Playable Archive: The management of data in the FIFA/EASports franchise.

The FIFA series (now known as EA Sports FC) of video games are football (soccer) sports simulation games that claim to provide "unrivaled authenticity" for fans (Escaravage and Ludlow 2023).EA releases a new version annually and each iteration routinely sells in excess of 10 million copies, outstripping rival football games such as Konami's eFootball (formerly PES: Pro Evolution Soccer) and Sports Interactive's Football Manager.The game has been described as one of a select few that is "familiar to people who have no interest in gaming -or even real football" (Parkin 2016) and "woven into global culture" (Markoff 2023: xiii).In this paper, I explore how the data in the FIFA/EA Sports series and its wider ecosystem is presented and used by developers and the player base.That data both replicates and represents the structures, machinations and history of association football but is also played with to create an alternate history.In this context the paper will consider how EA manages core aspects of the game data and what this means for authenticity.In 2022 it was announced that the licensing agreement between EA Sports and FIFA (the governing body of football) that has existed since 1993 was coming to an end and that from 2023 FIFA (the game) would be known as EA Sports FC.The news gained significant mainstream press attention (Powell 2022; Agini and Criddle 2022; Panja 2022) and has heralded a significant change to the how the series presents the sport.Like many games that are based on real-world data, EA Sports has consistently presented the game series as an 'authentic' experience.Whilst this is often convenient shorthand for marketing purposes, the company have repeatedly emphasized that the over-arching aim was always to create the most realistic football game -EA's original slogan was "If it's in the game, it's in the game."(Parkin 2016).How that is interpreted by the publisher, developer, marketing departments, and players is often in flux and further complicated by how we each define 'authentic' and 'realistic'.This research views FIFA not just as a sports simulation but as a historical game in two ways -through the content (e.g., use of real-world players and explayers, stadiums, retro kits) and through each iteration's representation of play (e.g., the rules, squads, and other default data in each version) which create a playable archive but many modalities (Dhaliwal 2022: 155).How the real world is represented