Reading Assignment Sport video game
Indiana University Press
Chapter Title: Madden Men: Masculinity, Race, and the Marketing of a Video Game Franchise Chapter Author(s): Thomas P. Oates
Book Title: Playing to Win Book Subtitle: Sports, Video Games, and the Culture of Play Book Editor(s): Robert Alan Brookey, Thomas P. Oates Published by: Indiana University Press. (2015) Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt16gzgbt.5
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45
Madden Men Masculinity, Race, and the Marketing
of a Video Game Franchise
I n Augus t 2 01 2 , a s t h e r e l e a s e of E A S p or ts’ M a dde n N F L 13 video game approached, a months-long marketing blitz peaked with a series of advertisements featuring actor Paul Rudd and Baltimore Ra- vens linebacker Ray Lewis. In the campaign, the two are presented as close, lifelong friends, whose bond is cemented by periodic Madden NFL marathons. The ads are clearly presented with tongue firmly in cheek. The friendship between Rudd and Lewis is offered as a whimsical prem- ise. Rudd is a recognizable film and television actor, best known for roles playing middle-class white professionals. W hile appearing to be reason- ably fit, he would never be mistaken for an N F L player, and though his movies are frequently about masculine themes (see, for example, I Love You, Man; The 40-Year Old Virgin; and Forgetting Sarah Marshall), he has never played the role of an action hero. Lewis, meanwhile, is black, was raised in poverty by a single mother in Lakeland, Florida, and was a ma- jor N F L star at the time, and hence a visible representative of hegemonic masculinity. The joke turns on the premise that despite the seemingly unbridgeable gaps separating affluence from poverty, white from black, icons of masculinity from the average guy, Rudd and Lewis are improb- ably buddies. Their friendship goes back to the cradle, as Rudd explains in the first ad in the series: “Oh, man, Ray and I have known each other our whole lives. We grew up together. Best friends!” The rest of the cam- paign shows the two friends playing the video game, engaging in verbal dueling, boasting, and performing other acts that characterize a certain kind of friendly masculine competition.
Thomas P. Oates
t w o
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46 Thomas P. Oates
This ad campaign was widely praised. It was also characteristic of a fantasy Madden works hard to create and maintain – the association of “regular guys” like Rudd with the N F L , where “the most extreme pos- sibilities of the male body” are celebrated.1 Though fanciful and light- hearted, the campaign presents the pleasures to be enjoyed by imagina- tively taking that leap. In this chapter, I want to explore the strategies by which Madden promotes itself. In my analysis of these efforts, I identify a preferred mode of engagement promoted by Madden and its corporate partners, which I call the Madden imaginary. I trace the key elements of this fantasy, emphasizing the connections to contemporary football’s formation of hegemonic masculinity, as well as the strategies by which the game addresses deep cultural anxieties about the security of that formation.
Madden demands critical scrutiny in part because it has been an unparalleled commercial success: since its launch in 1989, the games have sold more than eighty-five million copies and generated more than three billion dollars in revenue.2 Madden’s cultural imprint, however, extends far beyond these sales. The game is regularly featured on E S P N ’s preview, highlight, and analysis programs and holds a key place in the N F L’s own promotions, so the game is well known even among those who have never played it. Madden NFL is one of the best-selling video games of all time, but perhaps more significantly, it is the unrivaled video game simulation for the most popular sport in the United States. The N F L dominates the sport-media complex in the United States, drawing the eight largest television audiences of any kind in 2012, including the largest U.S. audience in the history of television to its 2012 Super Bowl. But the league’s dominance extends beyond television. Football has been a site of innovation for media marketers attempting to connect with fans in new ways. In the contemporary “crowded marketplace” of sport media, the N F L and its media partners have forged flexible marketing strategies to reach consumers as their media consumption habits change with technological, cultural, and economic shifts. As sports marketing experts Irving Rein, Philip Kotler, and Ben Shields explain, sports mar- keters are confronting a “new era,” where “all fans are elusive; all fans are in play. Competitors are engaging in an all-out battle for the money, time,
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Madden Men 47
and attention of fans. Sports decision makers are facing a new level of competition, a race to survive in a crowded marketplace, and a struggle to define, attract, and retain the ever-elusive fan.”3 EA Sports, which develops and markets the Madden NFL franchise, has been especially innovative in developing ways first to connect with consumers and then to deepen that connection. These arrangements have been mutually ben- eficial. In addition to collecting a substantial licensing fee, the N F L finds new ways to get its brand before audiences, while extending the length of their engagement with the brand. Meanwhile, EA Sports profits from its role as the primary provider of a realistic N F L simulation.
