New fandom, who dis
Musings on narrative design and fan engagement in sports and media
It’s happened. I’ve become a sports follower. I reflexively want to make a nerd joke, but a lot of people in games I know follow at least one sports — there are a lot of wrestling fans among game devs, and I guess who generally can’t throw a stone into any crowd without hitting someone who enjoys a bit of footie — both kind of footie as it turns out, American football is also something devs introduced me to.
To be honest, I can’t with any conviction say I never had a predilection for sports. Passive sports, that is. I like the big sports events as much as the next person — as a teen, I volunteered during the Football World Cup once, simply because I enjoyed the crowds of sports fans streaming towards their destination like schools of fish. I enjoy tube stations during Wimbledon. My favourite anime are, by and large, sports anime — Run With The Wind, Haikyuu, Welcome To The Ballroom. Then, I discovered the joy of slickly produced Netflix sports documentaries, and that, dear reader, is how I ended up here.
I’m a big fan of narrative design in sports — both in broadcasts and documentaries. I think it comes pretty close to narrative design in games sometimes. Part of that is pretty obvious — we identify with a player or team that we want to win, and their win can feel like our win, for reasons of personal sympathy, or the communities they represent. We are watching people perform extraordinary feats, feats for which they have to go above and beyond physically and mentally. Still, the outcome can be a surprise for everyone involved, and these outcomes can change lives.
But there are also so many stories to find here, depending on how you change your outlook. People who enjoyed Ted Lasso likely enjoyed seeing the underdog’s rise. There’s the unassuming kid who razes a competition to shreds. The person who makes it look easy. The titan of the sport, who will eventually be brought to fall, and seems all the more human for it. The small guys who are just happy to be featured and may end up growing on you the most.
Within all that, there’s a wealth of small moments that should be boring, that don’t film well, and that still have you on the edge of your seat. The machinations of money changing hands, transfer day, the kind of stress that I thought would never work on TV before I watched Sunderland ‘Till I Die. The idea that you can watch someone train and put the best equipment together and still not know how they will do, because sports are for a large part such a mental game. The childhood friendships and rivalries, translated onto courts an race tracks, the fact that a pat on the back or a hug among men is a sign of extraordinary sportsmanship. The match point, the seconds between one person and the next coming through the finish line — but oh, there are bonus seconds, a time extension! The leader’s sitting in the hot seat, their face dramatically captured in slow motion as they witness their next challenger. (it’s an actual seat. It has a sponsor’s logo on it, like a gaming chair.)
How did we get here?
Before I got into games, I racked up an impressive number of entirely voluntary credits in Media Studies as part of my Film Studies course. Especially fandom studies, which is still a very young field, interested me greatly, likely because I was in fandom — the idea that there was academic study on something I lived and actually enjoyed was fascinating to me, rather than studies on how I struggled as a working class POC. I wondered if through fandom studies, I would learn a simple way to unpack and describe what fandoms made me feel — today I think there really isn’t, and there shouldn’t be, because there is no universal fandom experience, and the ways in which we do experience it like someone else are vital in how they bring us together — it’s essentially a feedback loop. You share something with a crowd, but in doing that, you also become part of the crowd, and thus potentially a draw for someone else to join you.
Chris Bratt once said to me why he became a reporter, and I think about this often: he said he realised he was most interested in what happens to a game once it leaves its creators hands, so to speak. He liked to see what people did with it, which, given the interactive nature of games, makes sense. Games like to talk more about communities than any other form of media I’ve seen, even though it’s important to remember that this desperation is also what led us to GamerGate.
At the time Chris said this, I had a fairly intense crisis, acutely feeling like I was in the wrong job, before I worked out that just because freelancers become Swiss army knives of writing doesn’t mean everyone needs to be a critic, reporter and profiler all in one all the time. It’s okay to enjoy different media for different reasons, and today I’m proud to say I’m more interested in the art of making games than I am in its audiences — and that’s in part also due to what the audience has done to me. I think you should neither adore nor fear your audience under any circumstances, and I don’t want to generalise too much, but once I worked out I wanted to write rather for devs than for a general audience, no matter what role I was in, I felt something really click into place.
Given this however, it was perhaps inevitable for me to fall out of fandom a bit — I had both made a hobby my job, and it was also my job to look at what people get from games, which left next to no time to do what a lot a people get into a fandom for in the first place — to study their own feelings about something. Games were no longer dreams for me — they certainly still are a bit of magic, small miracles in and of themselves, but now that I at least partly understand what they do and why they do it, I can’t, for lack of a better word, dream about them. They are like a partner post-honeymoon.
