Devlog 5: Football is Madden-ing

For this devlog, we will briefly “address the experience, practice and culture,” (sharp, pg. 163) of football portrayed by the popular video game, Madden. I have only played Madden a handful of times, but I believe it only has the professional NFL (National Football League) teams as the players you can play as. This game has always struck me as a weird game to play by yourself because a football team is a team sport at its core. It seems pointless that you are playing as a whole team with just one person behind a remote. Obviously people enjoy this game because it is very popular and not too difficult to play. For example, I am able to play it and I understand enough about football to actively watch games and be able to keep up, but if you asked me where a defensive end stands before the snap, I couldn’t tell you. In Madden, you are incharge of all the positions. This means you have to pick out the plays, throw the ball, catch it, and run with it. This is too much for me as someone who doesn’t often play and I don’t find the game that entertaining.

“Real-life skaters spend far more time failing to pull off tricks than they do making them,” (Smith, pg. 170). To translate things into football through Madden, the game doesn’t show the hours and hours that each team puts into running and memorizing their plays, getting into shape, and practicing the throwing and catching combos. As someone who’s never played football, I am able to come into the game and make some plays happen just by pushing buttons and learning through the tutorial. When the game suggests new plays, all of the players on your team know how to execute it, so you, as the player, don’t have to endure team practices to learn the plays and get better at them- the knowledge and skill is already there.

John Sharp talked a lot about how the media doesn't do a very good job at showing the true “skater culture” and how video games about skating are bad at it, too. “What I find fascinating about these [skating] games is how they pursue a fantasy of skateboarding that glosses over many of the actual experiences of skating and cultural practices”, (Sharp, pg. 172). I believe that although it is just a sport, America has built a culture around football. To pick the low hanging fruit, the annual SuperBowl could be considered an unofficial national holiday In the United States. After Thanksgiving, more food is eaten on SuperBowl Sunday than any other day of the year. Commercial airtime prices go up every year because of the millions upon millions of people who will consume it. At the highschool and collegiate level, tailgating is a common event held before the games. Fans will follow their favorite teams all around the country and pay hundreds, if not thousands of dollars between game tickets, flights, hotels, and other festivities just to watch the game that could’ve been watched at home from their TV. There is a culture that surrounds football that games like Madden just can’t reproduce.

The game that my group and I worked on together was called You got served. It is a board game that is based off of serving in tennis and needs minimal amount of equipment and skill to play. In normal tennis, each player has to serve in the correct spot to earn points and continue the game against their opponent. The game we created represents the points and ball placement like real-life tennis by setting specific boundaries (within the board game court) that correspond with an amount of points. Like in real tennis, hand-eye coordination is essential and it was in our game too since you had to toss the ball up and hit it wit our make-shift tennis racquets.