Generally when I play a baseball video game, I want the game to mimic the sport that I watch on television regularly. While Madden, Fifa, and NBA 2K have all managed to at least cause a suspension of disbelief for me, all of the baseball games I've played have failed in this aspect. Certain key aspects of the game haven't been incorporated (presumably in favor of an abstracted game play that the designers decided was more fun), while other aspects that should be abstracted are left realistic, thus making the game not enjoyable. Examples are in order.
For the first situation, I've found that baseball games have a great deal of trouble with foul balls. For a pitcher to throw a complete game in real life baseball, he usually has to throw around 120 pitches. By reducing the number of foul balls in the game, the programmers trouble the pitcher stamina mechanic, causing either a pitcher who gets exhausted in the sixth inning, after only throwing 60 pitches, or a pitcher who can plug through a complete game every time, because he only throws 90 pitches a game. Both situations disrupt the "realism" of the game, and lead to potentially problematic playability issues (i.e. most baseball fans know to pull a pitcher when they get to around 100 pitches. If the pitcher gets exhausted after 60, the player feels cheated. If the pitcher can continue to 150, you might as well do without the stamina mechanic).
On the other side of this issue, baseball games have a nasty habit of leaving certain extremely difficult aspects of baseball nonabstracted in the game. The particular mechanic that bothers me is the ability for batters to identify pitches that are in and out of the strike zone. Most players, we can assume, do not have the reaction time to be able to read a 95 mph fastball as it leaves the pitcher's hand and approaches the plate. Recognizing this, the game designers have tried a variety of abstracting mechanics. Many have tried to slow down the pitches to the point that the player can see the pitch. The problem with this is that it falls in the uncanny valley of mimesis: The game is trying to appear real by not abstracting the batter's eye mechanic, but doesn't appear real in that the pitches move far too slowly. A more acceptable approach would be to wholly abstract the mechanic, as The Show did in previous years. In The Show, the batter was given the opportunity to guess which part of the plate the pitcher was going to throw to (e.g. low and inside, up and outside, etc.). If you guess correct, you can see where the pitch is going before it gets there, and whether it's in or out of the strike zone. By including this highly abstract mechanic, the player can easily run up pitch counts, draw walks, etc. Still, some players have strongly resisted this mechanic, in that they feel it makes the game unrealistic, and potentially too easy.
What we find in both of these situations is a tension between reproducing the sporting event, i.e. a baseball game, as it would be seen on television and creating a fun and properly challenging game experience. Since each player approaches these games differently, sports games have found a reasonable solution in the development of "difficulty sliders." These sliders allow you to tweak the mechanics of the game to fit your desires: For example, as I mentioned above, I feel that baseball games don't allow enough foul balls. Ideally, any baseball game would include a slider that could determine the likelihood of batter contact, and another determining the likelihood of solid contact, and by setting batter contact high but solid contact low, I could produce a game that allows lots of foul balls, but not too many solid hits.
The problem with the slider solution is that these sort of mechanic manipulations are exceedingly complicated, and require excessive testing. Most players don't want to have to play dozens of games, making minor tweaks of the sliders, before they can finally produce a game that matches their vision of what the game should be. Thus, with the development of sliders, a secondary community has formed on message boards online (particularly operationsports.com), where those players who do enjoy developing sliders can post their most realistic sliders, as well as discussion with other players who help them test their designs. By posting on the internet, the slider developer can rely on other players to help test, and thus speed up the time needed to produce a valid set of sliders.
Surprisingly, 2k has widely endorsed this fan activity, in fact creating a service called 2kShare for users to easily exchange sliders. This function is embedded in the game itself, allowing a user with internet access to immediately download and implement other sliders, rosters, etc., without having to sit around manually adjusting what might be dozens of fields. Ironically, this service is basically 2k accepting that they are incapable of successfully accounting for this aspect of the game, and therefore relying on the fan base to do it for them. Instead, 2k takes the role of a world-maker, a producer of a system that can be adjusted to fill the expectations of a wide range of different fans. As the game updates each year, it is less important for 2k to produce a balanced game then to produce a set of sliders that account for every aspect of the game that a fan might want to adjust. We can't accuse the designers of laziness in relying on produsers to create difficulty settings for them; in fact, they aptly recognized that the game designer paradigm itself doesn't allow for successful difficulty balance! By recognizing that their fans are not a unitary group with single desires, 2k is moving in a direction that could eventually produce the most accessible and successful sports games ever made.
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