By Storm Sebastian

Browsing through Wired Magazine, I found an interesting article about the relevance of sports video games to real life play.  In the first game of the NFL 2009 season, Broncos wide reciever Brandon Stokley employed a strategy that he said he had learned by playing football video games - he dawddled a few seconds before he reached the end zone in order to knock a few seconds of the clock.

Strategies and moves like this can all be played and tested out in the very realistic Madden NFL playstation and x-box games. John Madden Football was first designed for the Apple II and the Sega Genesis in 1990, and was one of the videogames which depicted the sport most accurately.  Now, according to Wired Magazine, the Madden games have become the most commercially successful sports videogames out there.

The article includes an interview with high school football coach Tim Grunhard, who encourages his team to play games like Madden, claiming that it teaches them strategies and football jargon more quickly.  While excessive physical training is still essential, the additional knowledge that can be gained from these games helps to improve players' strategy and understanding of the sport.

The players seem to be getting younger, as the article points out, and this may be attributed to the idea of using these video games as a learning tool.   Another coach interviewed mentioned that he programmed his playbook into the Madden game and uses it to teach his plays to his team.

As a lot of my friends are football and Madden fanatics, I found this article fascinating, because there really does seem to be some truth to it.  Watching my friends play these games, I look at the screen and see a game of football that looks almost identical (minus the computer graphics) to the real football games that you can watch on any sports channel.  Clearly, athletes will always have to continue their hard physical work, training, and practice, but the idea that these seemingly mindless video games can actually be used as a tool to help strengthen their play in the field is an interesting step toward progress in the field of football.