Fantasy sport and media interactivity

Media interactivity in the field of sport functions as both a lure and a way of transforming a viewer’s relation to a game. Sport websites, along with the more traditional medium of television, have taken on the pedagogical task of acquainting a mass audience with a variety of sports and their rules, skills, histories and cultures, and by extension turning them into sport fans and consumers. Fantasy sports accentuates and intensifies, while also constituting a reaction against, this development: it can be seen as a form of escape from what many connoisseurs of sport doubtlessly consider sport has become: a commercialized, trivialized and hyperbolized media spectacle. At the same time, fantasy sport produces entirely new sets of relations between spectators as fans and sporting contests, and to a large extent transforms the visual regime of sport spectatorship.