Sunday, April 26, 2015

116. The Colosseum

In the world of transhuman sports entertainment, whether that sport is chess or gladiatorial combat, there is only one name: the Colosseum.

The Colosseum broadcasts continually, sending feeds of its daily knife-fights, martial arts tournaments, freerunning races, chess matches, football (both traditional and new zero-g variants) and junkyard robot build-offs. The majority of the Colosseum's games occur in simulspace, some because it is cheaper, others because they are impossible in reality. In simulation, fighters need not pull punches and can fight with true ferocity, casualties are instantly revived, and any scenario can be constructed. Easily produced games such as knife-fights or chess matches are more likely to be real, and the Colosseum likes to hold finales in reality with live spectators.

Primarily, the Colosseum is funded by gambling on their daily events. What really draws crowds, however, are their special narrative events. No one event is the same as any other, although they often share broad similarities. The most popular variant is the "battle royale", in which several dozen competitors are dropped into a simulspace landscape of a hundred square kilometers and challenged to be the last one standing. The spectacle of minor politicians, aspiring mercenaries, failing socialites, former ultimates, and amused exhumans hunting and killing one another never fails to draw viewers. Other events include participants trying to survive simulated natural disasters, attempting to assassinate each other in simulated cities, or "king of the hill", in which they vie for control of a small mountain kingdom.

Being primarily simulspace-based, the Colosseum needs no physical location, but for legal reasons its operations are based on Extropia. Extropian contract-law allows for any scenario (for which willing participants can be found) to be carried out, and it is an excellent place from which to broadcast to the whole system.

Notes

The battle royale events are of course based on the movie Battle Royale.

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