You know how SimCity made it fun to run a city? When you would never, ever, ever run for mayor in real life?
In addition to letting you unleash tornadoes and space aliens on hapless virtual cities, video games can help people understand subjects they couldn’t understand through TV and newspapers.
“Madden 07 taught me everything I need to know about football,” Felix Gillette writes in Slate today. Madden is an annoying sportscaster, but to younger people he’s probably more famous for his line of football video games.
Playing football, even digitally, helped Gillette understand the game better than watching it on TV:
When you watch a game live, the big plays usually seem inexplicable and mysterious. When you participate in a big play in Madden, the success is not a mystery. Rather, it’s the logical outcome of well-timed manipulation and execution.
I’ve had a similar experience with car-racing games. Racing is ridiculous on TV. But playing racing games helped appreciate that there’s a lot of subtlety behind the wheel. Slamming the throttle doesn’t work. By taking it slower in some places, you end up going faster – a lot faster.
In pursuit of in-game awards and achivements, I’ve learned to drift and corner, shaving precious seconds off my lap times. It’s intensely satisfying to run a track again and again, perfecting my runs.
I still don’t watch televised car races. But I can grudgingly admit that those people going in circles do have some skill. Gillette goes further, to say that the TV networks should change the camera angles and add graphics, to show the games more like Madden does:
For starters, once you get used to seeing the field from the Madden perspective—above the quarterback’s head, up the field, over the line of scrimmage—the side view favored by the TV broadcasts becomes constricting. From that angle, the numbers on the backs of the players’ jerseys are obscured, which makes identifying the offensive and defensive packages more difficult. Sure, the side angle works well on running plays. But it’s abysmal for passing. Before the snap, you can’t see what the safeties are doing. After the snap, all of the receivers and their routes disappear off the side of the screen. How the receiver got open is a mystery.
Makes sense to me. The next time I’m studying the media, you may find me playing a video game.
Article: “Madden 07 taught me everything I need to know about football“