Sports are the ancient challenge of wills. Sports traditionally consist of two people or teams facing off in order to complete a goal based on a certain set of rules and regulations. Modern sports have an additional dimension with rigorous stat tracking. Every statistic imaginable, from performance, weather, temperament, previous matches, alignment of the stars, anything is on the table. Fantasy sports are where players act as managers of fantasy teams made up of real athletes. By tracking these stats with every new game, fantasy managers compete and have a season winner by the end. This practice is notable similar to table top gaming, like Dungeons & Dragons, and to strategic game playing, like the card game Magic: The Gathering. Fantasy sports and gaming have a lot in common.
1. The Numbers Game
Fantasy sports are all about numbers, just like building a deck or a character. To build a character in a tabletop game, you tend to give them points in categories like strength, dexterity, intelligence, charisma, and many of the other traits that serve to make a good adventurer. A good deck for a card game involves powerful cards, cards to grant favorable conditions, and cards the nullify your opponent. In fantasy sports, your stats indicate things like how many yards your athlete ran, how many strikeouts they have so far, number of touchdowns, number of injuries, successful plays, failed efforts, and so on. Various games have different levels of complexity.
2. The Fanbase
Every activity has its hardcore fans. If you go to an event like Comic-Con, you’ll see all kinds of people dressed up as goblins, super heroes, popular mascots, the occasional inanimate object, and sometimes even characters from popular fan fiction. Go to a hometown football game, and you’ll see the same kind of mentality. People with painted faces and bodies in the colors of their team, people with trucks and children adorned in their teams logo, and some people with tattoos of favorite teams or jerseys. Everyone needs something to believe in, with nerds and sports fans expressing their love in similar ways.
3. The Camaraderie
Sports are team ventures, but being in a fantasy league is a competition. You have to use what you know in order to beat your friends. That competition exists in the living room as well. For some, it’s a Sunday in front of the big screen, watching your key fantasy athlete go neck and neck with their rivals until they pull out a miracle victory in the last ten seconds. For others, it’s fighting through a dungeon with the same guys you’ve hung out with for years, each one trying for more treasure, and losing your mind when you roll just the right number on the dice to unlock the rarest item in the game. The spirit of competition brings you closer together.
4. The Randomness
It wouldn’t be a competition without a streak of unfair occurrences. No one wins all the time, and nothing is ever as easy as it should be. A sports team’s season can be ruined by their star athlete twisting his ankle playing with his kid. A bad call by a ref can knock them out of the playoffs. It’s just unfair to anyone in a fantasy league who had what looked like a sure bet. Likewise, a champion card game player could lose their star card, or be dealt a bad hand. A game die could always roll terrible numbers. It’s not a game if there’s not a chance of total unfair devastating bad luck loss.
5. The Memories
The entire reason people play these games is for fun. No matter what, you’re building memories. Without any effort, anyone reading this can flash back to a time when they were up late on a Friday night with their best friends, feeling like the coolest losers on the block. For some people it’s sitting around the computer putting the final touches in their fantasy team, ribbing their friends about their picks and trying to weasel into a trade or two. For others, it’s staying up until 3 in the morning just to finish the game, surrounded by empty soda bottles and the sense of approaching victory. Memories get made in competition.
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