‘It’s in the game’: sport fans, film and digital gaming

Crawford, G

Abstract

This essay compares the relative successes of sport-related films and sport-related digital games. Where sport-related films are relatively infrequent and even rarer successful when compared with other genres of film, sport-related games are a massively popular and successful genre of digital gaming. In order to understand this discrepancy, and in particular sport fan’s relationship with both film and games, this essays draws on the concept of ‘narrative’ and specifically Ricoeur’s ‘narrative identity’. In particular, this essay suggests that sport teams/clubs are to some degree polysemic texts, which allow supporters to construct their own individual narratives around these. However, it is suggested that sport-related films, which tend to offer only limited narratives, are unlikely to fit with fans’ own narrative identities, whereas digital games, with their more fluid narratives, are more easily located within fans’ relationships and narratives with the teams/clubs they support.

Citation

Crawford, G. (2008). ‘It’s in the game’: sport fans, film and digital gaming. Sport in Society, 11(2/3), 130-145. https://doi.org/10.1080/17430430701823380

• Journal Article Type: Article
• Publication Date: Mar 1, 2008
• Deposit Date: Dec 23, 2009
• Journal: Sport in Society
• Print ISSN: 1743-0437
• Publisher: Routledge
• Peer Reviewed: Peer Reviewed
• Volume: 11
• Issue: 2/3
• Pages: 130-145
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1080/17430430701823380
• Publisher URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17430430701823380