This entry deals with games and sports as a theme within sf. Games based on sf are treated under a wide variety of headwords branching out from theGames entry.

Just as sf's concern with theArts has been dominated by stories about the decline of artistry in a mechanized mass society, so its concern with sports has been much involved with representing the decline of sportsmanship. There was a marked tendency, in sf from the second half of the twentieth century, to assume that the audience-appeal of futuristic sports will be measured by their rendering of violence in terms of spectacle: the filmRollerball (1975), based on WilliamHarrison's short story "Roller Ball Murder" (September 1973Esquire), is perhaps the clearest expression of this notion. TheRollerball scenario is echoed in theVideogame seriesSpeedball (from1988).

There are two forms of stereotyped competitive violence which are common in sf: the gladiatorial circus and the hunt. The arena is part of the standard apparatus of romances in the Edgar RiceBurroughs tradition, and extends throughout the history of sf to such modern variants as that found in theDumarest series by E CTubb (1967 onwards). Combat between human andAlien is the basis of FredricBrown's popular "Arena" (June 1944Astounding) and a host of similar stories, while very many visions of a corrupt future society foresee the return of bloody games in the Roman tradition – FrederikPohl's and C MKornbluth'sGladiator-at-Law (June-August 1954Galaxy;1955; rev1986) is a notable example. In the new century, SuzanneCollins'sThe Hunger Games (2008) revisits thisDystopian theme in aYoung Adult context; this became the filmTheHunger Games (2012), with adaptations of novel sequels continuing the cinema franchise. TheBattleTechShared-World series (see also RobertThurston) moves the formula on to a galactic stage. Ordinary hunting is extrapolated to take in alien prey in such stories as theGerry Carlyle series by Arthur KBarnes (stories June 1937-Winter 1946Thrilling Wonder; coll1956 asInterplanetary Hunter), andMiniaturizing oneself to battle ferocious micro-organisms is a common future pastime in WilliamTenn's "Winthrop was Stubborn" (August 1957Galaxy as "Time Waits for Winthrop"; vt inTime in Advance, coll1958).

A familiar variant features human protagonists as the victims rather than the hunters; examples includeTheMost Dangerous Game (1932; vtHounds of Zaroff),The Sound of His Horn (1952) bySarban,Drag Hunt (1969) by JamesBroom Lynne,Come, Hunt an Earthman (1973) by Philip EHigh and many works by RobertSheckley, ranging from "Seventh Victim" (April 1953Galaxy) and "The Prize of Peril" (May 1958F&SF) – with its anticipation of associated realityTelevision – to such later novels asVictim Prime (1986) andHunter/Victim (1987); the original short "Seventh Victim" was adapted forCinema asLaDecima Vittima (1965; vtThe Tenth Victim) directed by Elio Petri. A notable series of relevant theme anthologies is the three-volumeStarhunters series (1988-1990) edited by David ADrake. The oft-presumed equivalence between the spectator-appeal of sport and that of dramatized violence reached a 1970s peak in NormanSpinrad's "The National Pastime" (inNova 3, anth1973, ed HarryHarrison) and the filmDeath Race 2000 (1975), later remade asDeath Race (2008). Further film examples includeTheRunning Man (1987) directed by Paul Michael Glaser,eXistenZ (1999) directed by DavidCronenberg andGamer (2009) directed by Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor.

An opposing trend is one which suggests that the people of the future might substitute rule-boundWargames for actualWars, thus avoiding large-scale slaughter of civilians. The idea was first mooted by George TChesney inThe New Ordeal (1879). Sf versions of it include "Occupation: Warrior" (March 1959Science Fiction Adventures UK) by JamesWhite, "Mercenary" (April 1962Analog; exp vtMercenary from Tomorrow1968) and its sequelThe Earth War (1963) by MackReynolds,The Cold Cash War (1977) by Robert LynnAsprin, theGamester War series begun withThe Alexandrian Ring (1987) by William RForstchen,Surface Detail (2010) by Iain MBanks and also a number of films, includingGladiatorerna (1968) andRobot Jox (1990).

