this topic, feel free to reach out I'd happily exchange. I will soon address a more specific problem in racing games: sensory drama.