Lead Faculty: Erica Halverson

In 2006, the New York Times reported that fifteen million people spend $15 billion annually playing fantasy sports games. Unlike in the early days of fantasy baseball, modern players no longer need to sit for hours on a Sunday poring over newspaper box scores. Instead they spend their time strategizing and acquiring knowledge about baseball players and teams, and use sophisticated on-line tools to manage their teams. As a result fantasy baseball (and fantasy sports in general) are now played by young and old players alike, as well as players from diverse educational and social backgrounds.

I am currently studying fantasy baseball game play using a framework I call competitive fandom. Competitive fandom is a way of describing participation in fantasy sports play that draws from both what we know about fan culture and gaming communities. I argue that fantasy sports actually represent a specialized sort of game play that exists within the social network of a fan community. The initial study involves an in depth examination three fantasy baseball leagues. As our research group examines these leagues we are working to:

• Describe the complex game play practices that make up fantasy baseball, with special attention to both the official and unofficial rules that structure how the game is played
• Define how players' "competitiveness" and "fandom" work in fantasy baseball play to provide them with the expertise necessary to play successfully.
• Document expert game play strategies and show how experts work to understand their own team management methods as they communicate them to us through comparison to other complex risk assessment practices.
• Document how novice (or "newbie") players learn game play, and the culture of fantasy baseball.
• Show how individual fantasy baseball league communities are built over time.
• Move toward building quantitative models of individual expert strategies and test whether these strategies result in improved in-game performance over time.

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