Spectator Sports

Fantasy football, fantasy baseball, and other fantasy sports are role-playing games that use statistics and organizational know-how to construct an alternative world in which the best of all possible teams can compete against each other in a utopia of fan participation. As many as 16 million adults may be in the game. For policy wonks, now Fantasy Congress offers constituents the possibility to put together coalitions, play smarter defense and offense, and rack up the legislative stats to please the hometown crowd. They offer tutorials on the legislative process to explain how a bill becomes law and encourage research on real-life elected officials and issues. I also like the fact that the game has a pedagogical history in a Distributed Software Architecture Course.