What football will look like in the future - Football 17776 Thread

Spoiler: chapter 6

the TRAIN yes god i love this

also I'M HAVING PIONEER 9 FEELINGS!!!! both about the real life spacecraft and the fictional character

 

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I love when a character so vividly summarizes the canon they're a participant in.

 

Spoiler: chapter 7

i am SO STOKED right now oh my god, what an amazing play

 

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Oh man, that train ride was so intense! I was never a football fan before, but now I'm totally spoiled; how is regular football supposed to compete with suspense like that?

 

Spoiler: chapter 7

HE UNCOUPLED THE CARRIAGES...... HOW ARE THEY GONNA RUN LIKE THIS!!!

GOD IM HOPING THAT ONE FO THEM MAKES IT AND THE OTHER MIGHT NOT BUT THEN THEY STILL GET TO LIVE TOGETHER AND BE IN LOVE!!!! FCUK

 

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i get the feeling he took so long with the carriages for fear of making it alone. Better he run out of time first and they fail together idea

 

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That's the feeling I was getting too - that he was deliberately running down the clock so that he won't have to choose between making the run alone or failing completely. The choice is out of his hands now, and not even the spacecraft can say for sure if he was actually having enough difficulty to merit burning all that time or if he was just sitting and waiting after he got the carriages uncoupled. They couldn't see what was taking him so long in there.

 

Spoiler: newest update

someone once talked about how they werent the biggest fans of 17776 bc it only focused on football and made it seem like humans only focused on that now, so i hope they read this update and get a nice chuckle out of it bc i sure the FUCK did

christ

imagine what fanfic is like in this future

 

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I have have been imagining fanfic with the deepest yearning, especially now that chess-monopoly-ttrpg+ is revealed to be a thing

 

Huh.

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As a non-American the focus on American football never stood out to me as, like. Significant in anyway, just a "yep, the yanks be like that". I fully assumed the rest of the planet has their own weird extreme public sports :D

EDIT: Imagine 17776-style ice hockey. I want it. Omg. Just glaze all the roads in the province over with ice and play on those, or something.

 

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I like that we get confirmation that he did run down the clock on purpose - made it so that the one of them who's got the best odds of making it through will have as much time as possible still on the clock.

I am also delighted and horrified by the chess player we see! Deliorified? Horrilighted? idk. Just, the sudden "here, have my conspiracy theory that you didn't ask for and that the POWERS THAT BE are trying to suppress by calling it made-up nonsense" and the equally sudden "heyyyy, do you want to go on a date? do you want this to be a date? because I think you, the person who literally cannot escape me at this moment, are very attractive and I would like to go on a date" combined with "btw, I think you and I should go back to my place - you should come with me, the person you literally only just met and who is being creepy and showing no understanding of boundaries, to a place I know and have control of" (and the "oh thank fuck, a phone call that will let me escape you" relief in her purely-textual-voice), and the implication that the referee actually had to step between him and Lori to keep him from pursuing her or preventing her from being able to leave.

Also the "oh what, did a sportsball happen?" sarcastic fury, when - yes. Yes, dude, a sportsball just happened. You were literally right there as it was happening on TV, and you got told with everyone else at the start that if football Happened, she'd have to pack up and leave and that this had already been discussed by the higher-ups and it had been decided that it'd be allowed and ruled as an emergency considering that being a football player is literally her job.

 

Spoiler

the chess player was a very intense That Guy.

"Have some conspiracy theories I know and you don't so you can be impressed and wowed by my knowledge!
You're new and not centuries worth of tired of me yet and existing while attractive, date me!!
Nothing says I'm interested in you and respect your autonomy in telling you that you owe me money for every minute you step away! Or in me scoffing the hobby you've been enjoying for thousands of years!"

The chess game: has some real possibilities.

Being That Guy: please no.

 

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I greatly admire UAB for their scope of vision now and their sheer dickery in the past and I feel bad for their players because yeah, that's not what winning feels like.

 

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It hasn't come up, but I wonder if there's a "no trades" policy of some kind in effect. Otherwise I'd imagine UAB would have haemoraged motivated players a long time ago.

