The videogame trained athlete
in the past couple of weeks, i’ve had a greatly increased desire to understand football strategy and tactics. my alma mater has had a banner recruiting year, and a particular formation that our offensive coordinator gus malzhan has brought back into fashion is generating buzz in the NFL and even the dollhouse. the task of learning and understanding was problematic however as football is one of the more complex sports games ever devised.
i had taken to watching youtube vids, reading wiki entries, and even watching eyeshield 21 to get a better feel for strategy. i figured, however, the best way to learn would be playing something like madden on the 360. i just hadn’t gotten around to buying it.
and lo and behold, i read this article today which basically says even pro athletes use madden to learn the game. not only that, apparently playing the game has changed on field tactics.
Just before he reached the end zone, with 17 seconds remaining, Stokley cut right at 90 degrees and ran across the field. Six seconds drained off the clock before, at last, he meandered across the goal line to score the winning touchdown. For certain football fans, the excitement of a last-minute comeback now commingled with the shock of the familiar: It’s hard to think of a better example of a professional athlete doing something so obviously inspired by the tactics of videogame football. When I caught up with Stokley by telephone a few weeks later, I asked him point-blank: “Is that something out of a videogame?” “It definitely is,” Stokley said. “I think everybody who’s played those games has done that” — run around the field for a while at the end of the game to shave a few precious seconds off the clock. Stokley said he had performed that maneuver in a videogame “probably hundreds of times” before doing it in a real NFL game. “I don’t know if subconsciously it made me do it or not,” he said.
It was only a matter of time before the generation that grew up playing Madden and games like it transformed the gridiron. For years, the sophisticated play of professional teams trickled down to their college and high school counterparts. Recently, that flow has been reversed. Now the way football is played in high school and college — a style dominated by the so-called spread offense, which involves a lot of passing and relies on quick reads by the quarterback to analyze the opposing team’s defense — is bubbling up to the NFL. The sport is being taken over by something you might call Maddenball — a sophisticated, high-scoring, pass-happy, youth-driven phenomenon.
so it’s pretty interesting to see this art-imitating-life-imitating-art cycle. in another sort of sense, this is the matrix training program. kids today are getting to see and use actual football strategy many times over before stepping out on the field when before, no such simulation was available.
on a somewhat related sidenote, here is a subbed korean show depicting the rise of a progamer reality show style.
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