What is "arena football"

n. A form of American football played on a smaller field.

Arena football is a variety of indoor gridiron football played by the Arena Football League (AFL). It used to be a proprietary game (the rights to which were owned by Gridiron Enterprises) but the patent expired in 2007. The game is played indoors on a smaller field than American or Canadian outdoor football, resulting in a faster and higher-scoring game. The sport was invented in 1981, and patented in 1987, by James F. Foster, Jr., a former executive of the National Football League and the United States Football League. Though not the only variant of indoor American football, it is the most widely known, and the one on which most other forms of modern indoor football are at least partially based.

Two leagues have played under the official Arena football rules: the AFL, which played 22 seasons from 1987 to 2008 and resumed play under new ownership in 2010, and arenafootball2, the AFL's erstwhile developmental league, which played 10 seasons from 2000 through 2009.

Arena Football is an Arena Football League video game developed by Electronic Arts (under their EA Sports brand) for the PlayStation 2 and Xbox. It was released on February 7, 2006. The cover features quarterback John Dutton of the Colorado Crush, the champions of ArenaBowl XIX. The game is similar to EA's other simulation football games ( NCAA Football and Madden NFL), but adopts a style of play that is similar to the faster and more frantic paced Arena game. The game includes all the rules, rosters, and teams for the 2006 AFL season. The game was succeeded by Arena Football: Road to Glory.

Arena Football is a 1988 Commodore 64 computer game coded by Chris R. Bickford III. It is essentially the first Arena or Indoor Football game ever created. It is a simple text-based simulation that allows the user to pick a play for his team (on defense or offense) and the computer simulates the results of the play based on real-life data and tendencies of the actual team.