Fictional Sport

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

The sport equivalent to the Fake Band: A "real" sport invented for the work itself which is played in the 'verse of the work, with clear rules that could actually be followed if the sport were real (that is, not Calvin Ball). Can become Defictionalized if someone manages to create feasible real-life rules for the game. This is somewhat limited by what type of universe it exists in. If its one that's made up, but still follows real laws of physics (eg. a fake card game), no problem. However, if it uses advanced technology or magic, its a bit hard to recreate. That said, you'll be amazed how creative fans can be.

Sometimes a Blood Sport.

Examples of Fictional Sport include:

Anime and Manga

Comic Books

Film

  • Rollerball. both the 1975 original and the 2002 remake, involve a future sport roughly based on roller derby, but with motorcycles added to the track, and a steel ball introduced into the rink via an air cannon. It was meant to sate the public's taste for violence and gore, to keep the masses manageable.
  • Baseketball. The game is a combination of H-O-R-S-E and beer league softball, mixed with a little streetball smack talk. The object of the game is to make your way around the bases by shooting a basketball into the hoop for a variety of distances. The longer the shot, the more bases you earn. Players are allowed - and encouraged - to insult and troll the opposition with foul language, the dirtier the better. Well, what do you expect from Matt Stone and Trey Parker?
  • Jugging, from the film The Blood Of Heroes, actually inspired fans in Germany to play the sport for real.
  • Star Wars:
    • The Phantom Menace shows the sport of podracing: like a chariot race with jet engines instead of horses.
    • Attack of the Clones: In the background of the bar scene, a viewscreen shows droids playing a ball game. According to Expanded Universe sources, the game is Nuna-ball: similar to football, but usually played with a nuna (a living creature that inflates like a pufferfish) instead of a ball. Another game can be seen, which looks like droid football.

Literature

  • Harry Potter: Quidditch, natch.
    • Defictionalized as Muggle Quidditch. One of the ways of getting around the fantastical elements of the sport is that the Snitch is a neutral party that runs around not just the field but also (or at least in college games) all over campus as well.
  • In Artemis Fowl, zero-G and garbage wrestling are mentioned.
  • Young trainees at the Assassins' Guild engage in the Discworld sport of edificeering, which is competitive free-climbing in an urban environment. Possibly inspired by Le Parkour.
  • Scavage and Counterchance in the Liaden Universe. Bowli ball might also apply, but it's more like a (literal) Happy Fun Ball.
  • The live-action Games from the Dream Park series could probably be staged today, if low-tech alternatives to holographic enemies could be adopted: it'd just be insanely expensive. A low-tech version of the Crystal Maze from The California Voodoo Game could likewise be produced, given a massive budget for construction and design.
  • Moopsball, a now-fading element of geek culture created by Gary Cohn that first appeared in issue 18 of Damon Knight's Orbit series in 1976, and whose rules make Quidditch look dull and uninteresting.

Live-Action TV

  • Star Trek has 3-D chess. What? Chess is a mind sport!
    • In later series has characters playing Parrises Squares in the holodeck.
  • Pyramid and Triad in Battlestar Galactica.
  • A 2nd series episode of Look Around You had a feature on gonnis (golf tennis).
  • An episode of the Finnish sketch show Kummeli had a sketch on Tamping, a fictional sport where the participant must travel the world and cover every square inch of the world with his own clown-shoe footprints - that is, to step on absolutely everything in the world. The sketch also served as a vehicle for puns related to feminine hygiene products: The sketch mentions one man who has tamped the entire world three times: Kenji Nakami, also known as the Tampon, and one square acre of tampable territory is known as a Tampax.
  • Kosho, in The Prisoner straddles the line between Fictional Sport and Calvin Ball in that its rules were never codified but it was played on-screen. Whatever the game is, it involves trampolines, padding, martial arts, and a pool of water.

Newspaper Comics

Tabletop Games

  • The Shadowrun supplement Shadowbeat includes full descriptions of the new Sixth World sports of Combat Biker and Urban Brawl, as well as information about how cyberware has revolutionized boxing, baseball, basketball, and (especially!) American football.
  • Alphatians in the Mystara Dungeons & Dragons setting are big-time fans of a team sport called hardball, which is played on a court divided into squares and involves a lot of complicated passing between players.
  • The Illuminati University setting for GURPS makes mention of the school Moopsball team. For details on Moopsball, see the entry in the Literature section.

