Harry Potter: The Chasers throw the Quaffle and put it through the hoops to score. So — that's sort of like basketball on broomsticks with six hoops, isn't it?
Oliver Wood: What's basketball?
Oliver Wood: What's basketball?
The sport equivalent to the Fake Band: A "real" sport invented for the work itself which is played in the 'verse of the work. Different from Calvinball in that the sport actually has consistent rules that could be followed, at least in theory, although for obvious reasons there will likely be some gaps in our knowledge of the game rules.
These are sometimes defictionalized if the source material gives enough information for fans to base it on (and sometimes even if it doesn't). How difficult this is to do and how accurate a recreation is even possible varies pretty significantly, of course. A fake card game can be created pretty easily, while a sport requiring advanced technology, magic, or superhuman athleticism just to play will obviously be impossible to accurately recreate. That said, you'll be amazed how creative fans can be.
Sometimes a Blood Sport. If a fighting sport, may involve Fantastic Fighting Styles. Related to Improbable Sports Skills for sport skills that are impossible in Real Life, which may or may not involve a Fictional Sport.
Not to be confused with Fantasy Sports.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- Aokana: Four Rhythm Across the Blue: Thanks to anti-gravity Grav-shoes, the game of Flying Circus becomes popular. Players score points by hitting their opponent's back or tagging floating buoys at the points of a diamond, similar to running the bases in baseball.
- The students of Assassination Classroom play "assassination badminton" in PE class, which is actually more like volleyball in almost every way. The main differences are that they can only touch the ball with the blade of a knife, and they use a tennis net instead of a badminton or volleyball net.
- Battle Angel Alita has Motorball, a deadly high-speed sport where racers fight to carry a heavy motorized ball across the finish line. Between racers' attacks, track hazards, and the ball trying to wriggle free, the casualties come fast and bloody in that particular arc.
- Blood Blockade Battlefront has Prosfair, a game somewhat like chess, but it gets exponentially more difficult and complicated the longer you play. It's also played inside a pocket dimension that compresses time (so you can play for 99 hours straight without inconveniencing your friends waiting outside). It's usually played to a time limit, rather than for an all out victory. Also subject to Loads and Loads of Rules.
- Girls und Panzer is about the traditional, refined sport of young ladies everywhere: tankery.
- Keijo!!!!!!!! is based on a Fanservice filled fictional sport called Keijo, in which women stand on a platform floating on a pool and must throw each other out using only their breasts and butts until only one remains standing.
- Lapis Re:LiGHTs has Bumpball. It's like dodgeball except with the addition of magic, 1 type and 1 spell per player.
- One arc of Space Adventure Cobra focuses on Rugball, a cross between baseball and American football that features 180 km/h (slightly faster than 110mph) pitches fired from a cannon, defenders are allowed to block runners in any way they see fit so long as they're holding the ball, and deaths on the field are not considered murder.
Comic Books
- The Fuse, a hard-SF police-procedural comic set on a space station in Earth orbit, has "ziggyball", or "Zero-G Ball", a three-dimensional micro-gravity equivalent of either basketball, American football, or a cross between the two.
- 2000 AD:
- Shuggy from Judge Dredd is a futuristic spin on billiards where the biggest difference is that the table has ten different holes, which are actually scattered across the board on hills of different elevations. The rules are fundamentally identical to billiards; two players take turns potting balls, and when one player misses, the other player gets to take their turn. There are some variations in the rules, mostly concerning scoring, and in particular there are two known "special shots" for the game. The first is the "Ten Commandments", which is where a player pots a ball in each of the different holes without missing a single shot. The second is the nigh-impossible "Booglariser", where a player clears a fresh table with a single shot—only two people have ever pulled this off in a tournament in the history of the sport. There are also two known variant rules for Shuggy; "Southern Rules" Shuggy hails from Texas City, and is played on a longer table with 26 holes instead of the normal ten, with each pocket being both numbered and color-coded, with the highest numbered being the "bull", which sits atop the tallest hill in the center of the table. In Southern Rules, potting the single purple ball into the bull triples a player's points, and a Booglarizer that also puts the purple ball in the bull results in tripling the originally tripled score, for a whopping nine-fold points multiplier. In comparison, Luna City Shuggy style is almost blandly simple; each player gets to make one shot and then has to give the table over to the other player, regardless of if they sink any balls or not.
- Aeroball from Harlem Heroes is basketball with jetpacks and turned into a full-contact sport.
- The Wizarding School story Lowborn High has Orbitus, which is a ball game played on Flying Broomsticks ... but is as different from that other game you might have heard of as it's possible to be and still be a ball game played on flying broomsticks. It's played on a ring-shaped field with the goal at the centre.
- De Kiekeboes had underwater billiards.
- Legion of Super-Heroes has Magnoball, which can only be played by those capable of Magnetism Manipulation. Both Cosmic Boy and his brother are former champions in some versions, as is WorkForce member Repulse.
- Issue 24 of My Little Pony: Friends Forever involves Rarity helping out Gilda with Griffonstone's boffyball team. Boffyball resembles rugby, but played using a small furry creature called a boffypuff as the ball.
- Noob has Fluxball.
- Smurfball from The Smurfs is this, appearing in both the comic books and the cartoon show. In "Smurf Versus Smurf", the sport morphs itself into a game of soccer (or European football).
