Tuesday June 22, 2021
When the rulebook for the first ever Interplanetary Games was announced there was an outcry from the Martian and Lunar Colonies. All the competitions had to be held at Earth-standard gravity – in the eyes of non-Earth-based competitors this biased the Games in favour of the Earth-based countries. --UniverWiki entry date 3456 21:67 Everyone knew that the game was rigged. It had to be. It would be unfair if it wasn't. Physics dictated that it should be rigged, and so it was. You can't play if you don't know the rules, and at this point, no one could rightfully claim to know all the rules of the Interplanetary Games. They would fill a room, if printed barbarically on paper, with actual ink. Men and women stared at screens, through their filtered goggles, and they stuck to the sections that pertained to them. They pored over every word, trying to make out just how the game was supposed to be played, how it could possibly be engineered to be fair to everyone on the field. In the interim, though, the athletes were actually enjoying themselves. Because knowing the rules was impossible, effectively they got to make up their own. Because a sure-fire win was cheating, and cheaters didn't get asked to come back and play again, no one cheated. They simply took advantage equally. Audiences, to the surprise of the organizers, ate this up. They loved the enthusiasm of the participants. They laughed uproariously at the confusion of the commentators when an athlete simply made something up as they ran down a wall from the ceiling, instead of gliding along the floor like another did. It wasn't, in the end, about the win. It was about the play. The rooms filled with quiet, earnest rules-lawyers intent on finding out how to cheat faded into the past. It turned out what was really wanted was team spirit and games rigged with so many dodges that they put Rube Goldberg's best to the blush. The more rigging, the more fun. Which is why the IPGames are the most watched event every tenth year when they are held, by lottery, in the most unsuitable places. Because the lottery is rigged too, you see. It has to be.
****
My prompt this week came from AC Young with the paragraph I italicized above and added a faux citation to. I prompted 'Nother Mike with "If life is circular, and you never quite get fast enough to see yourself going around that corner, what happens when…." You can read their prompt responses, and join in on the fun, over at More Odds Than Ends.