Fantasy Football is integrated into the public. To get information about a football game, you just need to turn on a tv, read a newspaper, etc. This is not true of the speciality shops where you need go to acquire the stuff of D and Ds.

More importantly, I think that Football is also more socially acceptable because it is a bigger part of the economy?

I dunno.

I think that money has something to do with it?

(To think about comics, have been gaining respect in part because movie studios have put them on the map by spending 50 to 200 million making movies out of the characters.)

So…if you were to rank them in terms of mainstream acceptance: D and D, then Ghostworld, and then Fantasy Football. This is also the way that the money flows into the three. You know?

So I think that the money is there…Don’t you think?

Who knows.

Chris

You can win at many games by exploiting loopholes. Doing a “wall hack” in a first-person shooter doesn’t mean you’re good at first-person shooters. It just means you win.

I definitely agree that games are designed for a variety specific purposes and in reaction to any number of environment/market conditions. I suspect that the difference between “nerd” games and “mainstream” games is hidden in the details somewhere there. I think what I was trying to say was just that even if certain characteristics of games were created the way they were intentionally, that doesn’t necessarily mean those design choices are natural, that they are made the one and only way they could be made, and that the stereotypes and stigmas that accompany certain characteristics are part of their intrinsic form.

A 20-sided die, for example, carries a lot of connotations for people in our culture, but to someone who has never met a geek or seen our numerals, it means nothing. The connection between that object and the pseudo-random, external forces it represents is ultimately based on common understanding. The connection between an oblong ball and manhood is something else we gather from common understanding. It makes sense that physically able people would gravitate to games that allow them to show off their prowess, and that such activities would thus be considered somehow preferable to activities that attract people who would be less enviable as mates or allies. If things had developed differently, though, nerds probably could’ve found a way to use an oblong ball to tell stories about dragons, and athletes used polyhedral dice instead of a coin to determine who starts the game with the ball, and those objects would have different associations.

Admittedly, that’s only one half of how I was using the terms “arbitrary” and “natural.” The other half was the claim, quoted in Graham’s essay, that actual activity involved in a game is arbitrary—that there’s nothing “natural” about a “caste of giants” established through a sport. As you suggest, Dan, sports provide an opportunity for exercise; on a social level, which is most relevant to this topic, sports also afford people an opportunity to demonstrate their abilities, attract mates, establish a local hierarchy of leadership, etc. In that sense, high school football might seem a fairly natural and ultimately functional way of establishing social organization. That function is very specific to a certain kind of insular environment, however, which (as Graham suggests) may be somewhat unrepresentative of the world at large. (Then again, when you consider that football players tend to be more rich and famous than college professors….)

Nevertheless, as anyone who went to our high school knows, you could be physically fit and quite athletic but still considered a loser so long as the only outlet for your physical prowess was Ultimate Frisbee. Ultimate is no less physically intensive than several of the more “respectable” sports, and you could even be considered a not-nerdy Ultimate player so long as you also belonged to the cross-country team, but the sport had associations at our school that didn’t exist in many other high schools (probably due to the fact that we were considered a club rather than a sport, and much of the team was also known for playing collectible card games in the cafeteria). I was surprised to learn years later that the Ultimate players were considered part of the popular group in many other locales. There were reasons why we were considered nerdy … but the function of the sport itself is similar enough to the function of soccer and football that there’s no natural reason why the masters of wit on the breezeway should have derisively called out to us, “Hey, frisbee geeks … gonna play some frisbee?”

Now take me to task on this one some more! Don’t let me get away with lazy essay-writing, people!

You raise some interesting points. My personal theory about the dominance of sports has mainly to do with the physical prowess component of it. Consider that there was (is?) a time when being physically fit was how things like tribe leaderships were determined. Less so for being creative, which is also more difficult to measure than who can bench press more.

I suppose I take some issue with your contention that games are “arbitrary and meaningless,” though the context in which you use that phrase suggests that you might merely mean games are all equally arbitrary and meaningless, which could also be taken to mean that they all have equal amounts of meaning.

Games are important in a lot of ways: sports, for example, provide an excellent source of exercise for people who no longer need to run away from predators or forage for food. Role playing games might benefit not only in a practical sense (I wonder if a lot of actors, for example, used to play D&D…besides Vin Diesel, that is), but also in a psychological/emotional sense of placing yourself in somebody else’s shoes (nerds are often stereotyped as being somewhat low on empathy, though that perception seems to be changing with the more “mainstream” nerd movement that is emerging).

You’re right, though, insofar as “game” is often used in a perjorative sense, to indicate something that is childish, or a waste of time. However, they’re anything but. Games are meant to challenge us in one way or another, put us in situations that we do not face in the everyday world so our brains (or bodies) don’t atrophy in the pursuit of mundane repetitive tasks.

I wonder, too, if the type of games people play impacts “real” life. If games can merely be the application of a particular set of skills to a particular set of situations, then what is life but a big game? Thus, are people who are interested in sports more likely to see life as a game to be “won” (acquire the most money, the nicest car, etc.) as opposed to people who play more open-ended role-playing games, who might be more interested in the experience, and thus less competitive? Perhaps that’s why I feel sometimes that I have such a lack of ambition…

As always, in attempting to answer some of your questions, I end up raising plenty of my own. However, it’s too late for philosophizing…