Saw a meme being all “ha ha, those kids who made fun of us for playing D&D in high school are playing fantasy football now, and it’s the same thing”.

And I don’t think that’s true, I think the distinction is in narrativization. Even a party of minmaxers on the most perfunctory Monty Haul dungeon crawl experience it as a narrative, if only as “you open the door to the next room, there’s a chest, guarded by a monster, you kill it and loot the chest, repeat”.

Some schmuck might have won the game of the week because Tom Brady’s passing and A.J. Green’s receiving stats put them over even in the face of their opponent getting a lot of points on sacks, but I’ve never seen (admittedly I haven’t looked too hard) that schmuck posting an after-action report where he tells the story of the critical plays where Brady, under pressure in the pocket, was able to connect with Green near the goal-line.

And it’s not like it would be impossible to narrativize things like that - I just did! Hell, actual, honest-to-god sportswriting narrativizes random noise all the time. So the fact that that’s not a draw, or even an expected feature, to fantasy football players strikes me as a significant distinction.

Back in the ‘90s when I was on AOL, I remember for some reason or another coming across a message board full of Microsoft Flight Simulator fans that liked to play “Airline”.

They’d form up into companies (=teams), download their company’s livery, start the game as a passenger jet at a major airport, taxi to the right runway, take off at the rotation speed and flap settings indicated in real-life manuals for that model of plane at an airport of that altitude and temperature, spend hours flying across the country at cruising speed and altitude along designated flight paths, land properly, taxi to the gate, and upload the playback log to be scored for their company.

And the really serious guys would download mods to turn the 737 model into specifically a 737-700 or something like that, and replicate specific cockpit setups with actual physical peripherals at home, and have sound clips ready to trigger in flight for, say, turning the fasten seatbelts light on and off, or declaring yourself upon passing into a new air traffic control zone.

All of this struck me somehow creepier than other fandoms that played with replicating meatspace in games - the people who’d make famous cities in SimCity2000, or their high schools as Doom .WADs. A decade or more before “gamification” - fitting productive capitalist activity to a recreational ruleset - turned into a big thing, it was the exact opposite - playing games according to a model of capitalist productivity.