The ritual production of time: How Daily, Seasonal, and Annual rituals mark time and contribute to the durability of communities.

Fantasy Sports is a game that predates its current iteration as a digitally mediated, networked experience. In analog form, communities of users in leagues got together in-person and drafted teams in person, while establishing a number of fun and engaging rituals around play. Many of these fun features remain in the now largely digital versions of the game. Rituals, sports and play are linked in many ways and relate directly to how communities spend, mark and pass time. While many product teams explicitly aim to maximize the time spent by users within their product, large investments of time are not sustainable in the long term as people move through the life cycle. The trade off then might be short term investment that does not retain users in the long run. This paper considers the way that time is perceived and made meaningful across the Fantasy Sports communities. It highlights the ways that time as a concept is built into products and engineering processes, and explores how time and ritual are related. It also considers how minimizing time spent in any given session helps create more durable rituals and sustainable communities over time (i.e., year over year), driving loyal and persistent users throughout the life cycle. This mixed-methods paper draws on two related sets of data. First, the authors conducted a large-scale survey of Fantasy Sport users followed by 50 semi-structured interviews (40 with Fantasy Sports users and 10 with Fantasy Sports developers). It focuses on how a sense of time is built into a product, how members of a community internalize that sense of time which further drives a sense of connection and meaning, and finally offers design and product recommendations for alternative metrics for valuing users time that run counter to prevailing wisdom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]