If watching (and enjoying) professional (American) football is unusual and perhaps politically suspect for an academic, so much the more so is playing it –as a computer game. Although I played a lot of arcade games in the 80s, my interest in electronic games passed with the end of that era, so the purchase of Madden NFL was something I had to work myself up to. I justified it a bit by buying the out-of-date 2003 version as part of a 5-game pack for $20; even though I knew I would probably never play the other games (I haven’t), this still allowed me to feel I bought the one I wanted for about $4.

Madden can offer a range of brain-teasing complexities, ranging from the in-game coaching (choosing plays is part art, part science) to the increasingly elaborate “franchise mode” options (which allow for trades, keep track of injuries and, in more recent versions, generate press and various off-the-field problems around the team). But these, in fact, are the least interesting aspects of the game to me, and I avoid them. This became apparent to me when discussing my new and cautious venture with a serious gamer (a certain E. Hayot). He was frankly not very fond of sports games, preferring the greater sociability, narrative, and intellectual complexity of role-paying games.

Which led me to reflect on the stupefyingly simple pleasures of playing virtual football. While I have to admit that there is something a little sad about a grown man simulating athletic activity in a video game, this does not seem to be exactly what is going on. We tend to assume that games thematically based on real-life activities are simulations of those activities and that the simulations are a kind of substitute, their success or failure dependent on the degree of resemblance. But what a game such as Madden simulates, if it can accurately be called a simulation, is the experience of watching games on television. I emphasize the experience of watching because what the game simulates is not the ostensible passivity of watching television, but the dynamics of identification and distance that comprise watching with interest --and when playing the game, you always have a horse in the race. In sum, rather than being a virtual version of a real game, it is in fact a more interactive version of an ordinarily more passive activity, which is one of the reasons it’s fun.

In other words, Madden offers not the simulation of the singular event of a given athletic competition, but an iteration of the memory-making rituals of spectatorship in the age of technological reproducibility in which past and future games are always linked by instantly available statistics, archival footage, and previews and in which, above all, the game is divided against itself by instant replay. Replay has become such an indispensable part of modern sports (in football it can influence the outcome of games when reviewed by the officials) that it almost escapes notice, but its presence, indeed its omnipresence in Madden, signals the game’s fundamental allegiance to the involved spectator rather than the athlete-participant.

It must be emphasized that replay is not simply repetition. Writers on photography have long emphasized that photographs do not capture or re-present some normal human vision but rather make accessible new visions, new moments that in a sense happen only as photographed. Similarly, slow motion qualitatively changes the experience of watching “the game,” a change pushed to new heights by Madden, which allows every play to be replayed at various speeds, forward and back, frozen, zoomed, rotated, and stored for later and potentially infinite manipulation. A fine example of what Walter Benjamin described as the tension between “the desire of the present-day masses to ‘get closer’ to things spatially and humanly, and their equally passionate concern for overcoming each thing’s uniqueness [Einmaligkeit] by assimilating it as a reproduction.”

The point here, as with Benjamin’s account of film, is that technological reproducibility increasingly becomes less and less something that befalls art (or sport) from the outside and more and more something than defines it from the inside out –or at least tends to define how it is possible for us to imagine it, even “from the inside out.” Hence Fountains of Wayne’s “All Kinds of Time,” recently picked up by the NFL to promote its new cable network. A song about football liked by people who don’t like football, “All Kinds of Time” finds a musical equivalent to the strange lyricism inherent in the beauty of slow-motion. A young quarterback, under pressure, drops back to pass and spots the open man to whom he will throw what we can only assume will be a game-winning pass. Against the inevitability of “the clock’s running down,” he experiences a “strange inner peace,” his whole life concentrated into a single moment, during which, for an instant within an instant, his thoughts turn away from the game:

He thinks of his mother
He thinks of his bride-to-be
He thinks of his father
His two younger brothers
Gathered around the wide-screen TV

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