Fan Works
- In his take on the Discworld, A.A. Pessimal built on the Assassin pursuit of "edificeering" - urban mountaineering - by adding drainholing - a sort of urban spelunking involving the downward exploration of pipes, sewers, conduits and below-city spaces. Edificeering has expanded to incorporate other trade and leisure groups with a professional interest. There is now a championship league which began as the Downey-Boggis Trophy For Edificeering Experience — a grudge-match between teams drawn from the Assassins' School and the Thieves' Guild School upon which much prestige depends. This has expanded to include teams from the Steeplejacks' Guild, the Post Office (who pride themselves on being able to deliver mail to anybody, anywhere), the City's Extreme Sports Society and the City Watch (who will chase any running criminal absolutely anywhere} - and, in the new Drainholing contest, the Guild of Dunnykin Divers and Sewermen.
- Smurfball in Empath: The Luckiest Smurf is played like a combination of volleyball and soccer.
- Red Witch's X-Men: Evolution fanfic Troutball: The Gentlemen's Sport
(one of her many, many comedic one-shots about shenanigans between the X-Men and Brotherhood) introduces... Troutball, the "sport of gentlemen who don't have any money. Or common sense." A variation on baseball (and apparently invented by the Brotherhood), it's played indoors, uses a beach ball and a six-pound plastic fish instead of a baseball and baseball bat, has five bases instead of four, and a seventh-inning doughnut run instead of the seventh-inning stretch. Also, instead of dropping the fish when running around the bases, they get to hold onto it and try to hit the other players as they go past. To counter this, the opposing team has the Bass Whacker (named such due to Rule of Funny, as confirmed in-story), who tries to knock the runner down with their own plastic fish. About the only restrictions are that they can't use fish with sharp ends (like swordfish), or fish that are too heavy (like large plastic tuna) or too small (like goldfish). Also, there are no rules preventing the players from going Off the Rails and just dueling one another with their fish mid-run, which naturally winds up happening during the game's demonstration at the X-Mansion. This being a Red Witch fanfic, things naturally go wrong and much craziness ensues.
- The Oversaturated World has Criffleball, a combination of dodgeball, tug of war, and rugby played in three dimensions with magic thrown in. The terminology is filled with nonsense words and while the rules themselves are perfectly comprehensible viewers both in universe and out are very confused at what is going on.
Films — Live-Action
- 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. It's based on a real game invented by writer/director David Zucker.
- Jugging, from the film The Blood Of Heroes, actually inspired fans in Germany to play the sport for real.
- In Disney's Descendants, the offspring of classic Disney characters engage in a field sport called Tourney, which is played with lacrosse sticks and nets, kite shields, and air-cannons that fire projectiles through a designated "kill zone".
- Real Steel is based on the world of professional (and semi-pro) robot boxing (that is, boxing between robots, not against them).
- 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. Before the original film's shooting wrapped, the stuntmen played a real game of Rollerball, and some sports promoters were briefly interested in making the sport into a real-life league.
- In the film Starship Troopers, the high school students play a variant of Arena Football, played on a hardwood court with coed teams. The padding and helmets are much lighter (allowing for more gymnastics), and there are no goalposts, suggesting that points are achieved solely by touchdowns.
- 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.
- Top Secret! has skeet surfing — combining skeet shooting with surfing (complete with a parodic The Beach Boys style surf song) in the opening sequence. This of course isn't even at Fridge Logic levels of plausibility — salt water and shotguns really do not mix, and the idea of trying to shoot a small, fast-moving target while trying to stay upright on a surfboard without being able to use your arms to balance and not falling off due to the recoil — well, you get the idea. Not to mention the only safe way to do this would be on a completely deserted beach with an automatic trap (skeet launcher); otherwise, stray shots would be very likely to hit the crowd, the trap operator, fellow shooters, etc.
Literature
- All for the Game is primarily a Sports Story about Exy, which is like a combination of lacrosse and hockey.
- Mentioned in passing in The Andalite Chronicles. Elfangor says the captain's quarters on an Andalite dome ship are so big "he can practically play driftball in there."note
- And Then I Turned Into a Mermaid: Margot plays a mermaid sport called Clamdunk, in which players' efforts to score goals are hindered by the other team's efforts to take the pearls attached to their tails, which takes a player out of the game. The game ends when one of the teams (usually but not always the losing one) has lost all its pearls.
- Also from Piers Anthony, the Apprentice Adept novels feature a mind-boggling variety of games in Proton's Tourney events, from the Dust Slide (essentially a waterslide-race, but with dry near-frictionless particles instead of water), to an android-assisted variant of American football, to Noodle Incident contests like tug-of-war using a live python as the rope. Phaze has a few unique competitions of its own, like the combination obstacle course and Shapeshifter Showdown at the Unolympics.
- In Artemis Fowl, zero-G garbage wrestling is mentioned. Although specific rules aren't given, it doesn't exactly take a ton of speculation to work out the gist of it.
- In Bad Mermaids, the most popular sport in Hidden Lagoon is shockey, which is played between two teams consisting of six riders and two swimmers. Swimmers race around a track trying to pass the checkpoint with the shockey pawn, a human shoe. Riders chase after the swimmers and try to stop them, using different sea animals as mounts.
- In Malcolm Jameson's story "Bullard Reflects", a spaceship crew plays Dazzle Dart, where the players wear mirrors and try to reflect a beam of light into a goal.
- Discworld
- Young trainees at the Assassins' Guild engage in the sport of edificeering, which is competitive free-climbing in an urban environment. Possibly inspired by a practice of students at Oxford and Cambridge Universities of climbing various college buildings. There is also the Assassins' Wall Game, a parody of the Eton Wall Game which is a combination of edificeering, squash, and violence. Most games go into injury time, sometimes forever.
- Crockett, a mallet-and-ball game played in the Shires, the rural area in the hinterland of Ankh-Morpork. A recital of the very complex time-honoured rules induced a catatonic coma in Sam Vimes, but it's roughly what cricket would be if it started as croquet.
