Football or baseball, Formula 1 or soccer, you can count on me to be a nice guy. It’s how I’d prefer to think of myself, after all. In the role-playing choices offered by franchises like MLB The Show, or in the narratives of Madden NFL’s Longshot or FIFA’s The Journey, I’ve always taken the high road. My friend Samit Sarkar played NHL 21’s revamped Be a Pro career and found its limited story arcs — selfish superstar or stand-up team leader — to not be much of a choice at all.

Hand it to 2K22 MT though — its MyCareer mode makes being a rich, self-centered jerk viable. It makes it realistic. And the developers at Visual Concepts, and the actors in these scenes, make it fun.

In my first week in the league, I found myself caught between the general manager who drafted me and the coach who didn’t want me; picked a passive-aggressive social media fight about my playing time; recorded a diss track about rapper The Game; got chewed out by my old college coach; and gave a bombshell interview in which I said I was thinking about a trade barely 10 games into my rookie year.

I actually hadn’t been considering demanding a trade, but the nonsense going on in my first week — with a side of Kendrick Perkins’ hot takes about my conduct — had me legitimately believing my situation with the Detroit Pistons was beyond repair. When the rest of my teammates played like steaming garbage in a 40-point loss to Brooklyn — and MyCareer has been known to contrive horrid games for narrative effect — that was it. I connived my way to the Sacramento Kings. They’re where I felt my player was a better fit all along, but because I performed so well in the pre-draft portion of MyCareer (which is played at the lowest difficulty), I was drafted No. 1 by Detroit.

It’s not that single-player career modes in other sports titles don’t offer ways to act out or act entirely in your own self-interest. They’re just a lot blander about it, and moreover, their very limited narrative arcs simply don’t present any incentive to make such disruptive choices. Madden NFL 22’s “Face of the Franchise” backstory is, if possible, even thinner than last year’s hackneyed, hole-ridden setup. The player character never develops a personality, as the either/or dialogue choices all seem to result in the same team buff or player benefit.

And it was damn cathartic, before that pivotal game against the Nets, to unload my frustration on interviewer Candace Green and see my fans increase and my personal “brand” shoot up across practically every measurement. In other sports video games, me-first vituperation usually gets you some passive-aggressive suggestion that players aren’t expected to behave that way.

I’ve come to expect this; sports video games are important PR for the leagues that license them, and developers typically want to present them and their athletes in the best possible light. Fortunately, it appears the NBA and 2K Sports have a trusting enough relationship where the natural conflicts and confrontations of professional sports can be presented and resolved authentically. The result is a career where I feel like I’m part of the action, not a mark being hustled.