The NBA has a Blog Squad now, which I am sort of loathe to mention, since they don't seem to understand (or perhaps they wish to control) some of the basic characteristics of blogs, such as permalinks to individual posts and commenting. Nonetheless, there is a great outpouring of passion on the blog from Flea of the Red Hot Chili Peppers, who is a die-hard Lakers fan and is part of the Blog Squad. In an interesting post (which of course I can't link directly to), Flea reminds us that:

as is with jazz music

basketball, being america's greatest export

is the finest example of what is great about a democracy

people working together within a structure to accomplish something

but free to express their individual character as they like

to improvise on a theme

Oh yes, Flea, I'm feelin' ya! In fact, I've thought similar things here before on sB.

Resample:

Many times I wondered with envy why I couldn't jam like jazz musicians are so often wont. Then I finally realized that jazz musicians probably thought the same thing about pickup basketball players. It's the same thing! Both create with a loose set of rules and peers that bring myriad skills to the mix. Where the jazz ensemble offers a pulsing bass to complement a burning sax, the cagers counter with sweet guard penetration for a no-look bounce pass to the backdoor cutter. Sometimes there's successes, sometimes there's failures. It's the same thing…

The brilliance of Flea's post (beyond its poetic structure), is its implicit recognition that there is something political about the way that basketball is played as a sport — specifically, something democratic. But I have to take issue with him for not taking the analysis one step further: it is PICKUP basketball that is the purest expression of what he is describing as democratic, not the hyper-controlled NBA variant that he is so fond of following.

Flea could have written his post in very dry English, with perfect Strunk and White grammar to boot. But he didn't — rather, he found the gaps and spaces in the structure of language to convey his ideas far more beautifully. Similarly, the pickup basketball player finds the gaps and spaces in the language of James Naismith to convey his ideas more beautifully.

Therein lies the true democratic potential of the sport, which I hope to articulate more clearly with Global Village Basketball.

Many sports videogame title offer a "create-a-player" module so that one can create a virtual character to compete in the game environment. The create-a-player module for EA Sports' NBA Live '06 is quite sophisticated, allowing one to customize the standard elements like height, weight, skill level, etc., but also skin tone, hairstyle, and choice of tattoo. Naturally, the icing on the cake for such a module is to allow for the individual's name and number to appear on the game jersey.

NBA Live '06, among other games, accomplishes this with a virtual keyboard that one "types" with the game controller, as seen below.

My question is: When are we going to take it to the next level of customization, and type with sound?

We have discussed already that the voice track for a sports title is made up of thousands of voice fragments variously stitched together and recombined. Would it not also be possible to record a library of phonemes and then use these to construct personalized names for the game, "spoken" by the game announcers?

First of all, when creating a player, you would be able to go through the existing rosters in the game to see if anybody had the same last name as you. If so, associate yourself with the last name voice file already in the system, and move on.

If not, then we use the alternative, a virtual keyboard similar to the one used for typing letters. The difference in this case, however, is that you are typing phonetic symbols. By mousing over the phonetic character on the keyboard, one would hear the phoneme being pronounced. Tapping the key would add it to your phoneme-chain display. Hitting a "play" button would allow you to hear the phoneme-chain being pronounced, with adaptive technology in place to "smooth" the phonemes together into one word. Saving it creates a unique last name voice file. Additional functionality might be put in place for advanced smoothing and tweaking of the pronunciation.

There is obviously little incentive for a company like EA Sports to have Marv Albert or whomever record every name that might possibly play the game. But there is an incentive for each individual player to have his or her own name in the library — the incentive of greater personalization. It would be advantageous for the game publisher to create an open web-based library for unique last name voice files (similar to what EA Sports did with golf course files in Course Architect) so that players could upload and share their creations, while others could see if their name was already in the system before creating one of their own — sort of a Web 2.0 perspective on sports games.

Of course, I have absolutely no idea of how to accomplish this technically, just that it, or something comparable, will happen soon. Maybe it already exists. If not, can a game programmer please contact me? ;)

The Associated Press, via ESPN: "A fan was escorted from the [Air Canada Centre] after holding up a sign that read 'Raptor Killer' with a picture of Toronto general manager Rob Babcock."

Didn't this fan read the small print on the back of his ticket?