During the same period, as these technological changes issued new challenges and opportunities to reach consumers, anxieties about the shifting and contested meaning of white masculinity have subtly changed the cultural landscape. Various political and cultural develop- ments have challenged the “identity politics of the dominant” and pro- duced a spate of cultural responses across media, including literature, cinema, television, and new media.4 These anxieties have also emerged in texts about elite sport. Norman Denzin asserts that it is “only a slight exaggeration to conclude that sports in all facets is the most significant feature of contemporary racial order.”5 Thus, we should not be surprised to find concerns about a shifting racial order concentrated around sport. In American football, where white men last constituted a majority of players in the early 1980s, the anxiety has been particularly acute. Black players have been a majority since 1983, and approximately two of every three N F L players are black currently.
Of course, the disproportionate representation by blacks on the field does not extend to the coaching, management, and ownership. All of the league’s majority owners are white, and black coaches and general man- agers are still rare (though not as scarce as they used to be), and many of the league’s most visible stars are white. Nevertheless, perceptions of black dominance in football’s most public and glorified roles have been widespread. The anxieties this shift produced were evident early on, when in January 1988 C B S football analyst Jimmy “the Greek ” Snyder fa- mously shared his opinion that in the N F L , “all the players are Black.” In an impromptu interview with a television reporter, Snyder worried that,
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48 Thomas P. Oates
should blacks enter coaching, “like everybody wants them to, there’s not going to be anything left for the W hite people.”6 The football analyst also suggested that blacks enjoyed a genetic advantage over whites due to slave breeding practices. Snyder’s comments were roundly criticized as insensitive at best (he had made the comments on Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday) and racist at worst.
Snyder was immediately fired by C B S , but attempts to explain the supposed disappearance of white athletes with racialist arguments did not leave the mainstream with Jimmy the Greek. In 1997 a Sports Il- lustrated cover asked “W hatever Happened to the W hite Athlete?” and suggested that most young whites had accepted a sense of race-based inferiority and were slowly turning away from participation in main- stream sports like football. Florida State football coach Bobby Bowden lent support to the (apparently) widely shared belief that “an athlete is an athlete, but, dang it, there just seem to be more black athletes than white.” Critical scholar Kyle Kusz has examined how the supposed “disappearance” of white athletes from mainstream sports has helped prompt the emergence of extreme sports such as those portrayed in E S P N ’s “X-Games” and films such as Dogtown and Z-Boys. Such enter- tainments, Kusz argues, express the concerns of a “white male backlash politics” and craft narrative spaces where hope of a “remasculinization” of white identity is explored through sport. W hite males have been re- centered in narratives about sport in the midst of what David J. Leonard calls “a metamorphasizing sports world – rising player salaries, increas- ing visibility of black athletes, especially as stars, greater corporate and media interest in sports.”7 But in important hypermasculine athletic rituals such as those staged by the N F L , black bodies remain central, and if anything are growing in visibility.
Black players are increasingly visible in Madden as well. Madden’s rosters reflect the roughly two-to-one ratio of nonwhites to whites on the N F L rosters, but the stars celebrated by the game have been even less likely to be white. Since the release of Madden NFL 2001, when the game’s namesake, former coach and commentator John Madden, was replaced on the cover, fourteen N F L players have been featured as cover athletes. Only three have been white. Since 2000 sixty-four players, excluding kickers and punters, have been assigned an overall skill rating of 99 or 100 by Madden designers. Only thirteen of those players have been white.
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Anxieties about white “disappearance” from hypermasculine spaces have not led to a devaluing of hypermasculine aggression and the link to male power it carries. As bell hooks notes, “Showing aggression is the simplest way to assert patriarchal manhood. Men of all classes know this.” As black men’s visibility in U.S. media culture has grown, their association with patriarchal aggression has become increasingly nor- malized, especially through hypermasculine sporting productions such as the N F L . Here, as well as in other cultural locations, black men have been routinely presented as “poster boys of brute patriarchal manhood.” As Patricia Hill Collins summarizes, “Recognizing that black culture was a marketable commodity, [commercial media interests] put it up for sale, selling an essentialized black culture that white youth could emulate yet never own.”8 This multicultural patriarchal marketing is the focus of this chapter: How has Madden navigated the difficult terrain of contemporary racialized masculinity that lies at the heart of its appeal to consumers? By what strategies does Madden present itself as a means to realize fantasies of masculine power and aggression when that fantasy is often coded black, and while deep anxieties about black masculinity continue to circulate in and beyond sport?
