Playing for a level court in esports

Ali Forbes

Dr. Ali Forbes has basketball in her blood. But the Texas State assistant professor of electronic media says she could not have predicted that her passion for the game would morph into an academic plunge into the NBA 2K video game and esports.

Forbes grew up in the Canadian province of New Brunswick, a child of Boston Celtics fans. She played college basketball before becoming a sports broadcast producer for radio and TV, first in Canada and then the U.S. Along the way, she earned a doctorate in journalism and mass communications, which led her to interest in NBA 2K. The game, which launched its first version in 1999, simulates professional basketball and attracts millions of players around the globe.

“I want to understand how 2K is both its own culture—because it’s a multiuser domain game where you can create your own character and socialize with other players—and also how it’s part of the bigger NBA culture,” Forbes says. “There’s a lot to unpack in this space: What are the experiences of women and girls? The experiences of people of color? The game has been a popular part of NBA culture for nearly three decades now, but there’s no substantial literature about it.”

Forbes is researching these themes for a book, which she says is a broader and less rigid expansion of the dissertation she wrote at Arizona State University. Her research involves interviewing NBA 2K players including ordinary enthusiasts; gamers who make their living by live-streaming their play; pro basketball players who play NBA 2K; and gamers who get paid as members of teams in the NBA 2K esports league.

Within Texas State’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication, Forbes teaches classes in studio production, live sports production, and media and society. She has also established the Sports Video Game Lab at Old Main, where she collects data on sports video games and guides students’ game research.

Forbes says her interest in NBA 2K overlaps with her other areas of research. At the Broadcast Education Association convention this April in Las Vegas, Forbes is participating in panels focused on discrimination and threats to women in media; diversity in emerging and virtual platforms; and sports broadcasting education and partnerships with ESPN. She’s also presenting her paper about image repair for collegiate sport programs, using the case study of the divorce of the Big 12 Conference and the universities of Texas and Oklahoma.

When it comes to her NBA 2K research, Forbes says one of the book’s chapters will explore the racial connotations of the game.

“NBA 2K is one of the only video games that has Black people as the heroes and the leading characters. For a whole community of Black people, that’s very important,” she says. “The flip side is it offers the ability for white people or anyone else to go in and emulate what they consider to be the Black experience.”

The book will also explore the experiences of women and girl players in NBA 2K. Forbes says she initially had difficulty finding female gamers to interview because of the verbal abuse they’ve experienced in the interactive game. While women are active in NBA 2K, they tend to keep a low profile.

Social cues that shape our daily lives don’t apply in a world of avatars, Forbes notes. “What’s happening is women and girls are being treated in just horrendous ways: As soon as somebody identifies a female voice in the chat, they’re just absolutely berated,” Forbes says. “In the absence of the cues that we all are aware of inherently—whiteness, gender, socioeconomics—some people from those groups use violent language and harassment to reinforce a social hierarchy that doesn’t exist when we can’t see each other.”

A snapshot from Ali Forbes dissertation defense.

Forbes says she intends to apply her findings to the NBA 2K League and esports in general. She points out that NBA 2K added the option of female avatars for the first time in 2019. Also, the NBA 2K League recently created an algorithm to score female players based on their individual skills in the league draft to address the issue of male players refusing to pass the ball to female players.

“Points to the league for being proactive and saying, ‘We know this is a problem,’” Forbes says. “But there are problems all the way through the system. I would like to help them with that. Let’s start to talk about the things we could do from a game development standpoint to support women and girls in the game itself.”