My son Charlie will be 18 soon. Like all Scottish males before him, he will be dropped on a Hebridean island with nothing but a rusty knife and his own anger. If he can't make it back to the mainland, he will live the rest of his life among feral, abandoned Scottish sons, and he will only survive if he likes sport, because that's how any group of men get through enforced time together. He tried sport as a kid, but as he is on the autism spectrum, he was obsessed with rules to the point where if he felt another kid broke them, he would pick the ball up and stop the game. He was basically human VAR.

Three Californians say that the video game publisher Electronic Arts is secretly manipulating them. On Nov. 9, they filed a class-action lawsuit accusing EA of surreptitiously using a patented A.I. technology known as dynamic difficulty adjustment in its FIFA, Madden, and NHL games--three of the biggest sports games on the planet. The lawsuit claims EA is using the technology to unfairly increase the difficulty of multiplayer mode online matches in order to encourage players to spend real-world money to boost their chances of winning. EA has denied ever implementing the technology and has called the lawsuit "baseless." For years, players have been stewing over ideas of fairness and balance in games, feeling taken for granted at best and taken advantage of at worst. The class-action complaint, Zajonc et al. v. Electronic Arts, doesn't contain any evidence for its claim, but that's fairly typical for this sort of class-action complaint.

NBA 2K18 is coming to PlayStation 4, Xbox One and Nintendo Switch in September. We don't have an official release date, but you can bet the developers for Take-Two's Visual Concepts are already working hard to produce the next version of the series. Per members of the development team, it's best to submit a wishlist for a sports game 7-9 months before it's scheduled to be released. I never expect everything on my list to be added to a game, but last year I saw 7 of my suggestions in NBA 2K17. I'm sure I wasn't the only one making requests, but it's great to know the gaming community's voice is being heard. I'm big on customization in sports video games, so I'll almost always push for more in this area.

We've seen strong efforts from almost every signature franchise in 2016. The success and quality of the products have raised the anticipation for next year's crop of releases, and it's also caused the sports gaming community to become even more demanding. While the thirst for sports gaming titles shows no sign of tailing off, the fire that burns in our guts for the best products available is still alive. After spending countless hours with just about every sports game released in 2016, I've selected the standout games and modes in a variety of categories. All three of these games delivered ultra-realistic renders, though the dynamics and structure of their sports create a diverse circumstance. Most often, player faces aren't visible in an American football game, but EA Sports' Madden 17 had as many scanned-in head models as the series has ever had.

If the University of Hairy Nipples' Fighting Areolas want to play on blue turf, then by cracky, go to town: It had all come a long, long, long way from 1993, when EA launched a college football series minus the rights to school names and logos (Michigan vs. BYU could be simulated as'Ann Arbor' vs. 'Provo') to mirror its successful Madden franchise, even slapping the name of another iconic Bay Area coach, Bill Walsh -- then about to wrap up his second tenure at Stanford University -- on the title. Within a few years, the series had dropped the Walsh name but added collegiate licensing, exploding in the summer of 1995 with 108 schools, conference logos and real bowl names (Fiesta, Orange, Rose and Sugar). It's dead -- technically on a hiatus -- now, a run of more than 20 summers slammed shut in 2013 not by consumer disinterest but legal entanglement. Because even if EA couldn't use players' names, as it violated the NCAA's rules regarding amateurism, programmers were inclined to approximate with every school the real-life attributes, from both a skill and physique standpoint, of its star players in any given season: You knew who they were. They knew who they were. If even if you didn't, the game eventually featured a customizer with sliders that accounted for the most precise of details and free downloadable fan-generated rosters that did all of the naming work for you. A lot of folks got rich off NCAA Football, of course, save for the players whom the game wasn't really (wink) trying (wink) to (wink) emulate (wink). Enter Ed O'Bannon and his legal team, and ne'er the twain; rather than wrestle with how to compensate its student-athletes going forward, the SEC, Big Ten and Pac-12 conferences, three of the so-called Power 5 leagues, forbade the use of their trademarks after the summer of 2013, and EA pulled the plug. And that's the Catch-22: Even thought we know it was wrong, we still miss it.