If you like football video games, and if you also insist that your football video games contain all the names and stadiums and logos you watch on TV every Sunday throughout the autumn, you will like Madden NFL 06. It contains all those names and stadiums and logos. It is the only video game to do so this year, and it will be the only video game to do so for the foreseeable future.

Electronic Arts, the company that published Madden, made big headlines in the gamer-nerd press (and smaller ones in the business pages) last December, when it announced that it had signed an exclusive licencing deal with the NFL and the NFL players' union. After years of growing competition from other football video games, EA had scored a decisive blow. It had the NFL all to itself. There would be no more challenges from upstart rivals. There would be only one game with real NFL teams and real NFL players, and its name was Madden. Cue delirious cackling in EA's head offices.

Now, here's the thing. Monopolies are great for shareholders, and certainly they are great for their executive committees, but for consumers, they are many layers of stink. You know how Windows never crashes your computer? You know how Microsoft Word never annoys you with a talking animated paper clip? Remember how much long-distance telephone calls used to cost? Remember when the cable TV people tried to get you to pay for channels you didn't want, because you hadn't phoned them to say no thanks? Monopolies are like that. Monopolies are grumpy and intolerant and they have no time for customer service, and when they try to innovate they concentrate on amusing themselves and not on what their customers might want or need or like.

The first monopoly Madden is a good example. The game is updated every year, to include current rosters and stadiums, and also to fiddle a bit with the controls and the graphics. The idea, generally, is to make the game look better and to make it more fun to play. This year, however, the big innovation is something called the field of vision. It does not make the game more fun, and neither does it make the game look better. It is, however, a neato bit of software engineering. It was probably great fun for Madden's application architects and coders, and this year that was good enough. Remember, monopolies don't need to care what their customers think.

The field of vision is all about offence. When your team has the ball and you are controlling the quarterback, a cone of brightness projects out from him onto the field, pointing like a beam from a searchlight. Little icons appear over the heads of all the eligible receivers caught in the beam. The idea is that if you tap the button corresponding to a given icon, your quarterback will throw an accurate pass to that receiver, who will then run the ball into the end zone and autograph it with a Sharpie pen he has been carrying in his sock.

Good quarterbacks like Tom Brady have exceptionally wide cones of light. This is because, as John Madden likes to say, they are watching the whole field. Crappy QBs have itsy-bitsy narrow cones of light, which means they have a much rougher time lining up a throw. You can turn the quarterback's head to make him look at a wide-open receiver, but the cone moves slowly, and usually you have two defensive tackles on you and a mouth full of Astroturf before you can really make anything happen.

Now, everybody knows that some QBs are better than others, and everybody expects the good ones to have an easier time than the scrubs. But realism is not the same thing as pleasure. The field of vision is a capricious and arbitrary gimmick. It makes the game tougher, but it does not make it any more fun. Well done, software engineers. You are clever.