Your "Fan" Avatar Could Watch the "Player" Avatar!

Bill Barnwell over at Grantland imagines "Football in a Non-NFL World." I'm surprised he didn't think of "Virtual Football." Think "Madden Football."

I have a friend who has a young son who would much rather play the Madden Football video game, than watch a "real" NFL game. I also hear the many, many NFL players love to play Madden because it is so "realistic."

Isn't this the ultimate solution to the "Football Problem?" See previous post. Won't the virtual world continue to get more and more realistic, won't we reach a point where "flesh and blood" players will become redundant? 

Can't you imagine having athletes work out, and then we feed their biometric data into computers, and then programmers build video icons that totally emulate those players? Couldn't you do this over time, year after year, and build a complete, all-encompassing universe of virtual football that could replace the "real thing?"

You could still have high performing athletes, you could still "draft" them, and work them out, but they wouldn't actually have to "play the games," instead we'd let the virtual icon, the "avatars" play the games. You could still have "injuries" - concussions, knee injuries, etc. but it would be the avatars who suffer these injuries, not the people.

And then too, you as a fan could have an avatar too. A "fan" avatar that watches the games, that eats pizza, and drinks beer, that gets excited and depressed at the outcome of the games. But we "real people" wouldn't actually have to watch the games if we didn't want to, we could have our avatars do the watching.  And then we'd have lots more time to do other things. Like... well, I'm sure we'll think of something.

A virtual utopia?