Agency on Trial in Daily Fantasy Sport

Abstract

The New York Attorney General filed a lawsuit against DraftKings and FanDuel in 2015 accusing them of operating illegal gambling platforms. Using actor–network theory, we show how DraftKings, FanDuel, the New York Attorney General, critics, and legislators were preoccupied with how much agency players possessed. They also understood agency as emerging from a sociomaterial arrangement of human and nonhuman entities and saw how agency could be enhanced or limited by introducing new rules, technologies, and constraints. We compare this perspective on agency with theories typically used in sociology of sport and we consider how sociologists can intervene in sport agency.

Productive play: The shift from responsible consumption to responsible production

“…This work categorizes emergent forms of Internet-mediated play in relation to gambling in order to clarify for regulators “consumption risks” stemming from the convergence of gambling with other media (Lopez-Gonzalez and Griffiths, 2018: 809). Complicating consideration of consumption risks, studies of DFS consumers emphasize how “consumption measures” (e.g., frequency and time spent gaming) are “poor” indicators of the risks or harms experienced by consumers (Macey and Hamari, 2018: 349) and point to consumer agency as a key locus of inquiry (McLeod et al, 2019). This nascent work on DFS illustrates the need for more empirical study of an apparently highly mutable form of play.…”