to keep most runs under five yards. Amusing “bugs” are often the most entertaining part of video games—when you call your roommate from the other room to “look at this!”—because they’re the manifestation of a rigorous protocol being violated. Chad “Ochocinco” Johnson is entertaining because he wore a sombrero on the sidelines (and was fined by the league for violating a higher set of extragamic rules, or whatever). If professional football is the most popular sport in the U.S., I think it has a great deal to do with the fantasy of succeeding not just despite the odds—as melodramatic end-of-season recaps would have it—but despite the system, the rules that try to tell you what to expect. If video games are popular, it’s in part because they can indulge such fantasies well. My problem with the Madden franchise is that it sometimes appears as if it believes the appeal of football and video games begins and ends with the playing This belief that rules can master reality is, of course, what video games and football have in common.
of informatics, the part of the game where bits clash against bits to produce increasingly esoteric data sets. One ends up with an animated version of what is deceptively called fantasy football, in which there is, of course, little fantasy. “Rational football” would perhaps be a better term, both for the virtual game and increasingly for the “real” one. Pat Brown is a graduate student in Film Studies at the University of Iowa. No, that doesn’t mean he makes movies; he just likes them a lot.
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