- Wizard Squash is somewhat similar to real squash, except magic ensures the ball doesn't move very fast (since wizards aren't keen on running about), while at the same time adding a bit more uncertainty as to where it's actually going.
- The Witches, particularly Nanny Ogg, play a card game called "Cripple Mr Onion" which appears to be something between poker and whist. The quasi-official Defictionalization adds blackjack.
- Young trainees at the Assassins' Guild engage in the sport of edificeering, which is competitive free-climbing in an urban environment. Possibly inspired by a practice of students at Oxford and Cambridge Universities of climbing various college buildings. There is also the Assassins' Wall Game, a parody of the Eton Wall Game
- 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.
- Forbidden Sea: In the Underwater City of Siarah, a group of mermen play a game that involves batting a ball of light back and forth with their tails, doing lots of impressive spins and dives in the process.
- The Galaxy Game by Karen Lord heavily features Wallrunning, which is competitive climbing with variable gravity. It turns out the skills required to be a Wallrunning team (and specifically to be the nexus of a Wallrunning team, telepathically keeping everyone else in position) are very similar to the skills required to run the long-abandoned Portal Network, and Wallrunning was originally a training exercise.
- Harry Potter:
- Quidditch is played on Flying Broomsticks with three different balls. Each team has three Chasers, who try to put a ball called the Quaffle through one of three hoops to score ten points (while a Keeper tries to stop them), and the game continues until one team's Seeker catches the Golden Snitch, scoring 150 points and ending the game. All the while the players evade the other two balls called Bludgers, which are like animated cannonballs, with the help of their team's Beaters, who are armed with clubs to protect their teammates and redirect the balls at the other team. Whichever side has the most points wins, although based on the rules we're given and the games we see, the team that catches the Snitch wins basically every timenote .
- A defictionalized version has cropped up, although the rules are modified in a few ways, even beyond the obvious limitations of not having flying broomsticks. Bludgers are replaced with dodgeballs, players who are hit must tag their own teams goal posts before returning to play, and the game runs for a set time with the snitch being worth far fewer points. Plus a bunch of specifics about fouls, penalties and such are added.
- A defictionalized version
- Quidditch Through the Ages is a Spin-Off book that expands upon the version of Quidditch seen in the books a great deal, trying to cover some of the common complaints about the game. It also introduces other sports, both extant and extinct.
- The Scots developed Creaothceann, which involved flying a broomstick around trying to catch rocks that had been levitated into the air in a cauldron tied to one's head. It was banned in 1762 because it was so dangerous, though the book suggests that it inspired the Bludgers in Quidditch.
- The United States isn't big into Quidditch, as it's been supplanted by a variant called Quodpot. In this game, the goal is to get the ball into a cauldron before the ball, which is magically Made of Explodium, explodes. Reportedly invented by accident after a wizard's wand came into contact with his Quaffle during shipping, causing it to blow up in his face when he and some friends went to play catch. (This is pretty clearly a send-up of American Football versus football/soccer, not to mention the idea that Americans like Stuff Blowing Up.)
- Quidditch is played on Flying Broomsticks with three different balls. Each team has three Chasers, who try to put a ball called the Quaffle through one of three hoops to score ten points (while a Keeper tries to stop them), and the game continues until one team's Seeker catches the Golden Snitch, scoring 150 points and ending the game. All the while the players evade the other two balls called Bludgers, which are like animated cannonballs, with the help of their team's Beaters, who are armed with clubs to protect their teammates and redirect the balls at the other team. Whichever side has the most points wins, although based on the rules we're given and the games we see, the team that catches the Snitch wins basically every timenote .
- In Heralds of Valdemar, there are a couple of games Heraldic trainees play. In the Collegium Chronicles era there is Kirball, a variant of 'capture the flag'; it has apparently fallen out of fashion by the 'modern' Valdemar period, as Hurley, which is something like polo, had invented by then.
- The The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy series includes several references to Brockian Ultra-Cricket, "a curious game which involves suddenly hitting people for no readily apparent reason and then running away". That said the game is much closer to Calvinball territory, as the rules we are given include helpful bits like "The winning team shall be the first team that wins". Only one complete list of the rules has ever been compiled, and it immediately collapsed into a black hole.
- Hover Car Racer is about racing hover cars modified from traditional race cars.
- In The Irregular at Magic High School, "magisports" receive a great deal of focus and patronage because they are essentially the only time young magicians are allowed to use their powers.
- "Ice Pillars Break": Each player has a group of ice pillars set up in the stadium, and whoever has more pillars standing when time runs out wins. The pillars can be destroyed any way a player wants- even with the self-destructive strategy of animating one's ice and using it as a physical battering ram- or players can focus on protecting their pillars from enemy spells.
- "Battle Board": Players surf along an artificial watercourse, using magic to propel their board against the current and hinder other players. Direct attacks are not allowed, but things like making waves and temporarily blinding opponents with light magic are. Whoever completes three laps first wins.
- "Mirage Bat": Holographic spheres of light are projected into the stadium, and players must hit the spheres with staves. The spheres are so high up that leaping spells are necessary to reach them, so Mirage Bat is essentially a contest of endurance: whoever is last to succumb to exhaustion from all those spells wins.
- Scavage and Counterchance in the Liaden Universe. Bowli ball might also apply, but it's more like a (literal) Happy Fun Ball.
