Spellsports
designer, at Hidden Switch, 2022
A fantasy sports card game for ESPN, in which every professional basketball player gets a card written in his own character, with the numbers on it driven by his real games.
Fantasy sports reduces an athlete to a row of numbers feeding a scoring formula. Spellsports for ESPN inverts that: every player in the league has a card written in his own character, and the numbers on it come from what he actually did last night.
The best shooter in basketball has a card that says he always makes the three. Rudy Gobert blocks the points from two players and has a one in five chance of blocking a third, close to his average. Draymond Green, who is always arguing with officials, silences a referee. Patrick Beverley fouls in proportion to how much he fouls. When Kevin Durant sat out injured in February 2022, his card fell from twelve and twelve to one and one, and every copy in circulation held the diminished version until he played again.
Cards carry a season, so a rookie year and a peak year are different objects, and a player who has declined keeps the better card as the collectible. A great play can be printed as a card the same night it happens. Nobody moves a player around a court: eight players draft, build a starting lineup, and watch the machine read the cards aloud against each other until somebody reaches a hundred. The form comes from autobattlers rather than from anything requiring skill at basketball.