Fantasy Film
April 11th, 2008 by GregIn my pre-sleep browsing, I ran across this interesting link: http://www.fantasymoguls.com/
Below is a description from IMDB (on whose home page I found the link):
“Think you can do a better job of picking hit movies than the studios? Then prove it at Fantasy Moguls.com, the fantasy game for Hollywood movies, now with a new look and easy new gameplay for all seasons. Create your own studio with a budget of $100, which you’ll use to select up to eight movies to fill out your studio slate. You’ll rack up points for your studio based on things like box office, review score, “legs” (the term for longevity in the theaters after the initial release) and per-theater average. You can play in a league with your friends or join a public league and make new ones. Perhaps best of all, it’s 100% FREE to play. The ultra-competitive summer season is now underway, so sign up and join Fantasy Moguls, sponsored by the 2008 Honda CR-V.”
While there are obviously many levels to unpack here (commodification of the process of commodification, for instance, or the “revelation” of “insider” knowledge via the industry term “legs”), I am hitting the sack, and just wanted to get this up here before I forgot about it.
Other possible discussion points include this in-depth strategy article that, at first glance, I took for a film review, or Honda’s large advertising presence in this venture.
Perhaps I will edit this to include a more thorough reading tomorrow, but please don’t let that stop you from commenting.
Posted in Uncategorized | 2 Comments »
joy! fantasy moguls! oh how i miss you!
i also don’t have time at the moment to add in-depth commentary on this little game but i just wanted to throw in my two cents and personal experience.
i was quite the FM participant/gamer this summer. retrospectively, i’m a bit disturbed with how much time i spent looking at stats, trailers, reading reviews, etc. etc. but i was hooked. i don’t consider myself a fan of the “industry” – i don’t regularly check-up on the happenings about Hwood -but somehow FM transformed me into a temporary movie fiend.
i think FM is a brilliant marketing strategy for the industry as a whole. FM exposed me to TONS of films that i wouldn’t have really thought much about if i had just seen the commercial/promotional material. i also quickly became emotionally invested in the success of certain films. and i found myself rooting for (and even seeing a few) movies that were in my roster. i feel a bit manipulated into consuming movies i might not have seen otherwise, but at the time i didn’t care.
and i guess there is a sense of betrayal… while FM is supposed to just be light entertainment to break up the work day, it’s also crafting me into a committed movie-goer. and the whole game seems to de-mystify the box office process by including the consumers and providing “insider” info, but by commodifying the industry it just re-establishes the distance that the consumers have from actually being producers of major films.
overall, i don’t fully understand how FM fits as a fan practice, but it’d be interesting to hear what other people’s experiences have been with fantasy sports games or the like.
I think we’ve missed a large area of interest by ignoring online fantasy games. I’m glad you brought it up! Traditionally they exist for sports, but they’re now available for many industries.
What kinds of fans play fantasy games? How much of a football or movie fan do you have to be to play the corresponding fantasy game? How does it change the fan experience? Are there themes we can see throughout the fantasy game experience?
How related is this current incarnation to the fantasy sports genre? By skimming the website, it seems to follow a lot of the traditional game-play. I think any large commercial industry could be the subject of this kind of a game. It is “fantasy” after all, and money is often times a part of our fantasies. The Swarthmore student in me wonders how it will normalize the greed and sterilization of most large commercial industries.