Televised Football Is Looking More Like a Video Game—In Subtle Ways
But television isn’t the only medium shaping the sport. It’s increasingly impossible to consider American football without considering video games, too.
.. The sweeping pans, the ability to follow play down the field from just-above-and-behind, reminds the viewer of what it’s like to play a video game. The cable-cam was introduced by most TV networks in the late 2000s. Murray and Young estimated that Madden players had seen the view or something like it since the game first went three-dimensional in the late 1990s.
.. broadcasts have recently turned to putting concentric circles or icons beneath players to highlight them. It seems to borrow from a certain video-game convention: Drawing concentric circles beneath athletes’s feet to convey you are controlling this character.