This chapter will trace a set of complex hypermasculine fantasies offered to Madden gamers through EA Sports’ promotional strategies. In these fantasies, which collectively constitute the “Madden imaginary,” the aggression, strength, and skill of N F L players, as well as the control and authority of N F L coaches and organizations, can accrue to gamers. This combination reflects deep ambivalences in contemporary football fandom, where the affirming possibilities of masculine strength, speed, and physical skill exist uncomfortably alongside the widely expressed suspicion that whites are “disappearing” from football and other hyper- masculine sports and frequently expressed disgust about the perceived undisciplined selfishness of the contemporary black-dominated game. The Madden imaginary offers fans a way to bridge this difficult tension in football fandom by offering parallel fantasies of embodiment and mana- gerial control. In the pages that follow, I trace three key components of the Madden imaginary: EA Sports’ relentless and widely publicized pur- suit of an utterly convincing simulation of the contemporary N F L , the measures by which EA Sports articulates and strengthens links between the Madden experience and the hypermasculine culture of the N F L , and
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50 Thomas P. Oates
the promotion of fantasies in which gamers control and direct those bod- ies as managers, and even as creators.
T h e R e a l T h i n g
In many video games, elements of realism coexist with aspects of fantasy, even otherworldliness. As Ian Bogost argues, other video games engage audiences via a set of procedures that works to create a procedural rheto- ric that may be shaped to confront or challenge dominant ways of think- ing and acting in the world. In most sports simulations, however, realism is a relentlessly pursued goal. Madden NFL is one of the most highly de- veloped examples of this general tendency. From its earliest conception, Madden was developed with the goal of achieving as “realistic” a depic- tion as possible. The game is the brainchild of Trip Hawkins, a passionate football fan and Strat-o-Matic football devotee. As a teenager, prior to his interest in digital games, Hawkins had attempted to launch a mass- market board game based on Strat-O-Matic. The game that the adoles- cent Hawkins tried to bring into the mainstream was a statistics-based contest similar to fantasy football. It was played by a small subculture of hard-core sports fans, but Hawkins’s attempt to bring the game into the mainstream failed because not enough fans were willing to perform the required math to play the game. As E S P N ’s Patrick Hruby summarizes, “‘Strat-O-Matic’ was too hard. Players had to crunch too many numbers, obliterating the necessary suspension of disbelief.”9
Fortunately, by the time Hawkins graduated from Harvard, the pos- sibility of computerized gaming made that problem solvable, allowing for a football simulation with a lot of number crunching that could be performed by computers without the gamer’s effort. Hawkins became an early innovator at Apple computers before leaving in 1982 to form Electronic Arts (now known as E A) and again set out to create a convinc- ing football simulation, this one in a digital format. An early innovation pioneered by Hawkins’s E A was the inclusion of digital renderings of ac- tive star players. In “One-on-One: Dr. J v. Larry Bird,” E A pioneered the effort it would ultimately apply as a formula for its most successful fran- chises – bringing recognizable sporting stars under the virtual control
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of gamers and making it possible for fans to embody not merely generic athletes, but stars. Henceforth, E A would work not so much to invent digital athletes as to capture with their renderings a likeness, personality, and skill set already known to the gamer.
Though the launch of Madden began without a license to use the actual names of teams or players, it strove to replicate football in other ways. In consultation with former N F L coach and then television analyst John Madden, the developers included plays developed by actual N F L teams that gamers could implement at home. The process was exhaus- tive. One early developer, Joe Y barra, remembers of his early research into N F L plays: “We spent hours just learning blocking schemes. . . . By the third year of the project, I could watch pro football on T V and tell you what was going to happen when the players were still lining up.”10 In 1993 E A , now having launched a separate division (EA Sports) to handle sports games, was able to negotiate a license from the N F L , allowing de- velopers to construct digital versions of entire N F L rosters. In the quest for realism, there is perhaps no more important feature than access to the names and likenesses of those who play the game. The license has also allowed the Madden franchise to outmaneuver rivals in the video game market.
For example, in 2005, under pressure from challenges from E S P N ’s line of video games, EA Sports negotiated an exclusive arrangement with the N F L , which drove the competition out of business. E S P N, perhaps concluding that it was best to join what one cannot beat, then entered an agreement with EA Sports to integrate brands. E S P N now features Mad- den simulations extensively in its analysis programming and its showcase program, SportsCenter, in which digital renderings of E S P N anchors, re- porters, and commentators offer commentary during gameplay. Such blurring not only expands the visibility of Madden, but also establishes the game as a reliable simulation imbued with a pseudoscientific reli- ability as a tool of analysis and prediction.