 

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I suspect that there isn't a "no trades" policy, but that the way the rules and the fields are set up makes it very difficult for players to effectively swap around. Imagine trying to swap from the San Francisco team to anywhere else, for example - any player who's on that field is stuck until they build up enough time to make the run across the desert, even if they're on a different team. There may also be rules prohibiting players who drop out from just upping stakes and joining a different team.

 

Spoiler: Chapter 10

"Ha. 'People'."
I'm betting that that means that either the Sharks are just one singular person who enjoys fucking with everyone who goes through that lake, or it's a bunch of robots.

Also, I like that we've been shown that yeah, some teams are sucking because their self-enforced rules and traditions and strategies make things really suck for anyone trying to join. Like - sure, require everyone who's joining to play defense and stay on your field for a hundred years if you insist. But if you've got a field that really sucks in terms of creature comforts, you need to make up for that somehow if you're going to insist on it. They've got unlimited money, it's a post-scarcity world; they could outfit every defense player with really nice camping gear that would make up for there being a huge stretch of field that just sucks in terms of amenities.

Refusing to do that and refusing to make any concessions to people wanting to have a comfortable bed to sleep in, or a meal that's not awful, is setting yourself up for failure because you're insisting on new players 'putting in their time' and having to deal with the same awful crap that everyone else did.

(UAB doesn't play by those rules, I bet. There's a reason why they've managed to keep Val and everyone else who was in that playbook from a thousand years ago, and it's probably got to do with them treating their players well. Val was upset that they had forgotten the rafts - not that they didn't have rafts at all. And they all had (or were supposed to have) good boots for the trip, and probably good clothing too. They've probably got camping gear and aren't relying on being able to get to motels and rest-stops that are on the field.)

...hell, now I'm thinking about how I'd work with the home field that Nick and Manny have to cope with. Step one would be to make it so that players want to stick around long enough to rack up sufficient OBT that they can make the run to another field. So, make sure there's somewhere comfortable for them to sleep. Hire people to go for take-out, who won't get penalized for stepping off the field.
Step two would be making sure everyone's trained to make it safely to the next field. Make sure they can run the distance as quickly as possible, make sure they've got support and the gear needed for it.

Dealing with the Florida field would be easy in comparison. Step one? Give every defender the best camping gear we can buy. Good camp stoves and cooking equipment, a good all-weather tent that can be set up solo, make all of it as light as possible so they don't have trouble hauling it around with them. Step two, compensate the defenders for staying on the field - get people who won't be penalized for stepping off the field to make takeout runs, for example, and make sure they're getting good food. Step three, find a boat that can't be flipped as easily but will stay within the bounds of the field; you shouldn't be having to worry about a one in five chance of being dunked, make it a one in a hundred at the worst.

 

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What were the rules for interaction from people who weren't a part of the team, coaches and the like? What's stopping the teams from building new infrastructure, using that infinite time they have at their disposal, to make the homefield experience as comfortable as possible as a motivation for outfield players?

Also my money is on the Sharks being a team of one.

 

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I don't remember the exact entry, but there is a rule against adding structures or, I think, making your footballs unreachable? You can't even put them behind a locked door, and you also can't build new structures. New structures go against the idea of the game being designed by unknowing committee, and if you can just put your footballs in a vault then it ruins it for the other players.

 

Spoiler: Chapter 11

Fun to see confirmation of the legend of the sharks

Nine's text getting fainter at a couple points, checked the code - it's labeled "Nine fading" as opposed to just "Nine." :(

I really like the bit about "All that time, all those threads, weaving through something that must have been far too confusing to enjoy." followed immediately by a shot of some overlapping fields, depicted as threads of color in a confusing game.

The swearing and self insulting as they fade out completely made me want to give Nine a hug.

And that's a fun cliffhanger of a football situation.

 

Spoiler: Chapter 12

Oh!!! Oh okay, this ended up being about something completely different than I thought, but damn that last shot of the two markers meeting on the island may have wrecked me a little bit.

I wonder if this means 20021 will be following someone else entirely than Nick and Manny? I could still see the narrative of what they're gonna do now when one of them is completely out of OBT being interesting, but the options for what they can do seem to be laid out so well that IDK how they'd get the kind of narrative twist out of it that this series likes to pull.