I’ve written here before about fantasy football, but apparently sports fans aren’t the only ones using real people to play their games. For you political buffs, a recent article from the New York Times explains a similar sort of pursuit, Fantasy Congress. In summary:

“Especially this time of year, all you hear is people talking about fantasy football leagues,” Ms. Montgomery said. “I couldn’t care less if I tried, either about real football or fantasy football. But hey, I actually pay attention to what goes on in Congress.” Just as in fantasy football or baseball, each player picks a team — in this case, 4 senators and 12 House members of varying seniority levels — and competes with other players in a league typically managed by a friend or a co-worker. Members determine whether to play for money or the thrill of victory. But that is where the similarities end. On the Fantasy Congress Web site, www.fantasycongress.us, leagues have names like “We the Peeps” and “Foley4Prez,” in addition to the usual school and workplace affiliations. Players accumulate points as the legislators they have chosen go about their business on Capitol Hill. A House member or senator earns five points for introducing a bill or an amendment, and more points for negotiating successfully each step in the legislative process.

Apparently the Fantasy Congress site, launched a month or so ago, had attracted 600 or so participants by the time the article saw print.

I find two things particularly interesting about what the Fantasy Congress participants are doing here. First, these players make a distinction of utility between what they’re doing and what fantasy sports players are doing. They make it clear that they don’t really care about football, and that everybody already knows about football but many people could stand to learn about politics. I suppose I can relate to their attitude somewhat, seeing as how Fantasy Congress seems somehow more “real” than fantasy sports: arguably, the processes of lawmaking have a distinct and longer-term impact on our society than the nitty-gritty details of athletic competitions (and, of course, we’re all paying for the former). That attitude, however, just replicates the value hierarchy of fantasy football players who insist that what they do is somehow better than what Dungeons & Dragons players do because football players are more “real” than elves and such. If the main goals behind leisure and entertainment are to enjoy the pursuit itself and enjoy interaction with others (both valid goals), then short of games that actively hurt or bother others, just about anything counts.

The second thing I find interesting about Fantasy Congress is that they’ve adopted the fantasy sports rule system despite that it doesn’t actually fit any real-life political model in Congress. That is, it makes sense that fantasy sports players should do their own “draft” and fill out a “team” of players across an entire league: the real-life league is made of teams that have been made just the same way. There are no leagues or drafts in Congress, unless you count things like political parties and loose political alliances. I’ve never played fantasy sports myself, though I have to imagine that things get complicated when you have to outfit a team with players for every position on the field. In Fantasy Congress, you just pick some of your favorite politicians and follow their activities.

Moreover, what some might see as a potential problem with this system is that it’s a perfectly valid strategy to pick politicians you actively disagree with who happen to have a successful record in pushing legislation you vehemently oppose. The only parallel in fantasy sports that I know of is in the mixed loyalties that arise when your fantasy players go up against your favorite team in the real league, but picking across ideological lines in Fantasy Congress would presumably have you challenging personal loyalties at every turn. This gets right to the crux of the matter, to me: in politics, people follow certain issues and maintain certain ideologies. In sports, there is rarely any greater significance behind the scoring of a point than simply edging one’s team closer to victory. And Fantasy Congress fails to account for this important distinction in its rule system.

That’s not to say that there’s anything wrong with Fantasy Congress’s approach. After all, most games are all about abstracting events into rules. Still, I wonder if there’s a way to do fantasy politics that actually fits some existing political model. Even if I’m going to resist that basing a game more on “reality” shouldn’t be socially superior, I will admit that tying game rules to reality makes games more fun in many cases. Maybe the problem here, though, is that it’s easier to extract a fun spinoff game from another game than from a process that was never intended to be fun in the first place.