What fictional football games can tell us about play

Up until a few months ago, I never realized what the outside of a football stadium looked like. Or at least, I had never really committed the image of one to memory. As a concept, a football stadium isn’t so different from Citi Field, or the Billie Jean King Tennis Center, both of which I had seen in person in Queens: it’s a structure meant to house seating for the audience and an area to play for the athletes. But when I thought of football, an actual stadium like I would’ve imagined for baseball or tennis just didn’t come to mind, because the picture of “what football looks like” wasn’t relevant to my life. But I did begin to consider it when reading the multimedia piece “What Football Will Look Like in the Future.” And despite a very limited knowledge of football, I found that I still enjoyed the work and had something to take away from it—which eventually became the thoughts contained in this article. 

“What Football Will Look Like in the Future,” by Jon Bois, is available online and can be read here before you read the remainder of this article. (If you have sensitivity to quickly moving images on a screen, please keep in mind that some graphics on the site will move very suddenly.)  

While masquerading as a typical news article at first, “What Football Will Look Like in the Future,” better known as “17776,” is actually a narrative series set thousands of years in the future. Instead of a non-fiction article hypothesizing on the sport, 17776 posits a far-fetched theoretical scenario in which tangible human problems such as old age, hunger, and disease are no longer relevant, and humanity’s only prevailing problem is their own boredom. 17776 is a “football story,” viewing this premise based on how people would live through the lens of sports and entertainment. It was written by a sports writer, for a sports news site literally called “Sportsblog Nation”. I’m not a sports fan, much less a football fan (as you could probably ascertain), but I am invested in game design and development, so I appreciated the insight of the story into games and play—which may also be of interest to you.  

To offer a new perspective on the status quo that had been ongoing for so long, 17776 takes place from the perspective of a space probe, Pioneer 9, that gains sentience at the beginning of the story. Within alternating chapters, the story either focuses on a few human characters, or conversations between Nine and other space probes (I swear I’m not making this up), so that 17776 feels very personal and lived-in. In comparison to a more grounded article you may have expected about history or statistics on football, 17776’s narrative evokes a lot of emotions from its audience. It’s a very hopeful story, proposing the idea that even without problems and conflicts we traditionally consider challenging, we would still find something “purposeful” in our lives, no matter how inconsequential what we value (such as games) may seem to others. 

Something a game designer considers when thinking about why we as humans play games is that people inherently have the ability to “play.” We are naturally capable of performing activities that constitute as play, such as passing as a ball around or splashing in water, and in fact engaging in play is something we may require to live. “Games” define rules, space, players, materials, mechanics, limitations that we can play in. In 17776, nearly every avenue of human potential seems to have been exhausted—but games have not. It certainly feels like the humans featured in 17776 are trying to push games to their absolute limit: spending hundreds of years on a single game, expanding boundaries of their games across entire states, adding tens or hundreds of players, launching giant footballs across the country, and creating other wacky and outlandish approaches to football. But throughout it all, there’s almost an impending sense of doom, as if these people are wasting away their time staving off an inevitable force. But the issue is really a lack of that “force,” of physical conflict, because there is no longer the threat of death to characters living in 17776. It might not be so simple to say that participating in play is preventing boredom for these characters, because maybe more so than it does for us, playing games fulfills a need they have in their lives. 

From the moment Pioneer 9 and the audience begin experiencing the narrative through a newcomer’s point of view, a creeping sense of dread starts to take root. Why are these people spending so much time on these pointless games? If these games are so inane or worthless, isn’t there something more worthwhile humanity could be doing with their extended time? If all humans are immortal, sickness is cured, and physical needs are no more; what else could they even do with this additional time? If humans are stooping to playing aimless games because they have nothing better to do, then hasn’t humanity devolved, deteriorated, or lost something in some way? 

But the point of 17776 is that they haven’t. Despite the absurdity of the football games humans have contrived before Pioneer 9 (and by proxy, the real-life audience of 17776) enters the scene, these “aimless” games actually add goals, create challenges, and encourage motivations for their lives. Games give them something to chase after (figuratively and literally), something to lose, something that is limited or valued or matters to them. Participating in games gives the characters their stories, not just to us as readers, but to themselves in the world they live in, driving their sense of purpose. Their games are set in an environment that adds enough uncertainty that characters know their goal won’t just be handed to them, “fixed” like the other problems of the world. It’s the same way how in real life, you might follow someone playing a game or a sport because you’re invested in their story and the personal narrative they built up playing their game. And how games give players enough risk that they can actually feel a challenge or fear of losing, so that the rewards they do get feel valuable. The lives of characters in 17776 do not lack meaning because they are playing football instead of doing something “productive.” Being able to play is what adds significance to their lives. 17776 is reassuring in that it conveys to readers sports and games can be and are meaningful, and so are the lives we lead, no matter how “dumb” or “pointless” they may seem from the outside. 

A “historical” date of note in 17776 is April 7th, 2026, which is set as the date when all humans stopped aging in the events before the story begins. You may note that, in the real world, this means we now live in the early beginnings of 17776’s timeline—though it certainly doesn’t feel like we’re all about to become impervious to death and solve all of humanity’s problems. The decisions we make now may feel meaningless for entirely different reasons than to 17776’s characters. But even with the stark contrast between our real world and 17776, its story may bring you some comfort in suggesting that when boiled down to our nature, we like to play games, come up with silly ideas to entertain ourselves, and spend time with each other.