The game story space of professional sports: Australian Rules Football

TL;DR

This paper analyzes the narrative structures of Australian Rules Football games by examining score trajectories, revealing a diverse spectrum of game stories and motifs that surpass random models in complexity and appeal.

Contribution

It introduces a novel framework for characterizing the 'game story space' in sports, specifically applying it to AFL to identify motifs and compare them with null models.

Findings

AFL games show a continuous spectrum of stories rather than discrete clusters.

Coarse-graining reveals motifs like last-minute comebacks and blowouts.

Real AFL games have more diverse motifs than biased random walk models.

Abstract

Sports are spontaneous generators of stories. Through skill and chance, the script of each game is dynamically written in real time by players acting out possible trajectories allowed by a sport's rules. By properly characterizing a given sport's ecology of `game stories', we are able to capture the sport's capacity for unfolding interesting narratives, in part by contrasting them with random walks. Here, we explore the game story space afforded by a data set of 1,310 Australian Football League (AFL) score lines. We find that AFL games exhibit a continuous spectrum of stories rather than distinct clusters. We show how coarse-graining reveals identifiable motifs ranging from last minute comeback wins to one-sided blowouts. Through an extensive comparison with biased random walks, we show that real AFL games deliver a broader array of motifs than null models, and we provide consequent insights into the narrative appeal of real games.