This week the hosts threaten to jump immediately into the topic of SPORTS IN SPACE but instead bicker about definitions for like 10 minutes…feel free to jump in around 13 minutes in, save yourself the grief…

Episode #54 – Sci-Fi Sports!

The volume is a bit off this episode, tried to compensate but we’ve been working around levels problems for the last few episodes. There must be a pattern. Maybe it’s soft-spoken lizards.

Show Notes

♃ 01.54 – What is a sport? We have no answers. It seems ultimately like a sport is something that your culture defines as a sport. But generally, some combination of “it has rules,” “it requires skill,” “it is athletic,” “it is fun,” “it is competitive” is at work. Corbeau postulates a continuum from ping-pong to tiddlywinks, and somehere along there it stops being sport, for some people…Is hunting a sport? The hosts are on the fence. Around here three of the four hosts decide to play devil’s advocate for five exciting minutes. Why isn’t competitive lawnkeeping a sport? This particular bit of trial by minutia is an extension of much of a full week of devil’s advocate.

Sci-fi sports more often than not seem to be created by adding “in space or low gravity,” “with wheels,” and “to the death” to any existing sport. There’s your template. Go.

Most of the sports write-ups can be found over on this extensive blog post about the various games. Pop that one open while the soothing voices chatter.

♃ 11.42 – Corbeau hates quidditch.

♃ 13.15 – getting into HSD, and away from devil’s advocate, we talk about the four or five canon sporting events from Sound and Silence. Proving Grounds, The Drop, Linerunning, hook, maybe arena battles

♃ 19.10 – Creating new Sol sports. We talk about what fits the various corporations for a long while. YT really wants to include Artificial Intelligences in Spyglass. Corbeau disagrees.

♃ 28.43 – A brief aside about including sports in your game. The hosts generally are against playing a game within a game, except in a stylized sort of way.

♃ 29.56 – what, we actually get to the topic? Sci-fi games from literature…

♃ 30.22 – Microhunting from “Winthrop was Stubburn,” big game hunting for the smallest life forms.

♃ 31.25 – Wu Liu, hybrid kung-fu and figure skating.

♃ 32.22 – Wallrunning – mountain/wall climbing but with arbitrary gravity obstacles

♃ 33.16 – The Minerva Sierra Challenge, a day-long cyborg trek across the Sierra Madres

♃ 34.20 – Brokian Ultra-Cricket, a Douglas Adams parody

♃ 34.58 – a few anti-sports from Brave New World, and a brief aside about how Brave New World may be on the same timetable as HSD. Brave New World sports emphasize consumerism over playability.

♃ 36.40 – Anime, beginning with Rugball from Space Adventure Cobra, Lifting from Eureka Seven, Flying Circus from…a series with quite a long name…Megaloboxing, Tank Girls…

♃ 39.02 – Television, starting with Pyramid from Battlestar Galactica, then Parises Squares

♃ 41.08 – Kosho from The Prisoner (it’s kind of like trampoline-jousting), and a staff-fighting game from Star Trek

♃ 43.04 – Games from movies, starting with Jugger (post-apocalypse basketball), Arena Football from Starship Troopers, Motorball from Alita Battle Angel.

♃ 44.34 – some random games from other RPGs, beginning with a few from the Warhammer series.

♃ 45.10 – a long bit on Shadowrun’s “Urban Brawl,” an urban blight-based destructive soccer game which may have a few applications for your Shadowrun game

♃ 48.00 – XCrawl, the tongue-in-cheek, pay-per-view dungeon crawl game.

♃ 49.44 – a few “historical” games, Chessboxing and Fox-Tossing. Do with these what you will.

♃ 52.54 – back to Sol, going through some homebrew ideas for Sol sports, begining with The Big Game from Pulse.

♃ 54.44 – Whines unveils his vision of Giant Robot Ball.

♃ 56.48 – “Rebound,” with thanks to Tygon, and Joiner at 58.14, ball-and-hoop games possibly from Marsco and IRPF, respectively.

♃ 1.00.06 – Pnepjyit, it’s like falconry with cuddly empathic space octopi

♃ 1.03.14 – Platformer, a joint ASR/Pulse project, half traditional ball-and-hoop, half spontaneously programmed platform game.

♃ 1.04.31 – A sort of fascist flag corps/martial arts “game” for Progenitus, a corp which gave me a lot of trouble in this project…

♃ 1.06.19 – Deka, a concealed-rules version of soccer for Spyglass and almost no-one else. This one is based heavily on the granddaddy of concealed rules games, “Mao.”

♃ 1.09.15 – Ashtaar plugs his bio-pokemon concept from our recent Sunday game.

♃ 1.11.30 – This week, all hosts agree on the recent “aerogel on Mars” story as being the hot pick for the week.

With thanks to Sirius Beat for our intro music, “Future Club,” and outro music, “Tronicles.” Our fun, modular header art is by Absyfield , (Thank you Ashley!) and Whines is our audio engineer.