Decision making in online fantasy sports communities

This paper reports a study of strategies used by players of fantasy sports games. Online discussion forums associated with these games are analyzed to understand and describe how players use contextual tools, knowledge, and peer interactions to support their formal and informal decision making processes. Decision-making processes involved in games like fantasy sports are likely to be different from those visible in schools and other formal educational settings. Understanding the structure of informal decision-making in these and similar games may suggest ways to teach formal reasoning skills by building upon existing (and often implicit) gaming strategies. Numerous sociocultural studies have characterized differences between the types of learning that occur in formal educational contexts and everyday life. For instance, studies of activities such as carpet laying, farming, candy selling (Carraher et al., 1985; Saxe, 1991), shopping (Lave, 1988), and game playing (Nasir, 2002, 2005) have examined the connections between mathematics learning and cultural pracInteractive Technology & Smart Education (2006) 4: 347–360 © 2006 Troubador Publishing Ltd.