The sf sports story is almost entirely a post-World War Two phenomenon, although the pre-World War Two pulps did feature Clifford DSimak's "Rule 18" (July 1938Astounding) – in which one of the ever-popular "all-time great" teams is actually assembled – and one or two rocket-racing stories, such as Lesterdel Rey's "Habit" (November 1939Astounding); and much earlier van TasselSutphen had included a couple of golfing-sf stories in hisThe Nineteenth Hole: Second Series (coll1901). Many early post-World War Two stories are accounts of man/machine confrontation (seeMachines;Robots). Examples include the golf story "Open Warfare" (May 1954Galaxy) by James EGunn, the boxing stories "Title Fight" (December 1956Fantastic Universe) by William Campbell Gault and "Steel" (May 1956F&SF) by RichardMatheson, theChess story "The 64-Square Madhouse" (May 1962If) by FritzLeiber, and the motor-racing story "The Ultimate Racer" (November 1964If) by Gary Wright (1930-2004), who also wrote a fine bobsled-racing sf story in "Mirror of Ice" (June 1967Galaxy). The numerous games played in PiersAnthony'sApprentice AdeptScience-and-Sorcery sequence include, inBlue Adept (1981), a version of American football with human-led teams of uncreatively obedientAndroid players. Rowdier ball games feature in Terry Pratchett'sUnseen Academicals (2009), in which theDiscworldCity of Ankh-Morpork tries to impose rules on the traditional violent scrummage of street football; and Lois McMasterBujold'sGentleman Jole and the Red Queen (2015 ebook; rev2016), whose "boot polo" is a violent game originating in the military, played on rough terrain with three teams, awkwardly placed goals (one underwater), and the added distraction of hostile alien fauna both inhabiting and being released at intervals into the playing area.

The changing role of the automobile in post-World War Two society provoked a number of bizarre extrapolations, including H ChandlerElliott's violent "A Day on Death Highway" (October 1963Galaxy), RogerZelazny's story about a car-fighting matador, "Auto-da-Fé" (inDangerous Visions, anth1967, ed HarlanEllison), and HarlanEllison's "Along the Scenic Route" (August 1969Adam as "Dogfight on 101"; inThe Beast That Shouted Love at the Heart of the World, coll1969). C MKornbluth'sThe Syndic (December 1953-March 1954Science Fiction Adventures;1953) features a macho form of polo in which armoured vehicles replace horses and the armoured ball is moved by bursts of fire from assault weapons.

Other popular sf themes are often combined with sf sports stories. Gambling of various kinds appears in manyESP stories, for obvious reasons, and superhuman powers are occasionally employed on the sports field, as in Irwin Shaw's "Whispers in Bedlam" (February 1969Playboy) and George AlecEffinger's "Naked to the Invisible Eye" (May 1973Analog). Stories which examine the possible impact of biotechnology on future sports include Howard V Hendrix's "The Farm System" (inFull Spectrum, anth1988, ed LouAronica and ShawnaMcCarthy) and IanMcDonald's "Winning" (inZenith 2, anth1990. ed David SGarnett). Full-length novels about future sport are relatively rare; examples includeThe Mind-Riders (1976) by Brian MStableford, about boxing, andThe Last Man Is Out (1969; vtThe New Atoms Bombshell1980 as by Robert Browne) by MarvinKarlins, aboutBaseball (which see for many further examples).

Cricket is relatively rarely encountered, though LordDunsany wrote several shortFantasies of supernatural or diabolical intervention in the game – including theJorkens tale "The Unrecorded Test Match" (inJorkens Borrows Another Whiskey, coll1954) – and MauriceRichardson'sThe Exploits of Engelbrecht: Abstracted from the Chronicles of the Surrealist Sportsman's Club (stories June 1946-April 1950Lilliput; coll of linked stories1950; exp2000) features the challenge of facing a literal demon bowler (this collection also offers surreal distortions of football, golf, wrestling and other sports). AndrewWeiner's "The Third Test" (Summer 1982Interzone #2) posits that a particular cricket innings is Earth's chief attraction for visitingAliens, while DouglasAdams wove the game's paraphernalia into an absurdistSpace Opera plot inLife, the Universe and Everything (1982); this storyline was originally submitted toDoctor Whocirca 1976 as "The Krikkitmen", but rejected by the current script editor. Tennis, like cricket, has few sf treatments: AldousHuxley'sBrave New World (1932) offers a throwaway line about the importation ofMathematics into the game with people of the year 623 After Ford playing tennis on a Riemann surface, while KeithRoberts's "Sphairistike" (February 1984F&SF) features a Wimbledon Centre Court player who may be anAndroid. InComics, AlanMoore'sMad Scientist characterAbelard Snazz invents giantRobot tennis-players in "The Multi-Storey Mind Mellows Out" (March 19822000 AD); unfortunately their personalities derive from the "bio-chips" of temperamental twentieth-century players, to disastrous effect.

