Note: This is a sponsored post. Samsung has asked SBNation's bloggers to post on the theme of "Enhance Your Experience" regarding the application of technology to sports fandom. Bloggers were not obligated to participate in the campaign, and were given broad freedom as to the actual contents of the post. This is post two of three Friday posts.
So, let me just start by saying that I do not play a lot of video games. I am not, by any means, a 'gamer' and no one would ever mistake me for one. As a family, we've always had whatever the latest Nintendo system is, because with small kids in the house, it seemed like the most family-friendly, and we pretty much had to have something for them. And I myself have certainly enjoyed a good puzzle game over the years - Tetris and the like. To this day, my favorite video game remains Super Mario 3, which I play with the kids on the NES at the cabin in Tahoe. But I don't think I've ever played or even seen NBA Live or NBA 2Kx. I hope you still like me anyway.
ClipperMax has an NBA Street game for his old GameCube that he still enjoys playing. (I just looked it up and saw that that game is 8 years old now - hard to believe.) Watching him play it, I always thought it was a little silly to be able to dunk from half court on every play.
But I have a question for the gamers out there. Do you think there's a way to combine fantasy sports with video games? What if your success in a gaming environment wasn't based solely on your twitch response on a game controller, but also on how you picked a team and real time statistics and injuries and what not? What do the modern games understand of the real NBA world? When Carmelo Anthony gets traded, will that be reflected in 2K10 automatically, or would you have to make that trade yourself?
I'm just having a little fun here, but what could you do at the intersection of fantasy hoops and gaming? They're both wildly popular in their own right; could they be combined into something even better, or are they just too inherently different? What if your weekly head-to-head rotisserie league was in fact settled by a video game, but the relative strengths of your teams was determined by the season stats for the players you had selected? You might still win based on your superior gaming skills, but your ability to manage a fantasy team would determine if you were starting from a position of advantage or disadvantage.
Would that be cool or lame? Discuss amongst yourselves.