A look into Daily Fantasy Sports
In previous vignettes and media experiments, I brought up a facet of fantasy sports that has recently gotten plenty of attention: daily fantasy sports (DFS). If you watched a sporting event at any point over the past couple of years, it is almost impossible to avoid one of the commercials for the two prominent DFS companies: DraftKings and FanDuel. I’m not going to go into detail about the thinly veiled gambling enterprises' business nor the actual chances a person who isn’t an MIT graduate has of winning tangible money (I’ll leave that to the John Oliver’s of the world). Instead I will look at the difference between this and traditional fantasy games and it’s effect on screens.
Much like regular fantasy sports, daily fantasy players get to pick any players they want and compete against other players for money prizes. Unlike regular fantasy sports, players have a “salary cap”, a limit on how much a player can spend on an athlete. One can argue that this gives the player a more immersive experience. Fantasy sports inherently allows players to step into that general manager/decision maker role. Adding a salary cap only further emulates that experience. It’s like playing Madden or NBA 2K, playing franchise mode and picking players while managing the budget (F.Y.I., much harder than it looks).
The main difference between the two is that daily fantasy games last for exactly that long, a day (DFS football games last for the weekend). A look at the DraftKings website frames it in this manner, “No season-long commitment-Avoid the injury bug and draft day busts.” The lack of a season long commitment to a fantasy team is appealing in many respects (players essentially have a daily mulligan and is better for people who don’t want to play every week.)
However, it begs the question; does this style of fantasy sports detract from the experience? Furthermore, do the players care whether they win or lose money?
Making any sort of profit in daily fantasy sports is a tricky proposition. As I said before, unless you have a high level knowledge of analytics, you are probably not going to get rich playing DraftKings or FanDuel. Which brings up another interesting thought, do DFS players enjoy winning for bragging rights?
Most regular fantasy leagues are made up of a community of people who at the very least are aquantences. The DraftKings website says that a player can invite as many friends as he or she wants to join leagues. However, it is not a requirement. A person can play this game by themselves and compete against others online in an attempt to win money and some bragging rights over a person they probably have never met.
Dominic Boyer’s The Life Informatic talks about the emphasis screen work takes at various news agencies. Much like traditional fantasy sports, DFS players likely interact with screens the same way. While they combine the viewing of the game on television, both fantasy sports players follow their teams on their laptops, phones and tablets. However, DFS does not appear to have the same reliance on bringing together a community of people (locally anyway) that enjoy sports. In some ways it is more immersive and in others it is more exclusionary.