Toys

  • Bionicle has Kolhii—a cross between hockey and lacrosse that can be played with two or three teams. Also Ailini, played by throwing disks through hoops, while simultaneously sliding on disks on a shifting field.

Video Games

  • Final Fantasy X: Blitzball.
    • Not to be confused with another sport also called Blitzball, as seen in Knowles' A Separate Peace.
  • Neopets gives us the Altador Cup and Gormball.
  • Star Control: Frungy, frungy, frungy!
  • World of Warcraft has footbomb, a dangerous cross between football and dodgeball, played by goblins.
  • The eponymous martial art in Star Wars: Masters of Teräs Käsi. This was "created" specially for the game's Excuse Plot although the rules regarding it are pretty vague. Combatants in the Fighting Game can use a wide variety of punches, kicks, and throws, and use any weapon they're familiar with, even lightsabers and blasters.

Web Comics

Web Original

  • Red vs. Blue: Grifball, which became so popular, less than three years after its inception, it was the only sport played.

Western Animation

  • Futurama has Blernsball. There are actually two episodes centered around it, and it changes almost completely between viewings. The first time, Fry looks like an idiot for using baseball terminology, but the second, it's almost identical to baseball.
  • The Legend of Korra brings us "Pro-Bending". Teams composed of one water-bender, one fire-bender and one earth-bender compete against each other, trying to gain the most territory or knock out as many opponents as possible before time runs out.
  • Dinoball in Dinosaur Train.
  • The Beetlejuice cartoon had the All-Ghoul Games, a team competition with various Netherworld-themed events, like the Troll Vault (similar to a pole vault, but with an angry troll as a hazard to vault over), Freight Lifting (having to out-wrestle a locomotive), the Cookie Toss (swallowing a plate of cookies with the goal of puking them the the longest distance; Beetlejuice wins this one easily), and Sludge Polo (like water polo, but riding inflatable pool horses in a pool full of slime.)
  • In How the Grinch Stole Christmas!, the Grinch describes a "noisy game" the Whos play called Zoozittacarzay, which is "a roller-skate type of lacrosse and croquet".
  • One episode of He-Man and the Masters of the Universe (2002 version) opens with Adam and Teela playing a game that resembles volleyball, except that the two players play on multiple levels of hovering cubes suspended in the air.
  • The Batman Beyond episode "The Winning Edge" features a sport that seems to be a cross between handball and hockey, full-contact, with teams of multiple players trying to knock a flying puck into a slot on the other team's wall. (The jersey is described as a "hockey outfit" in a later episode.) The plot for the episode has Terry investigating the use of performance-enhancing drugs called "slappers" by one of the teams.
  • Laff-A-Lympics had nutty events in every episode. Some were cartoon versions of real-life events you'd see in Battle of the Network Stars, but others were unique, like Dragon Racing, where the competitors raced with the giant dragon puppets used in Chinese parades.
  • In The Owl House, students at Hexside School of Magic and Demonics play "The Game" as Gus calls it. The playing field looks like a basketball court, but you score by throwing the opposing players through the hoops. "I hate this game!" shouts one player right before that happens to her.
    • Later, an episode is focused on Grudgby, a popular sport at Hexside (possibly the same as "the Game"), formerly played by Bump, Eda, and Lilith, currently played by most of the younger main cast. It's very similar to rugby, but on a field with numerous magical hazards, and more of a contact sport. Spell-casting may or may not be allowed depending on consent of the players. There is a Golden Snitch of a sort called the Rusty Smidge, which is used to make a blatant Take That towards such a concept. Team Grudgby requires three players per team, but as Eda and Lilith demonstrate, it can be played one-on-one.

Real Life?

  • Real Life example (in that it could be played, it's just too complicated and dangerous today) that shows up in some french Historical Fiction: "Soule", a kind of cross-country/inter-village wrestling meet/capture the flag/rugby match where the goal is to get a pig's bladder from one village to another, with the opposing villagers trying to stop the others. Chaos guaranteed, bone fractures not uncommon, Hilarity Ensues. It almost always seems better than it sounds, too...
  • Medieval England (and later centuries) had some fairly gruesome sports no longer played for safety reasons. Peasant jousting involved two people skating towards each other on ice and trying to knock each other down with a stick, which often resulted in severe injuries or death. Early soccer/football was played between entire towns, and the goal was to kick an inflated pig's bladder between the gates of the other town's cemetery; there were no rules and serious injuries or deaths were common.
Retrieved from "https://allthetropes.org/wiki/Fictional_Sport?oldid=1976566"