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Icons courtesy of komodomedia.com
As fantasy football draft season is in full swing here, I begin to wonder if the model can be applied to non-sport events. Anything with a human toll (wars, disasters, etc) could end up in pretty poor taste pretty quickly, but is there anything else that happens out in the world that could be tracked competitively? Stock markets and money markets seem like obvious, if uninteresting choices. Is there some other opportunity? Or have sports really cornered the market on safe conflict and strife?
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Is this a sport? Is it trackable?
Lucha libre - Maybe it's just the way it's crept into American awareness lately, but there's something eerily compelling about this.
How about movies?
Many hours were wasted on "Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon" back when I was in school. Could that be adapted? Build up a team of actors subject to some constraint, limit the set of movies you'll consider, and then query IMDB for the scoring data? Maybe the actual contests themselves need to be assigned randomly, since new things happen so slowly?
Politics are interesting, but people care so much
The thing about fantasy sports is that deep down, the event tracked doesn't matter. I suppose the local politics of a distant district might work, but you almost need to go all the way down to the county-council level to find a comfortable level of irrelevance. I think the key is that you need live events to watch and root for. What about local news? Does anyone do things like this for reality shows?
That's pretty much sports in
That's pretty much sports in a nutshell.
Even safer is video games, but that makes for an even lamer fantasy league.
political contests?
Especially for the 2-player situations we seem to end up in most often, the US political system could be a gold mine.
Video games would make for a
Video games would make for a pretty lame fantasy league. What about something based on the game industry as a whole, though? Compare sales of various titles, build a fantasy IP portfolio? It sounded better when I thought it, but it's a hard idea to respect when I write it down.