Fantasy sports provide participants with the opportunity to play the role of coach for a team of athletes they select. The better the athletes perform in their real-world competitions, the better the virtual teams they are on will perform. Leagues for fantasy sports started almost 40 years ago and have grown to the point that there are now approximately 30 million participants. Initially using ...

Nighttime fears are very common in preschool years. During these years, children's fantasy-reality differentiation undergoes significant development. Our study was aimed at exploring the links between nighttime fears and fantasy-reality differentiation in preschool children. Eighty children (aged: 4-6 years) suffering from severe nighttime fears were compared with 32 non-fearful controls. Fears...

Playing digital games is a part of life for current natives. Games make people engrossed, and are optimized environments where fun prevails. Of making people motivated in gameplay, fantasy is a paramount element. Research has discovered that fantasy plays a critical role in enhancing intrinsic motivation. This chapter thus revisits the role of fantasy while playing digital games, focusing on wh...

Utopia and satire would seem, superficially at least, to be closely related genres. They both reject present forms of human society, and they sometimes make use of similar devices (e. g., the voyage, the stranger's eye). They would seem to differ only in emphasis. Whereas the satirist focuses on criticism, the utopian writer offers an ideal alternative. The implicit social censure embedded in u...

Fantasy football participation is an extremely-popular, yet unique online activity that combines traditional sport fandom with interactive components to enhance a fan’s overall sport experience. The player-specific concentration of the game, however, has the potential to alter traditional team-focused loyalties that have driven sport consumer behavior inquiry for decades. Due to this intriguing...

BACKGROUND The popularity of active video games (AVGs) has skyrocketed over the last decade. However, research suggests that the most popular AVGs, which rely on synchronous integration between players' activity and game features, fail to promote physical activity outside of the game or for extended periods of engagement. This limitation has led researchers to consider AVGs that involve asynchr...

Preschool-aged children are exposed to fantasy stories with the expectation that they will learn messages in those stories that are applied to real-world situations. We examined children's transfer from fantastical and real stories. Over the course of 2 studies, 3½- to 5½-year-old children were less likely to transfer problem solutions from stories about fantasy characters than stories about re...

Yahoo Sports provides an online fantasy football league to its user base. End users create leagues and then those individuals construct a roster of real NFL players each week for head-to-head competition. NFL players are assigned “fantasy points” based on their achievements in each football game, and each head-to-head matchup produces a winner and loser based on the respective teams’ accumulate...

Many thanks to Ruy Blanes and Bjørn Enge Bertelsen for their response my critique (Bråten 2022a) of special section on ‘Utopian Confluences’ (especially, 2021; 2021), Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale publishing the exchange. The theoretical questions that arise from our diverging stances are, hopefully, general interest. While I take (hereafter B&B) argue an epistemologically all-i...