Games are used as a key to social advancement and control in a number of stories, includingThe Heads of Cerberus (15 August-15 October 1919Thrill Book;1952) by FrancisStevens,World Out of Mind (1953) by J TMcIntosh,Solar Lottery (1955; vtWorld of Chance) by Philip KDick,Cosmic Checkmate (1962) by KatherineMacLean and Charles Vde Vet, and theApprentice AdeptScience-and-Sorcery sequence by PiersAnthony, beginning withSplit Infinity (1980). Some sf stories produce future or alternate worlds where games are fundamental to the social fabric, as in HermannHesse'sDas Glasperlenspiel (1943; trans M Savill asMagister Ludi1949; preferred trans Richard and Clara Winston asThe Glass Bead Game1969) and GeraldMurnane'sThe Plains (1982). A vicious games-based alien empire (whose incredibly complex game is called "azad") is successfully challenged by the protagonist of Iain MBanks'sCulture space operaThe Player of Games (1988), who believes himself alone in this endeavour but is an unwitting pawn of his own Culture. In other novels by Philip K Dick, includingThe Game-Players of Titan (1963) andThe Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch (1965), games function as levels of pseudo-reality. Still other works deploy games not as a central theme but as both local colour and a metaphor giving insight into the culture, as with the territorial game "kol" played in the fiercely competitive society of DonaldKingsbury'sCourtship Rite (1982; vtGeta1984), or the vaguely reversi-like "Ochmir" which explicitly mirrors the alien political background of MaryGentle'sGolden Witchbreed (1983). Sf writers who have shown a particular and continuing interest in games or sports include Barry NMalzberg, who often uses surreal games to symbolize frustrating and ultimately unbeatable alienating forces – as in the apocalypticOverlay (1972) andTactics of Conquest (1974), and in the quasi-allegoricalThe Gamesman (1975) – George AlecEffinger, who also uses game situations as symbols of the limitations of rationality and freedom, notably in "Lydectes: On the Nature of Sport" (December 1975Fantastic) and "25 Crunch Split Right on Two" (April 1975F&SF), and PiersAnthony, who often uses games to reflect the structures of his plots, notably inMacroscope (1969),OX (1976),Steppe (1976) andGhost (1988).

The game which has most frequently fascinated sf writers isChess, discussed at length in its own entry. FritzLeiber's slight "Knight's Move" (December 1965Broadside; vt "Knight to Move" inThe Book of Fritz Leiber, coll1974) uses two-dimensional battle games like chess and one-dimensional track games like Ludo to symbolize the opposing factions and ideologies of hisChange War series (seeChangewar). Solitaire games tend to be frowned on in sf as the domain of obsessives. A crossword enthusiast, for example, is so fascinated by the grid possibilities of Martian words in Evelyn ESmith's "BAXBR/DAXBR" (inTime to Come, anth1954, ed AugustDerleth) that he barely notices their context of imminent MartianInvasion; another, in ArthurSellings's "One Across" (May 1956Galaxy), is lured byBasilisk clues into visualizing a crossword diagram in fourDimensions, throwing him into a fraughtAlternate World; he escapes with difficulty and is "cured" of crossword addiction. The typically tricky hero of Eric FrankRussell's "Now Inhale" (April 1959Astounding) will be killed byAliens once he either wins or loses a game of his choice, and opts for a competitive version of "Tower of Hanoi" which, though strictly finite, requires an unfeasible 2⁶⁴-1 moves to complete. Life, a solitaire game rooted in theMathematics of cellular automata and popularized in MartinGardner'sMathematical Games column forScientific American, features in PiersAnthony'sOX (1976) and more subtly in GregEgan'sPermutation City (1994); the topological pencil-and-paper game Sprouts played in Anthony'sMacroscope (1969; cut1972) was another Gardner "discovery" announced in his column. Both Life and Sprouts were invented by UK mathematician John Horton Conway (1937-2020) and his associates.

In the late twentieth century the rapid real-world evolution of electronic arcadeVideogames and home-computer games sparked off a boom in stories and films where such games become too real for comfort. Often these are directed at adolescents: a game is used to conscript a space pilot inTheLast Starfighter (1984), for example, and Michael ScottRohan offers an early example of the arcade game that is more than it seems in "Vurfing the Gwrx" (inPeter Davison's Book of Alien Monsters, anth1982, ed anon RichardEvans).Space Demons (1986) by GillianRubinstein is not untypical in sucking its protagonists into a ruthless computer-games world, much as in the filmTron (1982). (See alsoCyberspace.)

