Barry Bonds is a no-good, cheating scoundrel, and as a general point of fact, Americans hate him. Before someone goes accusing me of hyperbole, let me assure you that I'm not pulling this out of an empty hat. Using fWARs, ELO numbers, and other high level stat-nerd mumbo jumbo that is beyond my humanities-major comprehension, a recent study by the popular sabermetrics site FanGraphs demonstrated that, relative to his talent, Bonds is the least appreciated player in the history of baseball by a country mile.
Of course, it's not hard to understand why. After all, the man flagrantly abused performance-enhancing drugs to artificially gain an upper hand on his competition. Bonds tarnished the integrity of the game a little bit more with every home run he hit. It was an unconscionable act by an immoral man, something that anyone with even a modicum of self-respect would never repeat.
Or at least that's what I thought before I started my career in the NHL.
So-called "Be-A-Pro" modes have become a fixture in pretty much every major sports simulation over the last few years, allowing the player to transplant him or herself into the role of a young, upcoming rookie just entering the league. Season by season, you slowly train and build your stats, until ultimately, at the end of a long and storied career, you take your place among the all-time greats. From football with "Madden" to baseball with "MLB: The Show," anyone can be a big leaguer these days.
Of course, being a good Bowdoin student, hockey is my sport of choice. I have sunk more hours into each annual release of EA Sports' NHL series than I care to admit, and although I had never really spent much time with "Be-A-Pro" before, with this year's edition, I thought I'd give it a shot.
My virtual self was a 6-foot-6-inch, 220-pound behemoth with smooth hands and surprisingly quick speed. Drafted by my hometown Flyers in the third round—which, coming from a tiny, Division-III school in Maine, was actually pretty good—I was assuredly destined for great things.
As it turns out, even in a video game, getting to the NHL is hard. After slogging around in the minor leagues, my talented rookie prospect had made almost no discernable progress. Every individual game took around 20 minutes to play, and each solitary skill point took upwards of 10 games to earn. It would take hundreds of hours of play to build Eric Binswanger into Eric Lindros.
Of course, there was always that other option sitting right there at the bottom of the training menu, like a dealer hawking his wares in the locker room. For just a few dollars, I could buy more skill points. At first, I was offended by its mere presence; the fun of the game is playing it, and using real world money to skip the meat of the experience seemed to miss the whole point. The more hours I spent stuck in the doldrums of my team's minor league affiliate, though, the more tempting the offer seemed. My competitive nature took hold, and even in this inconsequential virtual world, I wanted to be the best.
When I finally gave in, I told myself it would only be that one time—just a little something to get on the right track. I'm sure Barry said the same thing. Six purchases and $20 later, I was the best player in the league.
The idea of performance-enhancers in video games is really nothing new; they've just always gone under a different name: cheat codes. Just about any child who grew up with an NES—and, indeed, many who didn't—can tell you how to get 99 lives in "Contra" (up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, B, A, Start). The only difference between that game and my hockey experience is that, in "Contra," I was only cheating myself. In "NHL 12," I took my stat-boosted skater online, where I used him to establish a stellar ranking on the leaderboards. The performance-enhancing drugs comparison was no longer figurative; I had bought myself an unfair advantage over other players.
As many of the baseball players from the steroid era have come to learn, just because everyone is doing something wrong doesn't make it right. Once the possibility of an unequal playing field enters the mix, the simple beauty of matching one player's skill against another is irrevocably tarnished.
But so what? Video games are just a pastime, while playing in the Major Leagues is a multimillion-dollar profession. The comparison between cheats and performance-enhancing substances can't hold water, can it?
If we set aside the physical repercussions of steroid use, the difference is really just a matter of scale. After all, as the common saying goes, baseball is a pastime, too. From tee-ballers to beer-leaguers, most people only play the sport for the love of the game. And just as there is a tiny minority of elite ballplayers who are paid and idolized by a rabid public, an equivalent community exists in the video game world.
Webcasts of Major League Gaming's 2011 pro circuit tournaments drew more viewers in the coveted 18-24 demographic than MTV and Comedy Central combined in an average fifteen-minute block, and the winners earned hundreds of thousands of dollars. Daigo Umehara's full-parry comeback at the 2004 Evolution Championship Series video game tourney holds as much meaning for a certain community as Kirk Gibson's 1988 World Series walk-off home run does for baseball fanatics.
I would never argue that there is no place for cheat codes in the medium; sometimes they are half the fun. But the next time you turn on "God Mode" while playing "Grand Theft Auto," consider whether your situation is actually any different from that of poor Barry Bonds.
After all, it's just a game.