- Lock In gives us Hilketa ("murder" in Basque), a fairly violent team sport played using "threeps" (artificial remote bodies), primarily by Hadens. It's the fastest-growing spectator sport in the country and, soon, the world. Players score by beheading a designated player (called a "goat" for some reason) on the opposing team and carrying or throwing the head back to their goal (the rules are described in detail here). NAHL (North American Hilketa League) rules specify that all professional games must be played with the feedback pain settings set to no less than 5% of normal. The rules allow four types of "threeps" to be used: General, Tank, Scout, and Warrior. There are designated weapons at certain locations, which range from swords to grenades, although all damage is simulated in order to avoid damaging the very expensive "threeps". Head On starts with the first ever player death during a game of Hilketa, which is investigated by the protagonist.
- The Matador Series has the Musashi Flex, a galaxy-wide professional street-fighting circuit. The rules of a fight (e.g., bare hands only versus weapons, fight to wound versus fight to the death) are agreed on by the participants before they start, and fighting an opponent ten or more ranks up or down the ranking ladder from you doesn't count towards your own ranking. The series' main Fantastic Fighting Style, sumito, was developed by an aging Flex fighter in the chronologically earliest novel The Musashi Flex, and in the series' present a number of the Matadors are former Flex fighters.
- Private McAuslan once found himself forced to participate in The Pillow Fight, which is like a regular pillow fight but over a tank of hot soapy water. McAuslan was outraged at the insult to his personal hygiene and challenged the order all the way up to a military tribunal. After winning his case, he went and joined The Pillow Fight.
- The Myth Adventures series has The Big Game, which is very similar to an epic game of American football, and determines the capital of the dimension Jahk.
- On a Pale Horse features a professional football variant called "pigskin", played by buff and buxom women and making liberal use of the magic which exists on (mostly) equal footing with science in the series' setting:
- Levitation spells to move players out of reach of opponents or propel a thrown ball further.
- Blocking spells, also applicable to players or the ball.
- Disruptive gimmick spells, such as casting invisibility on a player's uniform to make her appear nude (the affected player was angered rather than embarrassed, but still lost ground for her team when venting that anger incurred an unnecessary roughness penalty).
- Even the referees have access to "riot control" spells to break up player brawls.
- Interestingly, the rare use of a "mundane" (magic-free) play can be a very effective strategy, not only as a surprise tactic, but also a regular one, causing the opposition to waste counterspells on a magical offense that never materializes...and not counterspelling when there really is magic.
- In Red Rising, characters make reference to sports such as Faux War, Grav Cross (which from the name sounds like zero-gravity lacrosse), Rip Racing (Nascar in Space), and Blood Chess.
- Reign of the Seven Spellblades: "Broomsports" in the series consist variously of obstacle course races on Flying Broomsticks, one-on-one jousting, and team battles—the latter of which Nanao quickly excels at after a notoriously Moody Mount takes a liking to her. Oliver, who is merely okay at riding brooms, is drafted to be her "catcher"—i.e. running around with a wand below the match to magically catch her should she be unhorsed. She's so good that he doesn't have much to do until she's promoted to the senior-level teams in their second year.
- The Rig by Joe Ducie has Rigball. It's basically an excuse for the YA inmates to beat each other with highly magnetised lacrosse sticks. The twist is that the MC doesn't know the team he's playing against are enhanced super soldiers with powers that are slowly driving them mad.
- In the Rivers of London novels, Nightingale's classmates had played Indoor Tennis: an impello-powered variant of dodgeball in their school days, using magic to propel tennis balls (cricket balls for upper formers) at one another and to fend them off. Peter and Lesley, naturally, call it "Pocket Quidditch", and play with helmets and an "upper body shots only" rule at Dr. Walid's insistence.
- Star Wars Legends:
- The many books detail an array of sports to rival the number in the real world, including astrobatics, Boga Minawk, greenputt, Huttball, low-g gymnastics, nerf-throwing,note sandsurfing, and water hockey. Most aren't given much focus.
- During Galaxy of Fear, Tash Arranda looks back on playing speed globe with her friends on Alderaan. She still has the ball and it still works — when activated it speeds away from people - but she doesn't have a team anymore.
- The many books detail an array
- In the Terra Trilogy by Mitch Benn, there are two popular sports on Fnrr. In the Proud Scholar Race areas like Mlml and Dskt they play gshkth, which seems to be like field hockey. Terra's friend Fthfth is a keen gshkth player. The Proud Warrior Race of G'grk play Kkh-St'grrss, which Colonel Harrison compares to polo, except more violent and after a polo match, the winners don't eat the losers' horses.
- Incuel from Tough Magic is a sport which crosses magic dueling and martial arts. Not quite as dangerous as it sounds, as special suits, invarmas, protect the fighters from any serious harm.
- Troy Rising has null-grav ball, essentially zero-G basketball. The first group to play had a 10% injury rate that required a doctor's input. There's also jungleball, a variant of null-ball. Jungleball takes null-ball's many, many regulations down to just eight rules. The first of which is "no weapons".
Live-Action TV
- A.P. Bio: Stephanie, Mary, and Michelle have a game they play called pizza slap where they take pizza slices and hit each other in the face with the cheese side. Calling this a sport (or even a game) is a bit of a stretch though.
- Battlestar Galactica has Triad and Pyramid. In the original series Triad was a hybrid of basketball and American football (essentially a full-contact court-style ball game with the objective being to put a hand-sized ball through a goal) while Pyramid was a poker-like card game. The remake switched the names.
- CSI: NY: The B-case in "Obsession" features an annual race called the "Idiot Run," which is very loosely based on the Iditarod. However, it uses humans instead of sled dogs and shopping carts instead of sleds, the teams dress up in costumes, sabotage is encouraged, and the only rule is that the first team across the finish line wins.
- The Furchester Hotel: The episode "Furball" has Furball, which is played with a Furball - a spherical monster with Pokémon Speak. Elmo and Pheobe don't know how to play, but spend most of the episode hunting for the Furball throughout the hotel which turns out to be how you play Furball.
