Madden creators take higher precautions to ensure safety for their virtual football stars

Still think the Madden football franchise isn’t the most obnoxiously realistic video game of all time? Instead of spending their time trying to actually improve upon the template they’ve used since 2006, Tiburon has decided that the best way to ensure everybody’s fun is to make the rules for bringing a concussed player back into a game more realistic, because Lord knows that’s what we’ve all been begging for.

EA Sports President Peter Moore says that it was “wrong” when the company’s “Madden” game would allow concussed players to return to the field in the following quarter. That is no longer the case, Moore said Wednesday at the World Congress of Sports, a two-day summit in Miami.

Moore says “we have an obligation in our industry” to recognize that brain injuries are one of the biggest on-field issues facing football at all levels right now.

As a person who has actually bought four copies of Madden over the past two years (because they always seem to either break on me or get stolen), I can honestly say I’m pissed off. Year in and year out they break out their ‘new’ version of Madden, which is always essentially the same product as the year before except with updated rosters and small tweaks, like the removal of my favorite button in all of video games, turbo, or a new helmet to pick when we’re doing create-a-player.

It’s a tried and true format that takes little effort and an even smaller amount of creative innovation, and I can see right through their smoke screen of incompetence. How about an online mode where people from all over the world can assemble to each take control of a single player to form a gigantic 11-on-11 slugfest? I’d give anything to be able to play left tackle and strong safety for a squadron of internet friends. But no, instead we get this excellent new addition to the game of having a player who suffers a virtual concussion automatically take a permanent virtual seat on the bench.

But wait! Here’s the rub! According to Moore, “the “Madden game can help show proper tackling techniques.”

Thank goodness they’re subliminally teaching me proper tackling technique for all the people I tackle on a consistent basis out here in the mean streets of going to class and watching television.

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EA’s Madden game changing concussion rules [NBCSports]