Part of what makes a Madden simulation plausible is the game de- signers’ remarkable commitment to gauging multiple components for each player represented in the game. Numerical rankings determine each digital football player’s skill level, and the process of establishing
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52 Thomas P. Oates
player skill levels is exceptionally data intensive. As the game’s ratings de- signer, Donny Moore, explains, this attempt “to portray each player and their on-field performance as accurately as possible” requires consulting a number of publications that cater to hard-core fan interest in football scouting, including “War Room” reports published by the Sporting News, an online statistical research site for fans called “Football Outsiders,” as well as professional scouting services. Moore stresses the importance of these sources in providing an “accurate” rendering of player perfor- mance. He says, “I try to use all that information and accumulate as much information as possible.”11
Madden rates players by speed, acceleration, and strength and by position-specific and less tangible skills such as awareness, catching, and throwing accuracy. Every player is rated on a 100-point scale, and ratings are adjusted regularly throughout the season to reflect changing evidence of these abilities, updates that are then made available for the growing legion of online players. As Moore explains to Tom Bissell in a feature for E S P N ’s affiliated Grantland site, “‘I’m doing a roster update right now with the Packers. I want to make sure that the latest informa- tion is in there. Of course, Charles Woodson is a 95 overall corner, and he’s a top corner, probably one of the top five in the game, but he just had a terrible game against the Giants. I want to make sure that that’s reflected in the update.’ With a keystroke Moore knocked down Wood- son’s offensive awareness by one.”12
Many fans of the Madden franchise understand the game’s claim to statistical realism to be a key feature of the game’s success. As Andrew Baerg has documented, some fan debates about the realism of Madden’s statistical simulations for N F L players go so far as to include online dis- cussions about strategies for tweaking the game’s calculations to achieve a more satisfying level of realism. Baerg notes a gendered element in this supposedly objective quest to better authenticate the Madden experi- ence – what he calls “quantitative realism.” He concludes from the fans’ posts that their commitment to pursue a program of rational quantita- tive edits (a process described by the fans as “scientific”) represents an affirmation of their manliness: “To act scientifically is to perform their masculinity in dominating the technological environment in which they
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live.” Baerg acknowledges that this manly commitment to scientific mas- tery has a long history in football, dating back to the game’s popularizer, Walter Camp. Thus, he concludes, “It is precisely the scientized expres- sion of this kind of power over the number that serves as an epistemo- logical frame through which Madden users interpreted the game’s lack of realism. The technological manifestation of the sport of football in the medium of the digital game serves as a prime exemplar of the nexus of gender, science, and mediated sport.”13
EA Sports makes no secret of game developers’ relentless pursuit of realism. Indeed, revealing the effort is a key part of the marketing. The company distributes a promotional documentary titled The Making of “Madden” that details the painstaking and highly technical methods used to achieve a believable simulation. The documentary showcases the motion-capture technology that the game uses to construct digital play- ers. In the film N F L players perform for game designers. There is no men- tion that the vast majority of motion capture is done using a single actor who mimics N F L players.14 The experience of the “authentic” N F L is the key feature of the promotion’s discussion of the game’s use of motion- capture technology. As Anthony Stevenson, senior product manager for Madden NFL 11, explains for the Making of “Madden 11” promotional video, “It’s really crucial that our animations reflect what a player really looks like on the field doing a certain move, whether it’s cutting or juk- ing or a wide receiver tapping his toes to stay inbounds. . . . [W]e’ve got a very, very intensive motion capture process where we actually take N F L athletes, we bring them into a studio, we have sensors all over their body and we just capture every single movement and let that sort of manifest itself inside the game.”15 Stevenson’s choice of words here also helps to convey the sense of realism. Motion capture, in his account, simply manifests inside a computer, as if no engineering were needed beyond the simple act of capturing the motion and then relocating it to the game.
In another example of this commitment to the feel of authenticity, Madden NFL 13 boasts a feature it calls “the Infinity Engine,” which produces “physics you can feel.” As EA Sports’ promotional material explains, the engine “augments animation based on contact with other players or objects on the field,” thereby adding “more variety, emergence,
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54 Thomas P. Oates
and an extra level of authenticity to Madden NFL 13.”16 A team of engi- neers (including three holding doctorates in physics) worked to “ensure that no two plays ever look or feel the same.”17 A designer admits that “I wish I could tell how your interactions will play out but due to the emergent nature of the system,” such inauthentic predictability is the very thing targeted for elimination by the engine, so “I just can’t.”18 The result of this labor, readers are assured, is a more true-to-life experience, in which each play is potentially unique.
