Social Media, Facebook Games, and Fantasy Sport

Abstract

Perhaps more than any other form of gaming, social games have been significant in their popularisation of gaming and the dispersal of small and casual games to a broad demographic, not least due to their more recent migration to mobile devices. The immense uptake of social games through SNSs—though often short-lived for any particular game—has resulted in the diffusion of gaming throughout the everyday lives of people across place, age, gender, and socio-economic difference (see the next chapter for an example of the rise and fall of Happy Farm). Although social games might be broadly understood as those that embed some form of social interaction as essential to gameplay, since the deployment of small games into SNSs, the term ‘social game’ is now used by publishers, developers, players, and game theorists to refer to games that are played within SNS platforms such as Facebook (Whitson and Dormann 2011).