Overview

Electric football is a type of game invented in 1949, peaking in popularity around the late 1960s through the 1970s. Its popularity has since been eclipsed by digital football games like the blockbuster Madden NFL series of videogames.

Tudor Metal Products first sold the game, and they remain (as Tudor Games) the company that is virtually synonymous with electric football. Electric football was first inspired by similar games of theirs which also used electricity to vibrate a metal field, originally moving cars or horses in racing games.

The game of electric football seeks to represent American football in miniature, interactive form. Players of the game arrange their players in various formations and then turn the electric vibration on, hoping for a favorable result among the chaotic activity: the player on offense hopes the ball-carrier makes it to the end zone unobstructed, while the defending "coach" hopes their players will prevent that. The vibrating field agitates player pieces, causing them (with one of them carrying a small foam ball) to move around the play area. Most normal football rules apply, though this tabletop version simplifies the game to an extent.

Analysis

Electric football illustrates with remarkable clarity various facets of post-war, pre-digital American culture. Most broadly, the game represents football's rising popularity at the time and Americans' evolving relationship to electric media, but this instantiation of electric play brings into focus some of the specific insights found in Marshall McLuhan's discussion of the emerging electric and televisual culture in his book Understanding Media, whose publication in 1964 precedes Tudor's National Football League licensing deal (and subsequent surge in popularity) by only 3 years.

The era of electric football's peak was one in which Americans were still warming up to electricity's ubiquity. While the relationship was not as uncertain as is described in Carolyn Marvin's When Old Technologies Were New: Thinking About Electric Communication in the Late Nineteenth Century, electric football still represents a fairly uneasy relationship with electric media in the 20th Century.

To illustrate, we can look to a satirical article that was syndicated in the early 1970s under various titles, one being "The Shocking Tale of the Bertles" in the Columbia Missourian from November 17th, 1972.

In this short story, Russell Baker offers a vision of an increasingly electrified home, culminating in the story's patriarch becoming a new father but being barred from the maternity ward when his wife gives birth. The reason is that, after coming down with an electrical disease that demanded his being "subjected to a long humiliating course of therapy before it was safe for anyone to touch him without wearing rubber gloves", "he still sizzled and crackled so loudly that it woke the other babies."

Happily (if winkingly so, from Baker's perspective), he learns upon his wife's arrival home that he has "an electric son, who requires a change of fuses with each fresh diaper." The reader is assured that this son will have a normal life given the advances in extension cord technology, so long as "he is careful not to get rained upon."

This fable of cyborg anxiety is not just a general supplement to considering electric football's meaning at its height: in the story, a romantic prelude to this cyborg birth consists of the titular couple playing "a game of electric football by electric candlelight". Thus, the game is squarely within the set of electric anxieties legible in Baker's worldview.

In fact, through examining the details of gameplay, we can see that players of electric football take care to maintain a safe distance between themselves and the electric medium. Though players of electric football are involved in positioning their on-field miniatures, electric football is largely a hands-off affair. It is entirely hands-off for the duration of electricity's flow through the game, as the human players are meant to keep their hands away from the action in progress.

Even just from a perceived safety perspective, there is something alarming about the vibrating metal and the fact that the vibrating mechanism is invisible during gameplay; it doesn't take an extremely overactive imagination (especially for a child) to think that one could get an electric shock from touching the metal field while the power is turned on. (The metal is safe to touch; it's vibrated mechanically from below.)

For this reason, electric football should not be seen as a simulation of football, especially as compared to later games that demand real-time control of players. Rather, electric football is an emulation of watching televised football. Putting one's hand on the metal field while a play is unfolding is no more acceptable than putting one's hand on the television screen as a live football game progresses (covering up others' view of the action), much less putting one's hand inside the television (which—especially for CRT televisions of the era—would likely result in serious injury or death).

That electric football is effectively a spectator sport is borne out in the early marketing materials accompanying the game. A print ad from the game's first year on the market—1949—promises "Actual football thrills for armchair strategists!" We may now be familiar with the term "armchair quarterback" to refer to a football fan who strategizes at home while watching a televised game, but the term can be found as early as a 1940 American Lumberman. Furthermore, by 1949, television ownership rates were increasing, as were football broadcasts. For these armchair quarterbacks at the time (as well as today), "actual football" primarily meant "football for spectators".

As such, we can tie the subsequent rise of electric football to subsequent the rise of television, if only chronologically, but it is more than just coincidence. Electric football's qualities fit perfectly with McLuhan's characterization of the time period. He writes in Understanding Media about the decline of baseball due to television's domination of film and radio:

The characteristic mode of the baseball game is that if features one-thing-at-a-time. It is a lineal, expansive game which, like golf, is perfectly adapted to the outlook of an individualist and inner-directed society. Timing and waiting are of the essence, with the entire field in suspense waiting upon the performance of a single player. By contrast, football, basketball, and ice hockey are games in which many events occur simultaneously, with the entire team involved at the same time. With the advent of TV, such isolation of the individual performance as occurs in baseball became unacceptable. Interest in baseball declined, and its starts, quite as much as movie stars, found that fame had some very cramping dimensions. Baseball had been, like the movies, a hot medium featuring individual virtuosity and stellar performers. ("Television: The Third Giant", Understanding Media)

Football's quality of being a game "in which many events occur simultaneously, with the entire team involved at the same time" is captured perfectly in electric football. The miniature players of both teams swarm near-chaotically under the influence of electric power, providing a distilled metaphor for much of what McLuhan tries to capture about emerging electric culture in Understanding Media. The human player's role in these moments is most akin to the armchair quarterback watching televised football.

For a competing view, contrast electric football with one of its influential contemporaries in the world of tabletop sports gaming: Strat-O-Matic Baseball. It is a game that does not need electricity, mostly being played with pen, paper, and dice. Strat-O-Matic Baseball, like its real-world counterpart, is entirely a game of "one-thing-at-a-time" and "isolation of the individual performance". One player has a pitcher on the mound, the other player has a batter at the plate, and dice are rolled to instantly determine the outcome of the at-bat.

Comparing this game's randomness—statistical chaos—with the frenetic action of electric football—a more mechanical and visual form of chaos—prefigures a later move away from the television age and into the computer age, which brings with it football videogames and the decline of electric football. The computer age is then arguably marked by a mastery of electricity rather than an unease with it, and the mathematical spirit of Strat-O-Matic Baseball can be seen most coarsely in online fantasy baseball (and real-world sabermetrics) but also in the lower-level modeling of real-time football simulations like Madden NFL.

For these reasons, electric football is an extraordinary encapsulation of electric, televisual culture in America, particularly through the 1960s and 1970s.