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

2008; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 11; Issue: 2-3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/17430430701823380

1743-0445

Garry Crawford,

Sport and Mega-Event Impacts

This essay compares the relative successes of sport-related films and sport-related digital games. Where sport-related films are relatively infrequent and even more rarely successful when compared with other genres of film, sport-related games are a popular and successful genre of digital gaming. In order to understand this discrepancy, and in particular, sport fans' relationship with both film and games, this essays draws on the concept of 'narrative' and, specifically, Ricoeur's 'narrative identity'. Specifically, this essay suggests that sport teams/clubs are to some degree polysemic texts, which allow supporters to construct their own individual narratives around them. 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.