I sometimes think of it as my gamer-shame, but one of my favorite gaming moments every year is loading up the new version of Madden and taking my up-and-down Colts team through the motions. It’s been years since the brilliance of the Peyton Manning Super Bowl digital team, but with Andrew Luck, it’s hard to complain too much.
I remember my first experience with Madden. I received a Sega Genesis for X-mas the year it was released (it came out in January, so this would have been almost a year after release, in 1990). My first game, other than the pack-in Altered Beast, was John Madden Football. Yes, it was so new that it didn’t have a year or number yet, though that wasn’t actually the first iteration of the game. It was the first console version.
People rag pretty hard on Madden gamers in some circles. I know people used to laugh at me when I was grinding my WoW characters for my research and also playing Madden (and playing something on my phone). There was an elitist sense from many WoW players that Madden wasn’t a serious game, wasn’t complex, wasn’t difficult.
Here’s a little bit of autobiographical data about me. My mother and father separated (my dad went for cigarettes as the old cliche goes, if cigarettes are several other women, and he never really came back). I was raised in a house full of women. Sports wasn’t a big thing in our home. My step-dad, who came later, would teach me basketball, but he wasn’t any good at/never played football, and he was a shitty teacher and shittier human being, so…
Whether we want to admit it or not, there’s a certain element of being an American Male that is intrinsically tied to being able to talk about sports, and the most popular and dominant sport is, of course, football. Big college conferences and the NFL generate massive revenue and insane television ratings. Fantasy Football– which was a nerd thing when I started playing– has become so mainstream there was an FX comedy about it for several years and places like Buffalo Wild Wings offer to rent out their rooms for people to host live drafts. Football is a big, big thing.
Now I’m not saying this to sound like “woe is me, I had such a sad childhood,” because I didn’t. Growing up with a mom and a bunch of women around actually led to a pretty cool childhood. I don’t have a number of the hang-ups I see in some other men (well, most of the adult men I know don’t have those hang-ups, but as a high school student and an undergrad I saw a bunch of silly macho stuff). The big detractor to not having a serious male role model is that no one could teach me about sports. That’s not to say women don’t play sports, mind you. I know some women who are amazing at sports. Just not the women in my world, who were mostly older and weren’t overly athletic by nature.
So I decided as a kid I wanted to learn about football. I was always a big kid, so people expected me to be a player. Since that was the expectation, I felt like I should know about it. My first experience with football, though, was Tecmo Bowl. It’s a game I will still play any time I’m given a chance, but all Tecmo Bowl really teaches you is how to win with Bo Jackson and that if you pick the right defensive play the other team is going to suffer. It wasn’t very strategic, though it did teach me the start of the rules.
This is where Madden will always shine for me. I learned how to read plays, to understand coverages, to know position specific roles, etc. all from playing Madden. The playbooks, while not pro caliber, are certainly as sophisticated as a high school team would use (if not more), and while the AI is just video game AI and can be tricked (which the gamer in me learns every year), the basic premise of everything is correct.
And when you learn football in this way, you see how it really is a strategy/resource management game. You have a payload (the ball). You have units of time and numbers of attempts to move it. You need to get it to a specific place, but if you can’t, you have to make sure the other team can’t get it to their specific place.
It’s complex, and it’s layered, and once I started watching football with other guys (in college), I realized that I knew way more about the game from playing Madden and fantasy football and watching replays closely and writing about it online (I worked for a while as an early online PR person for the Colts in a non-paid “work for swag” role) than even people who played on the college team. Even though my knee injury ended my run as a quarterback’s nightmare before it even started, I knew better than just about anyone I sat down with how the game should work and what was the best strategy. Before long everyone in the sports bar would ask me why a play failed instead of trying to listen to commentary. I knew what I was talking about.
And that’s why every year I go back to Madden. That knee I destroyed (playing basketball, then reinjured teaching, which is a story for another day) never mended itself enough that I could take the field, and at 40, I’m too old and I’m too large now to ever play linebacker again. But every year I can make an overblown virtual me and play on my favorite team, and I can exercise the strategy game that is football.
I’m about to go plunk down my money and load up the new year’s Madden. And I do it with pride.
I’m a nerd. But at some point between high school and the start of my career as an instructor, the other nerds rose up. Now I might not be nerd enough with my football game and my comic books about actual super heroes and my critically acclaimed dramas on basic cable. And don’t even get me started on the crap I take from my Lucha Underground and New Japan friends over still watching all of WWE’s programming every week.
Imma be me, though. It’s working pretty well. And it’s Madden season.