EA Sports’ relentless pursuit of realism is a key element of the game’s marketing. In constructing the Madden imaginary, designers and marketers stress the importance of a “deep” virtual experience in which various aspects of the imaginary can coexist within a particularly constructed virtual world. Capturing the feel of N F L competition (mi- nus the physical dangers) is vital to unlocking the potential pleasures Madden offers to the average guy who represents the franchise’s target market.
M a k i n g G a m i n g M a n ly
The union of hypermasculine sports such as football and the audience of gamers is not as comfortable or natural as Madden’s financial suc- cess might suggest. Indeed, EA Sports has worked carefully to foster a close and easy connection between Madden and recognizable codes of hegemonic masculinity, a process pursued primarily by connecting the gamers with the hypermasculine culture of the N F L . In this section, I shall illustrate some of the ways the game celebrates male aggression through Madden’s game features, the television series Madden Nation, and the Madden Challenge. I also examine efforts to build connections between gamers and active N F L athletes through the celebrity tourna- ment Madden Bowl.
As R ich Hilleman, a developer who worked on the earliest incar- nations of Madden, recalls, “Before Madden, jocks did not play video games.” In fact, when Madden was released in 1989, “somebody playing games was more likely to get made fun of on E S P N than get featured on there.”19 In the years that followed, Madden joined a broader trend of
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hypermasculine, violent video games that included first-person shooters such as 1992’s Wolfenstein 3D and 1993’s Doom. In the 1992 version of Mad- den, players suffer frequent injuries, and severe injuries are frequently depicted. In such instances, an ambulance is summoned to transport the player off the field (and presumably to medical care), often driving over injured players for humorous effect.
Though such early arcade-style features were phased out as the pur- suit of realism intensified, hypermasculinity was later promoted by other means. For example, enhancing control of the athletic movements of Madden’s digital athletes has been one of the game’s constant features. Most generations of Madden offer improvements or new features for on- field control. The “Playmaker Tool,” the “Hit Stick,” the “Truck Stick,” and the “Weapons” features allow gamers greater control over players’ ability to inflict damage on an opponent or exercise skill moves with greater proficiency. Promotional material for Madden 11 boasts that its “dual stick control” makes it possible for gamers to “run through holes, break tackles, and explode in the open field.”20 An ad campaign for Mad- den NFL 08 with the tagline “How Does It Feel?” exploits this fantasy as well. In this campaign Madden offers up digital renderings of athletic skill and power and invites gamers to imagine themselves inhabiting the agile, fast, and powerful bodies that populate N F L rosters.
A different strategy to link the video game to aggressive styles of masculinity is employed in the E S P N reality series Madden Nation. The program, a product of the cooperative agreement between EA Sports and E S P N, conducts an eight-player Madden tournament involving contes- tants who also travel the country on a tour bus. The finals are conducted in Times Square on the ESPN Zone restaurant’s public screen. Participa- tion in Madden Nation is governed by an aggressively hypermasculine code of conduct. Contestants are known to the audience and to the other participants by nickname, most of which reference physical destructive- ness (“Mad Dog,” “UFC Champ”), celebrity (“Holly wood,” “KStarr”), or macho boasting and “trash talk ” (“The Gift,” “Dynasty,” “Yomama”). During competition, it is common for opponents to be shown engag- ing in the kind of aggressive trash talk one might expect from athletes themselves. The program’s performers are overwhelmingly male (the
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56 Thomas P. Oates
one female contestant in the entire four-year series, Sheila Barger, a.k.a. P G -13, was eliminated in the season’s first episode).
This aggressively masculine code of conduct governs the Mad- den Challenge as well. The Challenge, an online tournament involving thousands of participants and sponsored by Virgin Gaming, cumulates in a live event in Las Vegas, where finalists compete for “life changing prizes.”21 The Challenge includes a prominently featured space on its website, where contestants can upload “Trash Talk Videos” and engage in masculine boasting. Qualifiers for the semifinals are commemorated on the Challenge website in profiles that resemble N F L player trading cards.
Connections to the hypermasculine possibilities of the Madden imaginary are produced in other ways as well. Each gamer on Madden Nation is affiliated with a star N F L player, and the meeting between the two is a regular feature. At these meetings, the N F L player typically ex- presses his enthusiasm for the video game, offers advice and best wishes to the gamer, plays a game of Madden with the gamer, and presents the gamer with a replica jersey with the player’s name and number. The gamer then wears the jersey for the rest of the season, “representing” the player with whom he is partnered. This explicit connection between N F L players and the gamers is a well-established feature of EA Sports’ promotional strategy.
