Gaming Sports: Gambling and the Sports Media Complex examines games that are based on sports—like horse race and sports betting, fantasy sports, and March Madness brackets—and explores their relationship to sports and sports media. It seeks to improve common ways of understanding these games and to correct prevalent misconceptions. For example, gaming is often seen to be a supplementary add-on that is essentially corruptive to sports and sports fandom. Gaming Sports challenges this view and explores how gaming and gambling have always been part of commercialized sports leagues, sports media, and sports cultures. Indeed, gaming has an under explored role in explaining why certain sports rose to popularity, how sports leagues are organized, the way sports media covers sports, and how fans engage with sports. Gaming Sports tracks the development American sports-based games from colonization to the present to argue that gaming and sports have always influenced and been built upon each other.
