![]() ![]() But 17776 isn’t just an experiment with form Bois is a startlingly sensitive writer, and scrolling through his simple, color-coded dialogue feels like looking at the 1967 photo of Earth taken by an astronaut on the Apollo 8 mission: lonely, but awe-inducing. An epic reminiscent of Infinite Jest, it’s a dazzlingly idiosyncratic work of art that is equal parts exercise in speculative game design, history of a dying empire, and fable about the meaning of play, humanity, and technology. With their newfound immortality, Americans have developed more and more baroque constellations of rules for their favorite game, sending their players on elaborate, millennia-long scavenger hunts across the country. ![]() Told through text interspersed with video and graphics that mix satellite imagery, newspaper clippings, and Telestrated sports-field diagrams, the story follows the sentient space probe Pioneer 9 as it flies over the United States of the future: a land in which no one dies any more, but everyone still loves football. Four years after its first chapter was published on SB Nation in 2017, Jon Bois’s serialized multimedia novella 17776: The Future of Football is still my favorite (and some of the only) “new media” lit online. ![]()
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