- The Gillies Report featured sports bulletins describing the fortunes of the Australian farnarkeling team, and, in particular, its captain and star player, the accident prone 'Big Dave' Sorenson. From what can be determined from the descriptions, the sport is fast moving, high scoring, and violent. The humour derives primarily from John Clarke's deadpan delivery of bizarre descriptions of the action, and the application of sporting cliches to a sport no one understands.
In essence, Farnarkeling is engaged in by two teams whose purpose is to arkle, and to prevent the other team from arkeling, using a flukem to propel a gonad through sets of posts situated at random around the periphery of a grommet. Arkeling is not permissible, however, from any position adjacent to the phlange (or leiderkrantz) or from within 15 yards of the wiffenwacker at the point where the shifting tube abuts the centre-line on either side of the 34 metre mark, measured from the valve at the back of the defending side's transom-housing.
- Following John Clarke's death, one cartoon in his honour depicted Wal and the Dog (from Footrots Flats) persiding over a minute's silence at the Farnarkeling World Cup as a mark of respect on the passing of its most famous commentator.
- An episode of How I Met Your Mother involves Baskiceball, a combination of basketball and ice hockey created by Marshall Eriksen and his brothers. The rules weren't clearly defined, but it appears to basically be basketball played on ice with hockey equipment, but Marshall actually acknowledges that mostly they just "wail on each other".
- In The King 2 Hearts there's World Officer Championship, which is basically War Gaming but with real people.
- 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.
- A 2nd series episode of Look Around You had a feature on gonnis (golf tennis).
- Characters on The Prisoner (1967) are occasionally seen playing kosho, a bizarre combat sport involving contestants wrestling on trampolines and trying to throw or push each other into a swimming pool while wearing pseudo-Japanese costumes.
- "Louis Kazagger's Wide World of Muppet Sports" was a recurring sketch on The Muppet Show, where Kazagger would report on such sports as blindfold racing, cross-country billiards, and tree staring.
- Zero Gee Football, as followed by Dave Lister of Red Dwarf. Appears to be a form of grid-iron football played in a closed dome (Jim Bexley Speed apparently plays "roof attack" and appears on a poster over Lister's bunk looking something like the San Diego Chargers uniform).
- Sliders: On one world, where intelligence is revered above all (they walk past a guy dressed like a punk rocker blasting classical music out of his boombox and see a rap video about how cool it is to hang out at the library), the most popular game is a combination of handball and science trivia, meaning their world's mathletes must also be physically fit, as well as very smart. This world's Quinn is an MVP of this sport, as indicated when the protagonists see a poster of him advertising sneakers.
- The Stargate SG-1 episode "Space Race" had Samantha Carter take part in, well, a race in space hosted by the planet Hebridan. First prize was a lucrative shipping contract which an alien SG-1 had befriended in an earlier episode wanted. The race also suffered sabotage by a human-supremacist executive at the Mega-Corp that seems to own practically every industry on Hebridan.
- Star Trek:
- Star Trek: The Original Series has 3-D chess. What? Chess is a mind sport! The show's producers have never actually published official rules, but there are a variety of fan made rules from various sources, and companies like the Franklin Mint, who have sold replicas of the sets.
- Later series have characters playing Parrises Squares on the holodeck, as well as Hoverball, Velocity, and a few others.
- Parrises Squares is something of a combination of Fictional Sport, Calvinball, and Noodle Incident. Gameplay is never shown in any of the mentions of the sport, and the rules include odd objects like an ion mallet.
- A game of dom-jot (like billiards with some elements of pinball) played a pivotal role in Captain Picard's backstory; he was stabbed in the heart by a Nausicaan during a fight over accusations of cheating.
- Will Riker's father taught him Anbo-jytsu, a bizarre martial art in which the combatants fight with staves while wearing armor and helmets with opaque visors. One end of the staff is a proximity sensor, which is used to determine the other player's location.
- The Next Generation episode "The Game" features an unnamed Ktarian video game that turns out to be malware that takes over your brain.
- Data plays the holographic strategy game Strategema against third-level grand master Sirna Kolrami, but is unable to beat him. He eventually develops a strategy of playing to not lose, resulting in a draw (and a Rage Quit).
- Star Trek: Deep Space Nine:
- Quark's bar lets you gamble by playing dabo or tongo. The episode "Move Along Home" features an alien board game called Chula, which pulls some of the characters into a surreal environment where they have to solve a series of puzzles. Garak and Nog play the Cardassian boardgame Kotra, and Dax challenges Sisko to a game of Jokarian chess. Dax and Kira also make plans to go anti-grav sailing in the holosuite.
- There's also a number of appearances of a Bajoran sport called springball, which is essentially full-contact handball where you're allowed to body-check your opponent to screw up their shots.
- Star Trek: Voyager includes the board games Kadis-kot (played weekly by Seven of Nine and Naomi Wildman) and Durotta (played by Tom Paris and B'Elanna Torres). Tuvok regularly beats Harry Kim at Kal-toh, a Vulcan strategy game that "is to chess as chess is to Tic-Tac-Toe."
- Paris and Kim, piloting the Delta Flyer, compete in the Antarian Trans-stellar Rally, a spaceship race over a course of two billion kilometers.
- In one episode, Janeway and Seven play Velocity, which is best described as competitive skeet shooting combined with dodgeball... using phasers.
- Supergirl: Mon-El, from Krypron's mirror world of Daxam, asks if they play "garotta" on Earth. The humans have no idea what he's talking about, but Kara is just annoyed.
Kara: It's like soccer. With dragons.