Since 1995 EA Sports has worked in partnership with two other me- dia content providers to stage the Madden Bowl, a celebrity tournament in which active N F L players and other celebrities compete via the Mad- den platform. Proceeds from the inaugural event went to an N F L charity; the winner, running back Reggie Brooks, pocketed a thousand-dollar prize; and the video game had a successful promotion. At the 2011 Super Bowl, a new format was implemented for the now-annual event, in which teams of three celebrity gamers competed for the prize. The 2012 event was carried live on ESPN3.com, with E S P N personalities Trey Wingo and Michelle Beadle co-hosting the ninety-plus-minute program. The two co-hosts engaged in lighthearted banter and played out a running gag in which Wingo denigrated and ostracized his female co-host, go- ing so far as to hold private conversations with athletes on the set while
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Beadle sat nearby in faux-humiliated silence. Wingo and Beadle also openly acknowledged her “subservient role” throughout the program.
That display of masculine dominance underscores a macho fantasy constructed around Madden, in which viewers see skilled Madden gam- ers who are not emasculated nerds or geeks, but are instead N F L play- ers – hegemonic icons of athletic masculinity. The E S P N commentators hosting the event work to blur the lines between the athletes’ exploits during Madden play and their work on the field in actual N F L games. For example, when a team of gamers including N F L quarterback Tim Tebow won the 2012 Madden Bowl with a game-winning touchdown in the final minute, Trey Wingo referenced Tebow’s recent on-field heroics: “You’re telling me a team with Tim Tebow on it did something weird in the fourth quarter to win the game? That never happens!”
The Madden Bowl does more than simply promote the video game franchise. It also works, like Madden Nation, the Madden Challenge, and each year’s new gameplay features, to mark the game as a male endeavor. By making connections between the hypermasculine athletic prowess of actual N F L players with the Madden video game, athletic achievement and the exploits of gamers are connected, and the lines separating them are blurred. Thus, the imagined connections between gamers and the players they digitally inhabit through gameplay are strengthened and legitimated. The E S P N broadcast of the Madden Nation and the Mad- den Bowl also works to mark Madden as a space where women are, if not unwelcome, then relegated to a subservient role. Interestingly, this move works to reinforce the supposed realism of the Madden imaginary, because in football women occupy similar roles – present but secondary, relegated to being cheerleaders or sideline reporters.
C o n t a i n i n g B l a c k M a s c u l i n i t y
As the section above details, Madden promotes a close affiliation be- tween gamers and the hypermasculine culture of the contemporary N F L . In these moves, the Madden imaginary encourages gamers to imag- ine themselves embodying N F L players and promotes an aggressively macho (and almost exclusively male) culture of Madden gamers via the
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Madden Bowl, Madden Nation, and the Madden Challenge. But the game not only seeks to exploit connections to the contemporary game, but also constructs elaborate scenarios in which gamers can enjoy the fantasy of controlling these athletes in various ways. In this section, I explore some of the features offered by Madden that invite fans to deploy a managerial outlook, exercising imagined control over N F L athletes.
In 1998 Madden NFL introduced a new option called “Franchise Mode,” in which gamers were invited to guide a team through multiple seasons, drafting new players and orchestrating trades. Gamers expe- riencing Madden through Franchise Mode act as head coach: making substitutions, organizing practices, and calling plays in addition to per- sonnel matters usually the responsibility of general managers. As the Franchise Mode developed, new features were added, and the name was changed for a time to “Owner Mode.” Through the eyes of the owner, gamers still exercised the duties of the coach and general manager, but also took on other concerns, such as the price of tickets and concessions and even the design of the stadium. Madden NFL 12’s Franchise Mode included new features to deepen the experience of scouting new talent and negotiating free-agent deals. The next year Madden NFL 13 rolled the Franchise Mode into the “Player Career” heading, which offers the op- tions previously available as Franchise Mode under the heading “Coach Career.” The shift was part of a move by game designers to build a more integrated universe, where other options of the game could be coordi- nated with the features from Franchise Mode.
Other opportunities for engaging in this fantasy of control are made available as a way of promoting the game. Madden Ultimate Team, Mad- den Superstars, and Madden Social, offered online and through the social networking site Facebook, invite users to compete in a variety of ways by manipulating virtual “rosters” of N F L players. In Ultimate Team, par- ticipants compete by assembling through trades the “ultimate team” of player cards with scores reflecting their value. Superstars is a Facebook site that organizes what is essentially a fantasy league game, in which contestants seek to build the most valuable and productive virtual team through drafts and trades and by playing some players while “benching” others. Madden Social combines elements of the Ultimate Team game
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with a scaled-down version of the console-based game. Clearly, these attempts to reach online users are driven by a desire to imagine new ways to connect with audiences. However, the way these games seek to establish these connections is significant. Each offers a similar fantasy of controlling a roster of N F L players and deploying it strategically.
