Fantasy Football as Sport and Game

In an issue that aims to explore questions and the relationship between sports and games, I propose that looking at fantasy sports is an important angle from which to explore this relationship. The term fantasy sports can be a broad term if looked at as incorporating elements of fantasy into sport. For example, many of the most popular sporting games, like Madden (Visual Concepts Entertainment, Inc., 1993), already form a relationship between sports and game by using recent player data and incorporating that information into a game. One could argue that such a game already constitutes a fantasy sport. Nonetheless, the agency required by players varies considerably in many video games, all the way from intensely participating in virtual sporting competitions like Madden, where players can take a weak team and with enough skill dominate competitions, to other videogames where players need to study statistics and make choices for who plays in a match in a text simulation like Championship Manager (Domark Software Ltd., 1992). Both games are using data from the sport to then inform gameplay, which is one type of classification of fantasy sports as simulations (Lomax, 2009). This article will focus primarily on another categorization from Lomax’s taxonomy for fantasy sports, which he calls “Internet-based leagues” (2009, p. 386). Internet-based leagues, Lomax states, are run by sports sites or internet companies and provide free content and services for leagues (Lomax, 2009). Nonetheless rather than use the term “internet-based leagues”, I will use the term fantasy sports. This article aims to provide an examination of one fantasy sport and hopes to demonstrate how social norms and rules within that fantasy sport have allowed its players to shift freely back and forth between thinking of fantasy sports as a game versus a sport, creating an interweave between the game and the sport it is based on