- The Twilight Zone (1959): In "Number 12 Looks Just Like You", Marilyn Cuberle mentions electronic baseball and super soccer.
Magazines
- MAD:
- 43-Man Squamish. (MAD #95, June 1965). Also an example of Defictionalization, as one group in Canada actually formed a 43-Man Squamish team.
- An earlier example is an article (guest-written by Ernest Kovacs, the famous TV comedy pioneer) for a board game called "Gringo" (MAD #29, September 1952).
- And again with the board game "Three-Cornered Pitney". (MAD #241, September 1983)
- 43-Man Squamish
Tabletop Games
- Blood Bowl is a tabletop game about the sport of the same name. It's a Blood Sport bastard of rugby and American football with very liberal rules for acceptable levels of violence on the pitch (players dying durign a game is relatively common). It's set in an alternate version of the Warhammer Fatnasy universe where playing Blood Bowl has replaced the usual warfare.
- Blue Planet: Poseidon has hydroshot, which evolved from water polo during the Abandonment when the natives removed most of the rules against player contact and replaced them with a third team. Points are scored against other teams, and the team with the lowest score wins; in practice this turns into a chaotic underwater brawl whose sides change on short notice.
- Dungeons & Dragons
- Lower-class Alphatians (non-spellcasters) in the Mystara setting are big-time fans of a team sport called Hard-Ball, which is played on a court divided into squares. The Ball may be run within a given square, but only thrown across the borders of those squares. Tackling, block, wrestling and throwing the ball as a weapon are legal, but magic use is not. The upper-class (spellcasters) aren't supposed to be interested in this sport, but there's some that dress down to watch a match or use a crystal ball to scry on one.
- Oenkmar, found in the Broken Lands of Mystara, is an underground city occupied by orcs and similar creatures. Its game is based off soccer and is called tlachtli. It requires knocking a heavy rubbery ball between the opponent's goal posts, which can be struck with feet, knees, hips and elbows. Illegally touching the ball has a penalty of being trampled by the other team. It's played to six points, or if the player can land a difficult shot into one of the small side hoops.
- 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.
- By way of Ciaphas Cain's memoirs, Warhammer 40,000 has scrumball (a vigorous sport in which the class Scrappy was frequently and enthusiastically tackled whether he had the ball or not) and grasshopper (a very slow game with arcane rules, often interrupted due to rain, and mostly played in the Britannicus cluster).
Toys
- BIONICLE has Kolhii, a cross between hockey and lacrosse that can be played with 2-5 teams. Teams consist of a goalie and 2-5 other players, whose job is to chase the ball and score goals. The equipment used during play is known as a Kolhii Stick - a wooden pole with a hammerhead on one end (for striking the ball) and a scoop on the other end (for catching or throwing the ball). Goalies are also allowed to use a shield. Supplementary material states that Kolhii can be played with multiple balls, so long as the number of balls is smaller than the number of teams or the number of players per team, whichever is the smaller number. Interestingly enough, Kolhii seems to operate purely on a "whichever team reaches the predetermined number of goals first wins" basis with no time limit, as the Kolhii match seen in The Movie goes on for long enough that it starts during the day and doesn't end until after nightfall.
- In-Universe, Kolhii developed from the simpler sport of Koli, which is basically soccer, except the court is far smaller (about thirty feet from goal to goal) and square in shape (allowing for up to four "teams" to play in a single match) in order to allow each one-man "team" to simultaneously play as both goalie and kicker. Also, Koli is played with rocks that are about a foot tall instead of actual balls, with there being multiple rocks in play at once, instead of just one.
- Also Akilini, played by throwing disks through hoops, while simultaneously sliding on disks on a shifting field.
Video Games
- ARMS is centered completely around its fictional sport. While superficially similar to boxing, the rules allow players to choose gloves with various effects, and power-up sports bottles are dropped during rounds. The presentation also heavily emphasizes its sports atmosphere, with commentary between matches and throngs of fans wearing the colors and logos of their favorite athletes.
- Blaseball: While the game of Blaseball is similar to the real-world sport of baseball, its rules have some differences. Not to mention that in baseball, players don't usually get incinerated by umpires.
- Final Fantasy X heavily features Blitzball. It's basically something like handball or soccer, but with full contact (and the use of ones entire body). The only unusual element is that the game is played entirely in a sphere of water suspended in the air.
- Not to be confused with another sport also called Blitzball, as seen in Knowles' A Separate Peace.
- Final Fantasy XI: had a couple of these, Ballista and Brenner. They provided the game's PvP content.
- Hiveswap has Field Stickball, which is sort of like a game of Human Pool except the balls are bigger and have gimmicks attached to them, there are multiple cues running around, and it's near-lethal to play (much like everything else on Alternia).
- Mario Strikers: Battle League introduces the word "Strike" as the name of the sport played here, which is essentially street soccer but with electric fences that electrocute tackled victims, traditional Super Mario power-ups and a majority of real-world soccer rules being thrown out of the window. Previous entries in the series straight up calls it soccer (football in the UK) despite being less realistic.
- Mass Effect:
- One item from the newsfeed had humans trying to break into the turian sport of clawball.
- Another had the "Biotic Games" implying an entire range of sports using biotics.
- Metroid Prime: Federation Force has Blast Ball, which is basically soccer with giant mechs with guns.
- Neopets gives us Gormball and Altador Cup's Yooyuball.
- An Octave Higher has Sorcer, in which two sorcerers compete in a hexagonal arena to break any two of the other player's three crystals using magic. You can also win by knocking the other player unconscious.
- The Outer Worlds has Tossball, which appears to be somewhat like a much more violent version of lacrosse. Tossball sticks and padding can be used as weapons and armor, respectively.
