There's a reason basketball fans around the world spent Friday calling in sick, leaving work early, and eating up download bandwidth: It was 2K Day. It's not exactly a national holiday, not yet, but it's getting there.
For the uninitiated, 2K Day occurs each year when the latest edition of the preeminent basketball video game series, NBA 2K, is released. This week, the 19th game in the NBA 2K series, NBA 2K18, arrived. Cue the accompanying work slowdown and lost weekend as millions of people dive in.
Twenty-nine games deep, Madden is best for series devotees.
Each year the game finds a new hook upon which to snare new users. One iteration had a soundtrack curated by Jay-Z; another version had a career mode directed by Spike Lee. This year's game leans heavily on the introduction of Neighborhoods, which ties together game modes and allows for virtual interaction with other people playing the game.
The thing about sports video games is that there is a baseline of reality that must be approached. With games like Halo or Call of Duty, anything goes. Those are fictional worlds, so soldiers who can up and fly at the push of a button? Cool. But with the 2K series, things have to look and feel exactly like an NBA game. And to that end, NBA 2K18 does just fine. From opening with a shot of Kyrie Irving in a Celtics jersey to letting you design your own Jordans to hanging out in your Neighborhood with your friends that you hoop with, NBA 2K18 delivers a robust simulation of not only an NBA game, but also gives touches of the holistic hoops lifestyle.
You even get messages in the game from people who play and work around the game, and In the interest of full disclosure, I should probably divulge that I, Lang Whitaker, am actually in NBA 2K18. You can't play basketball as me, unless there's some unlockable scenario where gamers can play as middling former high school athletes. I am in NBA 2K in my capacity as someone who writes and talks about the NBA for a living.
I've been in 2K for a few years now, and being in a video game is awesome and dumb and kind of surreal, and it is also at times disconcerting, as it can reveal some basic truths about other people. Because of course, I am not actually inside your video game console. My picture is in the game, and you get social media messages and criticism from someone named "Lang Whitaker" who happens to have my photo associated with them. But these are all computer generated critiques of things that have happened in the video game. You might find this hard to believe, but I, myself, actually have no idea how you fared in your 20th game in the career mode.
This reality doesn't stop people from occasionally finding me on Twitter to complain about things that someone who is not actually me said regarding a character they were controlling inside a video game. "CAN'T BELIEVE YOU DISSED ME AFTER I DROPPED 25 ON THE RAPTORS SMH." (My stock response: Well, you deserved it.)
As real as NBA 2K18 can seem, where I think the game secretly shines is that it also allows errors to occur. When you're playing 2K, you really aren't playing the game of basketball, but playing a game about the game of basketball. Having in-depth basketball knowledge can be helpful, but understanding how to switch a pick-and-roll doesn't always mean your digital teammate will make the correct play, which explains how I ended up sitting on my couch in the dark quietly cursing Mike Muscala.
I created a character, Langston Marbury, and assigned him to the rebuilding Atlanta Hawks, where he backed up Dennis Schröder and slowly accrued more playing time. When Hawks coach Mike Budenholzer inserted Marbury into the lineup against Houston and had him guard James Harden, The Beard lit my digital ass up with the quickness. As Harden drove around me and streaked toward the basket, I screamed "Help!" at my XBox, as my useless teammates casually regarded Harden instead of rotating over to provide help defense.
In a perfect world, one where Tom Thibodeau isn't perpetually hoarse from screaming "Ice!" at his defenders, do all defensive players play perfect help defense at all times? Certainly, and I'm guessing that with just a few keystrokes that could be the case in NBA 2K. But in real life, human error is how James Harden is able to score many of his buckets, and the computerized simulation of human error in 2K18 makes this game more realistic than it might be otherwise.
I doubt that there will ever be a perfect sports video game (2K has historically struggled to accurately render Dirk Nowitzki's hair) but by nailing what can go wrong, 2K18 is about as right as it gets.