Fantasy Baseball: The Case for Competitive Fandom— Erica Halverson & Rich Halverson

talked about how players used to have to wait for the Thursday issue of USA Today and then transcribe and add up the statistics themselves
showed how his son learned how sample size affects statistics and decisions based on them

competitive fandom = fan culture + competitive gaming
fan culture as discussed by Jenkins, Ito, etc.
- two planes of interaction - primary activity and fan activity (fictional like Star Wars or Harry Potter or real like baseball)
- participation - from consumptive to productive
- transmedia participation - from simple to complex (reading Kurt Schilling's blog, reading books, etc.)

then have the competitive gaming side
- artificiality - games are separate from the real world
- knowledge of rule systems that define the game space
- pursuing new strategies and tactics to achieve quantifiable outcomes (win-states)

fantasy baseball is the prototypical instance of competitive gaming across different types of content

fantasy baseball originated in board game play
then moved to using Lotus 1-2-3 spreadsheets
now Yahoo and other sites run leagues

NY Times, June 3, 2007 - playing fantasy baseball moves you "one step closer to becoming a postmodern baseball fan"

research process:
- interviews
- surveys
- observations

competitive fandom matrix
two dimensions: competitive gaming and fan culture

showed a couple of use cases, differing perspectives and levels of fandom, loyalties

some players strategize which players they will use

3 activities:
- fantasy activity (feeds into fan activity; does it feed into the primary activity? the WIIP statistic is now displayed at Fenway Park)
- fan activity (feeds into fantasy activity)
- primary activity (feeds the fan activity and the fantasy activity)

this is one path to complex content
not all fantasy games reach the level of competitive fandom within the matrix (eg, Fantasy Congress)
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Fans, Learning, and Literacy — Rebecca Black

fandom & identity are significant in kids' lives
rather than just reading about their favorite stars, though, and just being consumers, are engaging in participatory culture and active participation
- low barriers to expression and civic engagement
- strong support for creating and sharing
- informal mentorship
- contributions are meaningful
- affiliation and social connection
(Jenkins and MIT team paper)
used Blizzard and World of Warcraft as an example

http://fanfiction.net
298,724 fan fiction stories about Harry Potter, written primarily by kids, often those learning English or struggling to write
she used to have to beg her students to write fiction
fanfiction site:
- writing, reading, peer-review
- peer-mentoring
- many options for participation
- collaborative writing
- meta-talk about practices (how to effectively do a search for your fan fiction)
- language and technology for authentic purposes
- meaningful contributions
(motivated while developing new skills)
has more than one million stories about books, music, movies, wrestling, comics, web games, video games, and more
showed an example that incorporates genre, vocabulary, pragmatic, and syntactic learning, with more than 6,000 reviews of the person's work (English as Second Language writer trying to improve her writing)
has written here for 3 years
early writing:
- stories related to popularity, peer pressure, first love, academics
- concerts, sleepovers, parties, classrooms as settings
- trying to integrate herself into anime, fanfiction, culture
- written in English; identified self as English learner as a way to ward off harsh criticism
- novice technology user
later writing (3 years later):
- history, family structures, arranged marriage, war as topics/themes
- China, Japan, historical settings
- Asian youth culture
- written in Mandarin, Japanese, and English; identified herself as an author
- savvy-technology user

she broadened her knowledge through sharing and talking with others on the fanfiction site
there is a lot of sharing of knowledge on the site
genre-specific language

"adaequatio intellectus nostri cum re" example - some call Latin a dead language; used to be the universal language, but no longer true; point - some academic concepts and ideas might be better presented in other formats (not just print-based literacy)
"conformity of our minds to the fact"
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How Wikipedia Is Like a Multiplayer Game — Elonka Dunin
game developer, author, and cryptologist

is a top-200 contributor on Wikipedia (32,000 edits)
created/expanded -250 articles
doesn't actual edit articles about games because it goes agains the culture of Wikipedia
site is often what people are checking for "up t other minute" news
750,000 visits to the VA Tech article within 48 hours
mentioned the Chris Benoit case (wrestler)

showed a lot of statistics about Wikipedia
sees the Wikipedia community (which is still very young) making some of the same mistakes made by young MMORPG communities

article decisions are made by consensus, not by an authority figure

Wikipedia as MMORPG
- players = editors
- rooms = articles
- gamemasters = administrators
- experience points = edits
- awards = barnstars
- guilds = WikiProjects
- griefers = vandals
- combat = vandal-fighting, POV warriors
- pubs = talk pages
- newbie-killing = WP:BITE
- stats = edit distribution
have high score lists
highest goal you can achieve is to get a "Featured Article"
have professions/classes
- inclusionists
- delusionists
- vandal-fighters
- etc.

bad guys
- trolls
- POV warriors
- vandals
- sockpuppets
- edit warriors (3RR)
- WP:OWNers
vandals - like a game of whack-a-mole
quests - promoting articles, getting featured articles, finding free-use images

gls2007