- Pararena is one-on-one Rollerball with Hover Boards, on a satellite dish IN SPACE.
- Many Racing Games often use this as a premise, especially if they are set in the future or have unconventional vehicles. Examples include:
- Battle Cars is a Blood Sport for an overcrowded populace in a Crapsack World.
- Extreme-G is a race with armed and rocket-powered hyperbikes.
- F-Zero is another futuristic racer, this time on magnetic tracks high above the city with numerous alien participants.
- Jet Moto features all-terrain antigravity bikes with magnetic grapples.
- Rollcage is a Vehicular Combat racer where destroying the landscape is part of the rules.
- Rocket League can be best described as soccer with super-cars that defy the laws of physics.
- The Wipeout series, where league advancement is based on both position taken and opponents eliminated.
- In Sakura Wars (2019), the Combat Revue World Games are an international sports festival where combat revues from many different countries, including the Imperial Combat Revue, compete in tournaments and performances every two years since 1936. Except that the 1940 Combat Revue World Games are a trap set up by the Big Bad, President G/Sotetsu Genan.
- The Sonic Riders series is a futuristic racing game involving hoverboards, hover bikes, hover skates, and hover-all-kinds-of-other-stuff.
- The Sims Medieval has Kingball, a sport similar to tennis but played on a triangular field with three players instead of two, and a ball similar in size and shape to a volleyball.
- Speedball: A futuristic cross between handball and ice hockey with the added twist of points being scored for injuring opponents.
- In the world of Splatoon, a popular pastime for Inklings and Octolings (which comprises the core of the actual multiplayer) is participating in Turf Wars, which is kind of like paintball, but with the goal of covering as much of the arena with your own color ink as possible.
- Spyro: Year of the Dragon: Frozen Altars is home to the sport of Cat Hockey. It's played on an ice rink and the point of the game is to get cats running around the rink and move them into your goal, where they will stay to scratch at the post that is located there. Whoever reaches the winning number of cats first is the Victor. It's safe to say that this will never become an official sport due to concerns of animal abuse.
- In Star Control II, the Zoq-Fot-Pik are obsessed with a sport called Frungy, to the point where they keep mentioning it in unrelated conversations, but they never quite get around to explaining what it actually involves.
- Word of God only says, "Whatever it is, it's played with GUSTO!"
- Stardew Valley has gridball, which very closely resembles American football. Zuzu city has a professional gridball team, the Tunnelers, and several of the NPCs are fans. Alex even dreams of playing for them someday, and if you get close enough to Shane, he'll take you to a Tunnelers game.
- Star Wars: The Old Republic has Huttball as one type of PvP match. It's a typical "get the ball in the goal" game played in a multi-level arena filled with various hazards, and violence is not only allowed but encouraged.
- World of Warcraft has Footbomb, where players pilot humanoid mecha in an attempt to kick a ball between two goal posts on a field that resembles an American Football field.
- Wizard101: The Aero Dwarves in Emperea play Whirly Burly. Although in the game's lore, it's a sport, when you actually play, it's a board game.
Web Animation
- Red vs. Blue has Grifball. Originally a joke line from Sarge ("This is the best game since Grifball!" said while trying to snipe Grif), the series creator eventually did actually make a set of rules for Grifball. The rules can be found in this PSA, but for those who don't want to watch a video, here's the basics; It's a ball-in-the-goal game, except the "Ball" is actually a bomb, and the player carrying it becomes Grif (their armor turns orange). So if you take out the carrier, Grif dies, and if you score a goal, the bomb goes off and he dies anyways! So, "Sarge wins either way." Later Halo titles added an official Grifball game mode.
Webcomics
- 8-Bit Theater. One word: Drownball. Fighter's historic victory was due to him technically losing (his brain consumes much less oxygen, so he didn't drown as fast as the other players) but as the only living player, he had to be declared the winner.
Post-match analyst: Though a Drownball rookie, you were the favorite going into today's match thanks to your daring strategy of wearing a full suit of armor.
Fighter: Armor is made of metal.
Post-match analyst: That it is, Fighter. That it surely is. And yet, even with that commanding advantage, you came in last. What went wrong?
Fighter: Well, I did a thing where I didn't drown. That probably hurt my chances. Also, I'm not sure where that ball comes in...?
Post-match analyst: Better luck next time, Fighter.
Fighter: I'm aiming for second to drown.
Post-match analyst: Meanwhile, as the sole survivor of today's match, first place now defaults to you!
Fighter: This is perfectly logical! - In The Croaking there is "Aerial Combat", a sport played competetivly among different universities: two teams of avians face off in a stadium and try to hit/shoot certain points on their opponent's bodysuits with non-lethal weapons to kick them out of the game in one giant, airborne melee.
- Devil's Candy: Eggscram is unique for being a sport that uses an unborn egg of the ruling caste as a ball, and the point is to put it through as much trauma and humiliation (for the players) as possible to get the egg to hatch. Whichever team has more points when the egg hatches (or when both teams' players are deceased) wins. Scoring a touchdown earns 4 points, but doing a showboating dance afterwards will earn up to 6 additional points, according to the judgement of the egg's spectating parents. Flying devils have a clear advantage over other players, but there's a 10-foot rule to keep the unfairness from turning into a joke.
- In El Goonish Shive, Noah has invented "Golf, but it is baseball". As far as is known, it remains purely theoretical.
- In The Far Side of Utopia there is an amped up version of cross between Tennis and Racquetball called Airball. If the ball hits the ground, you lose the point. Better bring magic or Super-Speed to have any real chance of playing.
