Building tools to map the ludic everyday

Repurposing a WhatsApp group: How a fantasy cricket group transformed into a site of care and support during India's second wave of Covid-19

“…This study shows the various dynamics and processes that went into the creation of such a site of care and support and also highlights the different processes of curation, moderation, and sharing as the participants tapped into the inherent functionalities of the platform to make it their own and chose to “contain, regulate, amplify, and intensify” (Cumiskey & Hjorth p. 30) specific information depending on the circumstances they faced. The initiative shown by the participants of a group that was specifically created for trivial pursuits and to foster a spirit of camaraderie needs to be acknowledged, because earlier work from games studies (Deshbandhu, 2020) has shown that communities of players, and forums can serve as sites of support, although a transformation of this nature and magnitude is both unique and representative of the challenge the participants were facing. Our analysis also indicates the group members’ capabilities in harnessing WhatsApp's features as they became aware of the challenges posed by misinformation (Banaji et al, 2019) and the vulnerabilities faced by India's networked publics (Arora, 2019), and actively found ways to mitigate them.…”

“…The snowball technique was chosen because of its inherent ability to first identify participants who would meet the study's pre-set criteria and then subsequently help identify and gather other suitable participants from networks the participants already selected interacted with. The snowball technique has been found to be beneficial in earlier studies in the subfield of game studies and the specific context of fantasy sport because the questions asked in the survey are designed to be exploratory to extract qualitative information and achieve an in-depth understanding of the topic in question (Deshbandhu, 2019, 2020; Deshbandhu et al, 2022). In order to achieve diversity and variety in the participant pool, two parallel snowballs were set in motion to find participants.…”

“…It is March 2021. As India and its cricket-loving population gear up for a season of the Indian Premier League (IPL) -an elite cricket tournament that features professional athletes (cricketers) from more than 10 nations-the two of us decide to examine the tournament and its fanbase through the dimension of fantasy sport (Billings & Ruihley, 2013;Deshbandhu, 2019). Fantasy sport, primarily an online activity, is an ancillary sport service that is based on statistics from real-world sports.…”

“…In the Indian context, fantasy sport has been quite popular among the nation's networked publics for the last two decades. Pfanner (2004) records that there were over 750,000 players engaging with fantasy cricket in 2004, and Deshbandhu observed in 2019 that fantasy sport continues to remain a popular format in the country when he found that over 200,000 players from India had taken part in the Fantasy Premier League (the fantasy sport format based on the English Premier League annual football competition) between 2017 and 2019 (Deshbandhu, 2019). In addition, fantasy cricket, especially the game based on the IPL, enjoys considerable popularity in India because the recently concluded IPL 2022 had over 2.25 million participants registered on the league's official fantasy platform (https://fantasy.iplt20.com/season/league).…”

“…33-58) or "always on" (Boyd, 2012), because it was vibrant and active during its fantasy phase and soon transformed into a site where valuable information could be found. The participants felt that the WhatsApp group was the best place to share information and receive credible leads because of the bond they shared with fellow participants, and they mentioned how players of fantasy sport habitually searched for verified, reliable information as they engaged with their sports of choice (Deshbandhu, 2019). Teja notes:…”