New fantasy soap league presents drama as sport
From Gina Keating

LOS ANGELES—If watching soap operas is your passion, then fantasy game designer Erica Salmon is betting Fantasy Soap League will become your sport.
The Walt Disney Co.’s SoapNet announced the Web-based fantasy site on Friday at its annual Super Soap Weekend in Florida in a bid to attract women aged 18 to 34, and add a social dimension to the six-year-old soap TV channel.
The game works along the same lines as fantasy football, in which real-life players are chosen for virtual teams and results are based on statistics from actual games. Fantasy Soap players will pick three male and three female actors and five “soapy moments” from nine U.S. network soaps, and score points depending on what the actors’ characters do.
Taking off clothing, waking up from a coma, getting an organ transplant, day dreaming or “monologuing” — when an actor stands alone in a room talking to himself — are each worth a hefty 50 points in Fantasy Soap League.
Kissing or slapping someone, pleading, lurking or eavesdropping can also boost scores. Players also win points if any of the five “soapy moments” they choose occur on any soap opera over a 10-week period. During the site’s six-week test, the top-earning character, Fancy Crane of “Passions,” scored big for being held prisoner by a murderer. The site, www.soapnet.go.com/fantasy/, was available for signup on Friday and points start accruing on November 13. It costs $9.99 to play for 10 weeks. Salmon and the Soap Squad, a nine-member team who monitor the soaps daily and count up points for the game, came up with the point system based on similarities in all soap plot lines.
“The game is only fun when you’re earning points,” said Salmon, who launched her own Fantasy Fashion League last year as an answer to her boyfriend’s addiction to fantasy sports.
SoapNet General Manager Deborah Blackwell said the Fantasy Soap idea was in the works for two years, spurred in part by the success of sister network ESPN’s Fantasy Football League.
Like ESPN, SoapNet enjoys a high degree of viewer loyalty, according to Nielsen ratings, and the soap network wanted to emulate ESPN’s robust online presence as well. “We saw how much fun ESPN viewers have with Fantasy Football,” Blackwell said. “The game rewards people for something they already are doing and it encourages sampling of other soaps.”
ESPN began offering fantasy sports online in 2005, and its free Fantasy Football League has emerged as the most popular by far, ESPN spokesman Paul Melvin said. “Part of that is because of the frequency of the games - it takes much less time to work on your roster and pick your players when you have a week between games to do it,” he said.
ESPN does not release statistics on the number of players who participate, but Melvin said estimates for the entire industry peg the number at 16 million to 20 million.
Fantasy football players generate four times as many Web page views as other ESPN.com viewers and watch about three times as much football on TV, Melvin said. More than 3 million users play Yahoo! Sports fantasy football, each spending an average 90 minutes a month on the site, a Yahoo! spokesman said. As well as basic free games, Yahoo Inc. also offers premium fantasy games for $24.95 per team and $124.95 for a league of up to 20 teams.
SoapNet will offer no real prizes or money for its league, but its designers think winning the title of “Queen of the Fantasy Soap League” will be enough for hard-core soap fans.