Mobile League Sports Network: Sports Picks Preview

Friendly betting on outcomes is one of fandom's most common ways to enjoy sports; one need only look at the skyrocketing popularity of fantasy sports leagues on the Internet to confirm the popularity of predicting which team will win, and who will perform best. Digital Chocolate's new Mobile League Sports Network games, which were announced Monday, will seek to build an entire mobile community from this competitive urge. The first entry in the series, Sports Picks, will reward sports wisdom with mobile immortality...among your friends, at least. We've taken a look at a near-final version of DChoc's project, and we think that they may be on to something.

Basically, MLSN Sports Picks functions as a sort of clearinghouse for sports information and speculation. All kinds of popular American sports are represented here, from the big baseball, football, and basketball pro leagues to college sports and racing; a scrolling ticker at the bottom of the screen lists scores from around the sports world.

You can choose to either play a quick game or set up your own mobile league. In either case, you will be competing against other MLSN Sports Pick users; a quick game throws together a minitournament with other quick gamers, while a mobile league consists of five "matches," over a two-and-a-half-week period, against five fellow league members.

The competitive mechanism itself is pretty innovative, and potentially quite compelling. Instead of picking from real-life rosters, as you would in fantasy sports, or answering canned trivia questions, Sports Picks throws fresh predictive questions at you that are based on that particular day's sporting events. For example, if the Mets are playing on a particular night, Sports Picks will ask you a series of multiple-choice questions concerning the upcoming game--from the winner, to the total number of runs, to the performance of a particular player. DChoc has hired a full-time professional sports writer to churn out fresh content on a continuing basis, so the questions will probably be good ones.

Assuming that you've come up with answers in time, they'll be transmitted to a central server for scoring, and the results of your predictions will be compared against other players'. Here's the most interesting part of the concept: Even though you're competing against each other, players need not make predictions on the same questions, the same game, or even the same sport. In fact, you can set up your preferences to only show you sports you're interested in, if you're so inclined. This works because the questions will be generated across a range of difficulties. Harder questions will be worth more points than easier ones, and each player's questions will normalize to the same total amount of difficulty. This seems as though it'll work pretty well, if DChoc can manage to keep the point values consistent across sporting events.

MLSN Sports Picks will also make considerable use of connected features to keep gamers in the heat of the battle. Status symbols like badges will be presented to the best players, who will also be represented on systemwide, sports-specific leaderboards. Apparently, the game will also be capable of generating SMS invites. These can contain codes, so your buddies can be clued in to the existence of private leagues.

If all of its features can be made to work correctly, MLSN Sports Picks could easily become a phenomenon--especially given the viral distribution model. We'll start to find out for sure in October, when the game will start to appear on major carriers. Our full review will appear soon after that, so check back often.