Patent ID: 8662974

Claim:
In a videogame simulating a sport, wherein animated action may be performed by a game character in response to input from a user provided through a user-operable controller and the game character possess the characteristics of a real-life player having a plurality of skills, a method of controlling game play comprising: enabling user selection of a first game play mode which provides regular game play in accordance with the rules governing the sport being simulated, the regular game play enabling a plurality of game play scenarios; enabling user selection of a second game play mode, different from the first game play mode, which provides game play enabling repeated play of only a partial subset of the plurality of game play scenarios; and providing game play in the second game play mode upon user selection thereof, including: generating a first game play scenarios, as one of the game play scenarios of the partial subset, presenting an automatic opportunity for the user to control the game character to repeatedly simulate performance of one of the skills of the real-life player in a manner inconsistent with the rules governing the sport being simulated; receiving user input from the user-operable controller to control the animated action of the game character in the first game play scenario; generating at least one additional game play scenario, as another one of the game play scenarios of the partial subset and being different from the first game scenarios, presenting an automatic opportunity for the user to control the game character to repeatedly simulate performance of another one of the skills of the real-life player in another manner inconsistent with the rules governing the sport being simulated; and receiving user input from the user-operable controller to control the animated action of the game character in the additional game play scenarios, wherein said method further comprises: assigning a score based on the user's control of the game character to achieve a certain goal presented by the first game play scenario and assigning a score based on the user's control of the game character to achieve a certain goal presented by the additional game play scenario; adding the scores that were assigned based on the user's control in the first and additional game play scenarios to form an accumulated score; determining whether the accumulated score exceeds a threshold value; comparing the accumulated score to at least one other accumulated score for at least one other user controlling the same game character, wherein the sports videogame is a baseball video game and the assigned scores are separate scores from runs scored during normal game play in the baseball videogame; and designating the game character as having a special status in a virtual league when he accumulated score exceeds the threshold value.