Having a new fandom, by comparison, one so removed from your usual nerd passions, yet surprisingly familiar all the same, is as overwhelming and magical as it gets. I didn’t think I’d feel this way again, I’m not sure I ever did. You can precision-design games, films, shows, books for fandom activity, but a lot of it is passive, simply by the static nature of the medium. In sports, you’re barely done with today before you realise you have no idea what tomorrow brings.
Men in bib shorts
My poison of choice is pro cycling. Yes, look. I don’t know. I don’t know! That in itself is annoyingly inconvenient — no matter how long I think about it, I have no idea how my brain alighted on this particular sport. I know I watched a Netflix documentary on the Tour de France (Tour de France Unchained/Au Coeur du Peoloton) and then, when I realised the Tour de France was on when I finished watching it, wanted to know how the real sport compared to the narrative production of a documentary. I had tried this with golf only a few months prior to realise golf didn’t measure up to the image Netflix’s Full Swing had produced in me, but cycling made me want to try again.
The initial reason? Mountains. I love mountains. I made my first real attempts at hiking in Japan this year after I realised that I’d probably always had a thing for looking down mountains (which is wild seeing how on a normal day you can’t send me up a steep set of stairs), and it was immediately the best thing I’d done in my entire life. I turned on the Tour de France to see the Mont Blanc and was overcome with such an enormous feeling of want that for a moment, I forgot all about the sport. I realised with a start that the Alps were right there, as right there as mountains can be after you’ve flown for over 15 hours around the world to climb something.
To be fair, I’m not going to climb the Alps, but suddenly I was confronted with the possibility. Sometimes, that’s all it takes. And at first, that was enough to keep me with cycling, which for the most part, is pretty chill to watch. Commentators talk about French cheeses and old chapels, about rider and competition history that at the time didn’t make any sense to me. I left it on in the background and worked. Looking back on it, it was a bit of fun, and I missed nearly every really dramatic and important stage of that tour.
Then I learned about this guy.
This is an extremely Danish Dane called Jonas Vingegaard. There must be something about him, something I haven’t worked out how to talk about, because besides his sporting feats as now two-time Tour de France winner, there isn’t really anything remarkable about this dude. Maybe that’s it. He leads a life of such startling normalcy and domesticity, broken up into trips around the entire world to ride a bicycle, that for me, there really isn’t anything I could possibly be identifying with.
And yet, I looked at him, and I wanted to put his win into context, and I wanted to put him into context so I bought books, and I listened to podcasts, and a mere two months later I am sitting in my Tour de France t-shirt typing something about the Tour de France that actually still tells you nothing about what the sport is or why I’m now into it, because I’ve just realised that’s a wholly different point for another day.
What happened though, which brings us back to the point of this post, tenuous as it is, is that I wanted to engage in cycling fandom. For the first time in my life, I wanted to engage with other sports fans. I wanted to watch a sport, on TV, and live, and I wanted to talk to people about it, and I wanted to create fanworks for it.
The fervour of this wish baffled me. Unlike a new TV series or film, this wasn’t something that would inevitably make its way through my nerd bubble in games. I would have to sail uncharted waters, usually very male-dominated waters, and knew that wouldn’t be working for me as queer woman of colour. So I went on Tumblr, I asked, and I received in the form of a small cycling Discord server.
The only word I can use to describe what is happening right now is love, because any interest in fandom, academic or otherwise, doesn’t compare to what you get when you get into it with a bunch of kids. They’re not literally kids (not all of them), and I, as it turns out, am the loudest kid of all. Grandma’s thrown her walking aids away and she’s on the (dance)floor!
I surprise myself, perpetually. There is a creative energy here, from prose to coding projects, that I couldn’t describe, and that yet is extremely easy to describe somehow if you know anything about narrative design — give these people a good trope, and they’re off. For the first time in 15 (!) years, I got back into video editing. Every piece of news, every Instagram post, is carelessly curated but carefully dissected the minute we get off work and it’s time to pour over the race of the day in conversations that regularly involve little more than people going “did you see that!!”. Watching cycling now is at times like watching the world’s largest boy band concert, if any boy band member was ever allowed a name like “Uijtdebroeks”.
It’s wild that all this energy is available to me in the first place, although my time and love for games may have suffered for it, which I don’t know how I feel about yet. But I am having fun. I am unable, and unwilling to stop. It is a new thing in my life, at a time where new things are as rare as they are exciting.
It’s exciting in the way a complete habit change is, a thing that has the potential to accompany you for years to come or fall apart tomorrow, the love that fits a short bio:
This is Malindy. She loves Japan, Ace Attorney, Drag Race, illustrative art, books…and pro cycling.
Anyway, I’ll see you in France next summer.