This desire to extract the maximum productivity from N F L players is perhaps most developed in the long-standing feature of the Madden console game “Superstar Mode.” This mode allows gamers to experience a career from a player’s perspective, but even here extraordinary fanta- sies of control are made available. The popular “Create a Player” option allows gamers to literally build a digital avatar to their specifications. Gamers select the type of player they would like to create. For example, one can select a quarterback from several options, choosing between a “Pocket Passer QB” or a “West Coast QB,” among several other choices. Gamers can also design the size and shape of the player’s head, his hair color and type, arm size and definition, as well as skin color. Gamers can choose the player’s physical abilities, including “strength” and “speed,” and can manipulate ratings for more elusive features such as “toughness,” “awareness,” and “confidence.” Gamers can even outfit their players in their favorite brand of athletic shoe and select the team for which they will play.
This fantasy of control over athletes, the ability to deploy them stra- tegically, invest in promising players, and trade or cut unproductive play- ers, constructs an important feature of the Madden imaginary. As own- ers/coaches/general managers (distinctions that the game usually blurs), gamers imagine themselves controlling and directing N F L players. Of course, this fantasy of control is not limited to black athletes. W hite and black N F L players are subject to these fantasies of control. However, as I have argued elsewhere, such fantasies (which are also available in fan- tasy leagues and the mediated coverage of the N F L draft) have enjoyed remarkable growth and mainstream popularity during a period of widely expressed anxiety about a black-dominated game.22 They represent a significant shift in the representational strategies for hypermasculine sports such as football. As whites are understood to be “disappearing” from elite football, the terms of engagement have subtly shifted. W here
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60 Thomas P. Oates
players were once hailed as icons of masculinity, emerging representa- tional strategies additionally position them as commodities.
C o n c l u s i o n
The N F L has grown in popularity during the past several decades, a pe- riod when white masculine domination has faced a widespread set of challenges. As a number of scholars have noted, professional football has served as a bulwark against the insurgencies from feminists and other groups. Michael Messner has argued that “sports as a mediated spectacle provides an important context in which traditional concep- tions of masculine superiority – conceptions recently contested by women – are shored up.” Less attention has been paid to the factor of race, which complicates this process significantly. Though N F L players arguably represent widely accepted models of hegemonic masculinity, the black-dominated game nevertheless stirs deep anxieties. Consider, for example, the marketing survey Q Scores, which rates the relative popularity of recognizable athletes in the United States.23 In repeated surveys, black N F L players dominate the list of the most unpopular ath- letes, while white N F L stars are consistently among the most popular.
There are, of course, exceptions to this general tendency, but the trend, in combination with recurrent tropes extolling the virtues of the old-school game (when blacks were not so visible) while bemoaning the current game as the triumph of style over substance, suggests a deep anxiety among many members of the mainstream with the demographic shifts in pro football. The performance of hegemonic versions of mascu- linity remains central to the formation of cultural and political power in the United States, and public enactors of these norms are as vital as ever. The fact that, in the N F L as well as in other spheres, those playing those roles are often black creates a profound challenge.
Madden NFL offers fans a way to bridge this difficult tension by of- fering parallel fantasies of embodiment and managerial control. Madden gamers are invited to imagine themselves inhabiting the hypermasculine bodies of N F L athletes – virtually executing plays as an N F L player. As I have detailed above, the various promotional strategies undertaken by Madden seek to establish a clear connection between the aggressive,
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Madden Men 61
hegemonic culture of the N F L and the Madden imaginary. These en- gagements with N F L players, however, also invite gamers to imagine themselves controlling and directing players, disciplining them, training them, even buying and selling them.
Of course, there is no guarantee that audiences will necessarily en- gage the video game on the terms endorsed by the Madden imaginary. Though commercial media producers promote particular kinds of plea- sure, this does not determine the uses audiences will make of their prod- ucts, nor does it make impossible alternative, even subversive, forms of pleasure that might be derived from popular media. Nevertheless, it is important to carefully document and theorize the kinds of pleasures en- dorsed by these producers. Doing so potentially opens spaces for alterna- tive readings and helps us to better understand what meanings powerful commercial and cultural forces are attempting to promote.
