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Making Virtual Sports More Like the Real Thing
The New York Times has an article today with an unexpected source of game criticism: Seattle Seahawks football player Sean Alexander. The athlete made the EA execs nervous at a press conference this week, where he offered up some insightful comments about the Madden series of games. From the article: "Madden has always been great, but it's always been one-on-one, just you and another person, and real football is a team game. You should be able to make a team and play together with your friends. Like if you have 10 friends, you could all play different positions and be in 10 different houses and play together over the Internet. Or maybe you just have like five people, and you control the skill positions and the program controls the other guys."
Executing a football play is a complex thing. The play has to be decided upon, the players have to huddle up, each player needs to know their role. The offensive line needs to know who to block, each receiver needs to know their route exactly, tight ends and running backs need to know if they're blocking or receiving. Running plays might be a bit more controlled, but think about possible reverses, options, trick plays, etc. Now, you're actually going to the line of scrimmage, and the defense shows you an alignment you don't like. Now you've got to audible. It's really quite a miracle that with all of this chaos, football players can still go out and execute.
The reason why football plays succeed in real life is because those 11 men on the field practice together like crazy before football comes up every Sunday. Who out there is going to want to try to get 11 buddies out there to practice there this much? Never mind conflicting schedules from real life that could make this impossible, or trying to audible using only your gamepad... it just doesn't make it as much fun. If you're the quarterback, you're involved in every passing play. If you're the running back, you're involved in every running play. If you only get to be a receiver, though, the ball might get passed to you a half-dozen to a dozen times per game. If you're a fullback, you're basically limited to running into people and trying to knock them down. Who's going to want that skill position? And it is a skill position, because of the possibility of getting to do a short-yardage running play or catching the odd pass out of the pocket, etc.
The only way to make sure that everybody holding a gamepad gets to be involved in every play is to make sure that the guy with the gamepad is the one with the ball. That's 1 guy out of 11.
I'm not passionate about this or anything, just not sure how this could work and be both practical and fun. Even in baseball, for instance, where coordinated execution isn't as important as football, it still means a whole bunch of bored guys sitting around waiting for something to happen.