How video games have changed the way you watch football

Throughout the early months of the year, millions upon millions will settle in to watch the most important games of the football season. College bowl games and championships wrap up at the onset of the New Year, while professional football’s postseason rolls through January before culminating in the Super Bowl in February.

If you settle down to watch any of these competitions, you might not be aware of how much the games that you’re watching have been transformed by the football video games that have caught hold of gamers’ imaginations for decades.

The original football video games were limited by poor graphics and diminished computer or game system capabilities. As those issues were mitigated by improved technology, video football game developers were able to create games that mimicked the actual action on the field.

Led by the famed John Madden franchise, developed under the auspices of a successful NFL coach and legendary broadcaster, football for gamers became more advanced and, thanks to the ingenuity and cleverness of video game designers, started to impact the real thing.

For video games that you don’t need to shell out any dough for, FreeGamePick can provide you with outstanding selections. While you’re in the recliner or in a bar cheering on your favorite team, you might notice some of these video game innovations impacting your viewing experience.

Quarterback View

When an NFL game during the 2017 NFL season was impacted by fog, cameramen weren’t able to get a clear view of the normal press box shot that viewers are used to seeing. They were forced to use camera shots from behind the quarterback. What they found inadvertently was that a lot of viewers loved it, because it provided them with the kind of view that gamers are used to seeing when they play Madden games. Look for more of that shot as the years progress.

Tracking the Plays

Again, here is an area where the John Madden games were ahead of the pack. Gamers who play Madden select from a variety of plays and can see the “x’s and o’s” of each play. For whatever reason, that information was withheld from television viewers for many years, perhaps because producers were worried the information would be confusing. Once the Madden franchise proved that fans were savvy enough to handle such data, it started to be incorporated on broadcasts as well.

Player Ranking

One of the facets that gamers love about Madden is how the simulated players are ranked based on the performances of their real-life counterparts, and those rankings then affect the abilities of the simulated players. Recently certain networks have been including rankings of players in the pre-game lineup information, which seems like an obvious nod to what gamers have been accustomed to seeing for many years.

These are just some of the advances in television’s coverage of football that likely wouldn’t have taken place without video games leading the way. Look for more to come in the years ahead.