Further notable examples of computer games in sf include "Dogfight" (July 1985Omni) by MichaelSwanwick and WilliamGibson,Octagon (1981) by Saberhagen,True Names (1981 dos) by VernorVinge,Ender's Game (August 1977Analog; exp1985) by Orson ScottCard,God Game (1986) by Andrew MGreeley,Only You Can Save Mankind (1992) by TerryPratchett andBedlam (2013) by ChristopherBrookmyre (see alsoVirtual Reality). Stories of space battles whose protagonists are revealed in the last line to be icons in a computer-game "shoot 'em up" seemed for a time to have succeededShaggy God Stories as the archetypal folly perpetrated by novice writers – although FredricBrown's similarly plotted "Recessional" (March 1960Dude), where the protagonists are chessmen, has been much anthologized (seeChess). Many computer-Game scenarios are, of course, science-fictional (seeVideogame), as are many of the scenarios used inRole Playing Games (see alsoGame-Worlds).

When it comes to inventing new games, sf writers have had limited success. There have been one or two interesting descriptions of sports played in low-gravity or gravity-free conditions, but these are usually incidental to the real concerns of the stories in which they occur; stories set inSpace Habitats frequently include descriptions of "Flying" games played in the vicinity of the rotational axis, and Robert AHeinlein's "The Menace from Earth" (August 1957F&SF) centres on flying as a leisure activity in an atmospheric storage cavern on theMoon. Sling-gliding, in which gliders are accelerated by massive steel whips, is a plausible and dangerous sport featured inThe Jaws that Bite, the Claws that Catch (1975; vtThe Girl with a Symphony in her Fingers) by Michael GConey. The team sport of hussade, which plays a major part in JackVance'sTrullion: Alastor 2262 (March-June 1973Amazing;1973), is not wholly convincing; the vaguely similar (in that play takes place over a water tank into which opponents are toppled) two-man combat game "kosho" inThePrisoner seems overtly parodic. TheBoard Game vlet in Samuel RDelany'sTriton (1976) is cleverly presented, but the details of play are necessarily vague. This game was first written about by JoannaRuss in "A Game of Vlet" (February 1974F&SF). InThe Shockwave Rider (1975), JohnBrunner gave full rules for the board game "fencing" – a roughly Go-like game of territorial enclosure on geometric principles – but learned to his dismay that game-theory analysis rendered its seeming complexities trivial. The filmQuintet (1979) revolves around the eponymous board and/or real-life game. TerryPratchett's laterDiscworld books feature the board game Thud, resemblingChess in that it is a game of stylized battle (here between dwarfs and trolls); the game was designed by Trevor Truran and is central to Pratchett'sThud! (2005).

GamblingCard Games, often only vaguely described, appear with some frequency. Examples include Bluff in Philip KDick'sThe Game-Players of Titan (1963), the improvised Fizzbin in the original-seriesStar Trek episode "A Piece of the Action" (1968), raffles in AlexeiPanshin'sStar Well (1968), Sabacc in theStar Wars universe, Damage in Iain MBanks'sConsider Phlebas (1987) – preliminary card-play is also of importance in the hugely complex game central to Banks'sThe Player of Games (1988) – Cripple Mister Onion in TerryPratchett'sDiscworld sequence, in particularWitches Abroad (1991) and Tall Card inFirefly (2002).

Games and sports are also very common inFantasy andScience Fantasy, especially that set inPost-Holocaust or primitive worlds, as in Piers Anthony's early trilogy (1968-1975) collected asBattle Circle (omni1977), orEclipse of the Kai (1989) by Joe Dever and JohnGrant, which features vtovlry, a rugby analogue played triangularly and with throwing-axes. Indeed, the metaphoric nuances of games enliven fantasy of all sorts, from the croquet andCard Games in LewisCarroll'sAlice books to the game systematization ofPsi Powers in Sheri STepper'sTrue Game series; in both cases the arbitrary and obsessive nature of games-playing becomes an image of life itself.

Relevant theme anthologies includeArena: Sports SF (anth1976) edited by Barry NMalzberg and Edward LFerman, andFuture Pastimes (anth1977) edited by ScottEdelstein. [BS/PN/DRL]

see also:Leisure.

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