Madden’s notable commercial and cultural significance is due not only to the franchise’s remarkable integration with some of the most rec- ognizable and profitable brands in the contemporary sporting economy, but also to the sophisticated fantasies it constructs, which navigate the complex, shifting terrain of racialized masculine dominance. Madden offers gamers the virtual embodiment of N F L athletes, experiencing the thrill of dominating opponents in the arena of hypermasculine conquest. At the same time, it affords gamers the fantasy of controlling virtual N F L rosters – developing athletic talent as a commodity and deploying it in virtual competition.
N o t e s
1. Michael Messner, Out of Play: Criti- cal Essays on Gender and Sport (A lbany: State University of New York Press, 2007), 72. 2. Patrick Hruby, “The Franchise: The Inside Story of How Madden NFL Became a Video Game Dynasty,” http:// sports.espn.go.com/espn/eticket /story?page=100805/madden. 3. Irving Rein, Philip Kotler, and Ben Shields, The Elusive Fan: Reinventing Sports
in a Crowded Marketplace (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2006), 8. 4. See, for example, Robyn Wiegman, American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995); Sally Robinson, Marked Men: W hite Masculinity in Crisis (New York: Co- lumbia University Press, 2000); Brenton Malin, American Masculinity under Clin- ton: Popular Media and the Nineties “Crisis
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62 Thomas P. Oates
of Masculinity” (New York: Peter Lang, 2006). 5. Norman Denzin, “More Rare A ir: Michael Jordan on Michael Jordan,” Soci- ology of Sport Journal 13, no. 4 (1996): 319. 6. “Jimmy ‘the Greek ’ Snyder Slurs Black Athletes in K ing Interview; Apolo- gizes,” Jet, February 1, 1988, 18. 7. S. L. Price, “W hatever Happened to the W hite Athlete?,” Sports Illustrated, De- cember 8, 1997, 34; Kyle Kusz, “‘I Wanna Be the Minority’: The Politics of Youthful W hite Masculinities in Sport and Popular Culture in 1990s A merica,” Journal of Sport and Social Issues 25, no. 4 (2001): 390–416; Kyle Kusz, “Dogtown and the Z-Boys: W hite Particularity and the New, New Cultural Racism,” in Visual Economies of/ in Motion, edited by C. R ichard K ing and David J. Leonard (New York: Peter Lang Press), 135–163; David J. Leonard, “To the W hite Extreme: Conquering Athletic Space, W hite Manhood, and Racing Vir- tual Reality,” in Digital Gameplay: Essays on the Nexus of Game and Gamer, edited by Nate Garrelts ( Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2005), 116. 8. bell hooks, We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity (New York: Routledge, 2004), 51; Patricia Hill Collins, “New Commodities, New Consumers: Selling Blackness in a Global Marketplace,” Eth- nicities 6, no. 30 (2006): 298. 9. Ian Bogost, Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames (Cam- bridge: MIT Press, 2007); Hruby, “The Franchise.” 10. Hruby, “The Franchise.” 11. “Madden NFL 12 Interview: Donny Moore – Scouting Talent,” http://forum .ea.com/eaforum/posts/list/5240087 .page.
12. Tom Bissell, “K ickoff: Madden NFL and the Future of Video Game Sports,” http://w w w.grantland.com/story/_/id /7473139/tom-bissell-making-madden-nfl. 13. A ndrew Baerg, “It’s (Not) in the Game: The Quest for Quantitative Real- ism and the Madden Football Fan,” in Sports Mania: Essays on Fandom and the Media in the 21st Century, edited by Law- rence W. Hugenberg, Paul M. Haridakis, and A. C. Earnheardt ( Jefferson, NC: Mc- Farland, 2008), 228. 14. “Eye to Eye: Kenney Bell,” 60 Min- utes, January 21, 2008, http://w w w .cbsnews.com/video/watch/?id= 3734987n. 15. Christopher Erb, Michael Herst, and K irk Langer, producers, Making of “Madden NFL” (Spike T V Video, 2010), DV D. 16. Victor Lugo, “Infinity Engine De- veloper Blog,” June 3, 2012, http://w w w .easports.com/madden-nfl/news/article /infinity-engine-developer-blog. 17. “Feature: Infinity Engine,” http:// w w w.easports.com/madden-nfl/feature /gameplay-part2. 18. Lugo, “Infinity Engine Developer Blog.” 19. Hruby, “The Franchise.” 20. “Madden NFL 11,” http://w w w.ea .com/au/madden-nfl. 21. “How It Works,” http://virgin gaming.com/tournaments/challenge -series/how-it-works.html. 22. Thomas P. Oates, “New Media and the Repackaging of NFL Fandom,” Sociol- ogy of Sport Journal 26, no. 1 (2009): 31–49. 23. Messner, Out of Play, 54. See http:// w w w.qscores.com/Web/Index.aspx.
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