Living in a World of Fantasy Can Be Dehumanizing When is a man's flesh and blood, pain and joy reduced to nothing but statistics: soulless numbers to be bought and sold? When he is a fantasy football commodity. So it seemed this month in the days after the death of the 2-year-old son of Adrian Peterson, the Minnesota Vikings" star running back. A man who lived with the child's mother was accused of inflicting the injuries that led to his death. But those who had invested a first-round pick in Peterson, fantasy football's crown jewel in 2012, fretted that the anchor of their teams might be unavailable for the Vikings" Week 6 game against the Carolina Panthers. Should Peterson's fantasy owners trade him? Or bench him? Or get his backup off the waiver wire? Or would Peterson, the consensus No. 1 fantasy draft pick, channel his anger, confusion and grief into a statistical day for the ages? Peterson, in the wake of his son's death, gained 83 yards on 13 touches against Carolina. It was among his lowest fantasy outputs in the past couple of seasons. This was just the latest example of the way fantasy football dehumanizes the players at the center of the game, perhaps no more than fantasy baseball or basketball or golf, but magnified by football's popularity. To play the game well is to ignore allegiances to players, to bar emotion from decision-making. Along the way, people become objects. Their humanity is lost, as is ours. I had a front-row view of the frantic, widespread reaction to Peterson's son's death because I write for four fantasy publications, keeping tabs on every fluctuation in the fake football marketplace. I'm also the author of "How to Think Like a Fantasy Football Winner," which preaches the importance of seeing football players as commodities - the key to taking a dispassionate stance on player evaluation. I don't apologize for that cold, calculating message. Muddying weekly fantasy decisions with emotional biases would be akin to playing poker based on gut feeling and on the excitement of the moment. I would be lying, however, if I said the Peterson case didn't make me rethink the crux of my book and the way I approach the game. Fantasy football has become a national obsession, played by more than 24 million Americans who sustain a $1.2 billion industry, according to the Fantasy Sports Trade Association. Fueling that obsession, along with an insatiable need to have action - rooting interest - in every N.F.L. game every season, is the understanding of numbers, and how to use them to beat buddies, relatives, co-workers and strangers alike. That never-ending slicing and dicing of numbers drives fantasy footballers to be better. It also converts the men on the playing field to statistics. Instead of a young running back on the verge of a contract that would mean financial security for his family, we see a glistening yards a carry. Instead of an aging quarterback making one last run at glory, we see completion percentage and red-zone efficiency. Renee Miller, a neuroscientist at the University of Rochester, has examined fantasy games" dehumanizing effect. "In fantasy football, we're valuing players according to what they can do for us," said Miller, the author of "Cognitive Bias in Fantasy Sports: Is Your Brain Sabotaging Your Team?" The fact that we are using football players for our own purpose necessitates our distancing ourselves from them. They are people, but people who work for us, and with whom we have no personal contact. The most common fantasy football language, including the concept of "buying low" on underperforming players and "selling high" on those who are playing above their heads, breeds the sort of accepted dehumanization that goes mostly unnoticed in fantasy circles. "I do think that using language we apply to commodities for human beings is a dangerous game," Miller said, adding that she was sickened by some of the fantasy Twitter chatter in the hours after Peterson's son died. It is fascinating how people can be so selfish and self-centered to think only about how that unspeakable event would affect their chances on Sunday in a game. Fantasy football strips N.F.L. players of their personhood every season, as the Houston Texans" star running back, Arian Foster, discovered last December when he left a game with an irregular heartbeat. His fantasy owners took to Twitter to berate him, wishing him all the worst in his recovery. Foster had, after all, cost many fake footballers a championship, and that was all that mattered to them. John Sarmento, a fantasy football writer and part of the popular 2Mugs podcast, said the online game's dehumanization did not escape him, even if most who dedicate untold hours to assembling their weekly lineups were unaware. "I've often wrestled with the terms buy, sell and owner as it pertains to the every-week cycling of fantasy football," Sarmento said, "but I'm not sure we have a viable alternative." Sarmento added: "It is, after all, fantasy football. It's nearly as absurd as being the lord of the manor, or a dragon master in a medieval role-playing game. Maybe the everyday lexicon will change at some point, but until that time, we need to realize that it's merely a role-playing game," and that being a fake general manager is just that, fake. Perhaps it's just our instinct to care about others, and realize that while football is a violent game, fretting over statistics at the risk of said violence is a petty and selfish exercise. A game within a game. C. D. Carter, the author of "How to Think Like a Fantasy Football Winner," writes fantasy columns for TheFakeFootball.com, 4for4.com and XNSports.com.