NCAA Football 12: Should Gamers Be Allowed to Cheat in College Football Sim?

At long last, NCAA Football 12 was released on Tuesday. If you’re a college football fan looking to pass some time before the 2011 season kicks off, and you also happen to be a video game nut, I recommend you go pick it up. It’s getting good reviews.

If you’ve never played any of the NCAA Football games before, all you really need to know is that this is essentially college football’s answer to the all-powerful Madden NFL series.

Yes, it gives college football fans everywhere the chance to play with their favorite teams, but it also has modes that allow you to be in charge of the entire operation. If you’ve ever wanted to run a college football program and/or facilitate a high school star’s path to pigskin glory, this is your ticket.

However, there is one thing you cannot do in NCAA Football 12: cheat.

It may seem like an odd, out-of-the-blue kind of a gripe, but I think it’s a gripe worth making. After all, for a college football simulator that is supposed to be ultra-realistic, you would think that cheating would be among the game’s myriad features. Art imitates reality, as they say, and cheating is definitely a big part of college football in the real world. For good or ill.

Instead of shunning that reality, the higher-ups at EA Sports should consider embracing it. Doing so will no doubt cause a fuss, but giving gamers the option to cheat in the next NCAA Football game would definitely inch the game closer to reality.

So how would gamers be allowed to cheat? Well, for starters, there should be an option that allows players to bribe recruits in order to come to their school. The better the recruit, the bigger the price. Just like in real life.

Once you have these illegally recruited players in the fold, there should be a way to develop them in a way that the NCAA would not be too happy about.

For example, allowing them to skip class would allow for better attributes, and covering up their assorted transgressions (see Tressell, Jim) would keep them on the field.

In order to make sure both sides of the equation are properly represented here, gamers should also be allowed to make the players break the rules if they so please. This would definitely come into play in the game's "Road to Glory" mode, in which gamers take control of a recruit and guide him through his college pigskin career.

While there should definitely be an emphasis on practicing and studying, there should also be an option to receive improper benefits (see Bush, Reggie). The payoff could be something like increased business savvy, which will invariably come in handy in the pros later on.

Naturally, there will have to be consequences to running a rotten program. Realism and the morals of younger gamers make that a must. As such, there should be something like the Fallout series' karma meter. The more you misbehave, the harder it is to play the game.

In this case, that means the danger of NCAA sanctions and the like would only increase as you break more and more rules.

If you run a clean program and end up winning the BCS National Championship, congratulations! If you run a dirty program, win the championship, well, congratulations! If you get away with it, you get away with it. Once again, it will be just like real life.

To be sure, this is a hard idea to sell, and actually implementing it is going to be even harder. But the majority of NCAA Football's audience is well aware of the lesser aspects of college football. And with games getting increasingly realistic with each passing year, there may come a time when EA Sports is not going to be able to keep getting away with ignoring an essential part of the big picture.

Then again, NCAA Football 12 is supposedly selling like hotcakes. EA Sports might just know what it's doing.