You think economics is boring, finance giving you a headache, marketing is pointless, math ruining you G.P.A, well maybe it’s time for a class in Electronic Arts.
If the University of Alabama can teach philosophy classes in The Simpsons or if The Matrix is taught at Stanford then maybe it’s time for Business classes in video games. Let me crunch some numbers for you real quick. $2,807,300,000.
Yes that’s two billion, eight hundred million, three hundred thousand dollars of expected sales Electronic Arts predicts for the full year of 2004. EA is the world’s number one video game producer in the world and has a market cap (shares of stock x price of stock) that rivals companies like The Gap and Nike.
If Quinnipiac already has a sports in economics class then why not work in one of the sporting games. Let’s take Madden 2004. After you choose between a fantasy draft or an already existing team the work begins. Salary cap, bonuses, player re-singing, and free agents all come into play.
Once your team is under control be sure to check out the merchandising sales, parking issues, concessions operations, and stadium repairs to make sure that the fans stay happy. All of these issues have to be accounted for in order for your team to stay out of the red. Each week you update each and every category right down to the price of soda and hotdogs to the different prices to charge for sections in your stadium.
Depending on weekly wins and losses decides the prices to charge and the attendance at each game. As the owner, if you are not keeping up with these states then people will not want to go to your games, your revenues will fall, and bankruptcy will ultimately occur.
When bankruptcy does occur you are forced to move to another city, and build a stadium with the existing money you do have. At any given time a chart can be seen that tell of your income, revenues, and attendance, also a breakdown of your balance sheet will reveal who is getting paid too much and how to stay debt free.
Think the fun stops with economics, finance, and math, well how about a little advertising. You can choose to increase advertising through T.V., newspapers, billboards, or the radio.
This will of course take away from your income but raising parking prices around the stadium should offset the charges. A nice fan appreciation day as well will keep everyone happy so I suggest giving away bobble heads or maybe even the number one fingers.
Sounds like a pretty cool class to take right? I look at Madden 2004 as covering AC 101, SB 101-102, Pre-Calculus, and Marketing 201 all in one class. I took this little idea to Professor Johnson who teaches sports in economics to get his opinion.
On a side note I consider Professor Johnson a friend so I can say he did just suffer a brutal loss to the Patriots on some ingenious coaching by Bill Bilichick. Professor Johnson blamed “inept special teams on the ensuing kickoff” for the reason the Broncos lost, but I will go with the ingenious thought for now. Although Professor Johnson does find the class intriguing he was not sure if the idea would fly with the administration.
So I guess we will just have to wait and see if EA 101 ever becomes a class, one thing is for sure though, that I would be the first one to sign up.