- Flaky Pastry has Cavernball, a sport played in an ancient high-tech arena with a ball-like artifact with different functions by goblins. Two teams of three people each try to score goals. The unique thing is the titular cavernball: by pressing panels on the ball, it can activate functions such as becoming sticky, bursting into flames, or letting the bearer jump higher.
- Kevin & Kell has at least three:
- High-school level and college level hunting competitions, which appeared in Rudy's high-school era along with him having to deal with Dystraxia (inability to follow tracks).
- MOUSECAR, which is based off the American racing sport, and requires players to scour a hedge maze to find cheese. The ruleset seems to be the most abstract, as it's unclear why the drivers aren't instantly rushing to the objective.
- College-level gardening competitions. Unlike real-world competitive gardening, it is done in a stadium and treated as the same intensity as football, along with implied rules for fouls.
- Mac Hall: Australian Indoor Rules Quidditch.
- Hitball in Paranatural is an altered version of Dodgeball. After all, dodging was never the most important part of the game.
- Smackball, a new sport mentioned in Penny and Aggie's Distant Finale, "Six Septembers Later". Writer T Campbell described it in the comic's forum as a cross between jai alai and tennis.
- Boxer Hockey in the web comic of the same name. The rules are given in the first strip. it would be possible but extremely dangerous to play in real life.
Web Original
- Babe Ruth: Man-Tank Gladiator has Man-Tank Gladiatorial combat..
- Tumblr user fidefortitude, tired of all the many sports events, imagined them all stuck in one event: the fuckening. All sports are played at the same time on one field. All players must abide the rules of their own game, except if two players from different games hold hands: then they swap rules as long as they do.
- Dynamo Dream: We see two futuristic sports, both being televised. Hyperball is, so far as one can tell, a combination of a ball game and a race, played by people riding vehicles that are 90% jet engine. "Guardfight" is a show about Humongous Mecha fighting other things — a Giant Enemy Crab in the episode we see.
Western Animation
- Amphibia has Bugball, a game somewhat akin to basketball. Played with a live bug as the ball.
- 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 one episode.) The plot for the episode has Terry investigating the use of performance-enhancing drugs called "slappers" by one of the teams.
- Witch Hurling in The Big Knights. Although usually substituted by witches made of hay, Morris can't resist hurling a real witch they encounter in the woods.
- Dinoball in Dinosaur Train vaguely resembles American football; the players have to whack a gourd into a goal at the edges of the pitch, and there's a lot of tackling involved.
- Futurama:
- Blernsball: It appears briefly in the first season, and it's Baseball plus Calvinball as Fry has no idea what the rules are and nothing is explained. When it shows up again in the third season in an episode focused around Leela becoming a professional player, it's basically just baseball with the ball on a stretchy tether, although a few of the other changes that were made to "jazz it up" made the transition as well.
- Death Ball
- Space Demolition Derby
- Ultimate Robot Fighting
- One episode of He-Man and the Masters of the Universe (2002) 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 Legend of Korra has brought us "Pro-Bending". Teams composed of one Waterbender, one Firebender and one Earthbender compete against each other, trying to gain the most territory or knock out their opponents before time runs out. Defictionalized here when the elements are replaced with appropriately colored bean bags.
- Loonatics Unleashed has basherball in Acmetropolis. Players ride flying motorcycles, and use them to capture the ball in the vehicle's intake funnel, then shoot it out a scorpion-like tail gun at a spinning target just below the scoreboard. Colliding with other players (bashing) is allowed.
- Mike, Lu & Og: Every year on Lady Hewitt-Smythe Day, the Albonquetinians play an extreme game of croquet with elephants serving as a player's mallet and mount.
- Molly of Denali: In "Mollyball", Molly makes up a game called Mollyball, where the players make up the rules as they go along.
- My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
- Equestria has a sport called hoofball that's mentioned in "The Cutie Map", presumably a fantasy counterpart sport to American Football.
- "Buckball Season" introduces a recently developed Equestrian sport called "buckball", and goes into pretty big detail on the rules. It involves two teams of three ponies: an earth pony, a pegasus, and a unicorn. The earth ponies try to knock the ball into a bucket held by their team's unicorn "catcher", while the pegasi try to block their opponents from catching the ball. It also mixes in the opening face-off of basketball and full contact with the ball like football/soccer. First team to six points wins the match.
- The Owl House has two shown:
- Grudgby is an even more violet version of rugby, with players using magic and the field covered in deadly traps. Somewhat of a parody of Quidditch, right down to a Golden Snitch equivalent.
- Flyer Derby is a combination of flag football and capture the flag, with players flying around and trying to get flags off of the opposing teams staffs and returing them to their own goal. It also involves magic, though there are no traps involved since all gameplay takes place in the air.
- Star vs. the Forces of Evil has Cornball. The rules on how to play and score are quite fuzzy though.
- Sofia the First gives us Dazzleball; the sport is played much like soccer...except the ball randomly transforms, magically switching between a soccer ball, an American football and a flying disc. How you play and use the ball depends on the form it takes (feet only for the soccer ball, hands only for the disc, either for the football).
- Thunder Cats 2011: "The Games" in Thundera's Thunderdome: A racing Chase Fight between two Cat competitors climbing, swinging, jumping and running up a tree to ring a bell at its top, violent kicking and punching included. Ring Out involves knocking a player off the tree into a pool of water.
- Transformers: Rescue Bots has Rescue Ball, a ball-and-net game with no offensive or defensive restrictions.
- Transformers: Cyberverse introduces "Cube" a Cybertronian sport similar to rugby. One of the protagonists of Transformers: Rescue Bots Academy, Hot Shot was a gifted young player before going into rescue work.
- Wakfu: Gobbowl. Later defictionalized, as Ankama has held a real-life tournament.
- 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".
