Fantasy Football as Interactive Storytelling

Millions of men out there spend there Sundays in front of computer writing their interactive narratives. They are the legions who give up their time to create entire leagues of combinatoric narratives, known as Fantasy Football.

Robert Coover pointed out this connection in his The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J.Henry Waugh, Prop. In Coover’s tale, Waugh watches over the lives of his players. He lives in a metafictional plane, casting dice, and watching the fate of his teams. Fantasy sports, from rotisserie on out, are the real life equivalent.

The fantasy sports player tunes in to weekly updates, using their computer as an interface. Their choices of their roster shape the drama, as do the real world factors. Interactive…narrative…hmm…

Video games such as Madden have obviously captialized on Fantasy Football. Coover’s book has even inspired a dice and table game. The use of the internet to connect players and to update statistics has transformed fantasy sports, while also bringing the interface closer to that of a video game. But perhaps we could draw another connection to interactive narrative.

• Players imagine themselves in the role of the managers. (As in god games, such as the Sims) They make decisions that have immediate (local) effects and long term (global) effects on the generation of the narrative for the season.
• The sports stats themselves act as the systems. (As in interactive narratives such as Facade)
• Their teams are imaginary groups that play fictional games. (This follows the combinatorics of many games and elit pieces)
• The narrative changes weekly (As in blog fiction or ARGs)

But wait: There’s not a textual story that’s produced. Or is there?
Every day, sports news journals create narratives about the players: Cindarella stories, hometown favorites, fallen heroes, rising hopes, not to mention the scandals. Their are magazines and websites devoted to the people who play these games, filling out the rules and mapping out the characters. These parallel well the manuals of certain interactive games. They are the Monster Manuals, if you will, as well as part of the larger storyworld.

It is a fixed set of characters that users interact with. Their choice is limited but significant. There is even what N. Katherine Hayles calls “possibility space,” a computational mediating environment that affects how the data of the players is transformed into the story.

Reading Fantasy Sports as Interactive Storytelling, suggests that there are many more people interested in interactive storytelling than we might have guessed. This connection may also offer suggestions for new types of interactive storytelling, such as fantasy politics.

 

 

 

 

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http://wrt.ucr.edu/wordpress/2005/09/13/fantasy-football-as-interactive-storytelling/