1. The Premise
17776 is a work of multimedia fiction about the future of American football, created by Jon Bois in 2017.
Now, if you’re a gray-triber reading this blog, you might see that and think: “Football? Not for me.” But 17776 is more sci-fi than sports. It uses football as a lens to explore what humanity would be like without death or disease, why we play games, and the ultimate purpose of life.
Jon Bois tells human stories using sports as his raw material. Mostly, he makes videos, but he’s also done some creative writing and journalism. His dry, surreal humor and philosophical bent make him unique in the sports media world, where most content is just hot takes, memes, and betting tips. And 17776 is singular even for Bois.
Football is at a weird crossroads. We’ve learned a lot about the troubling effects of repeated head impacts, even for athletes who don’t get officially diagnosed with a concussion. Former players are behaving chaotically, with many dying as young as their 30s. Some are retiring after only a few seasons in order to protect their brains and their bodies. The NFL is changing the rules to try and prevent head impacts. More and more parents are choosing not to let their kids play the sport.
It’s telling that in order to write a story about the future of football, Bois had to envision nanobots that magically protect humans from all injuries. (By the way, this is all leaving out the troubling societal effects of online gambling, which was not nearly as prevalent back when 17776 was written.)
And yet: despite all this, football is as popular as ever. I know all of the above, and I still watch every weekend in the fall.
It’s hard for me, and presumably Bois, to square the challenges football is facing with our love for the game. Why do we keep watching football? What is it that makes the game so compelling, that makes it hard to look away?
The answer, according to 17776, is that we use football as an escape. It’s a way to kill time, to avoid thinking about the meaninglessness of life or our minuscule place in the cosmos. In other words, as Juice says: “the point of play is to distract yourself from play being the point.”
I’d recommend 17776 if you’re interested in that last paragraph, but also if you’re into far-future societies, post-singularity abundance, the practical side of immortality, or boundary-pushing literary formats.
2. The Format
What is a “book”, anyway? (After all, this is a book review contest.)
By far the most notable thing about 17776 is its multimedia web format. It’s worth checking out the first chapter here to get a taste of the style.
…did you read some of it? You’re back now?
With very few words spread across dozens of calendar pages, Bois expresses a deep sense of loneliness and the crushing passage of time in a unique way I’d never seen before.
A physical book would be limiting for something like this. You could use 50 mostly-blank pages to do the same thing, but it would be sort of a waste of paper, your book would be 50 pages longer, it would cost more to print, and so on. An ebook might work better, but you’d still run into issues with different screen sizes, fonts, etc. On the web, it's no problem at all, and scrolling seems to make the effect work.
But that effect is just one taste of how 17776 uses the web as a creative storytelling medium. The 3D maps and visualizations create a rich atmosphere. Bois uses videos to accompany the text with music and sound, but also to dictate dialogue pacing, adding dramatic pauses and punchlines. The piece starts off looking like a typical web article before disintegrating into blackness, which is a powerful and jarring beginning. (Unfortunately the original landing page seems to be offline, but you can see an archived version here.)
His experiments don't always work – one page in particular uses some creative text routing that I'd say is more confusing than engaging. But hey, at least he's trying something unique.
I love the rich, emotional world Bois is able to build in this fashion. And it’s not just me; 17776 is popular and award-winning. So my question becomes: why isn't anyone else writing like this??
Our culture has been radically transformed by technology and the Internet. Back in the mid-to-late 20th century, futurists envisioned electronic books that would use hypertext for innovative branching structures and include interactive features like shared margin notes. But as far as I can tell, most authors are still writing books of a few hundred pages, broken into chapters, paragraphs, and sentences.
So what happened? Why isn't more modern creative writing like 17776?
I want to consider a few possible reasons:
I. People are writing like this and I’m just not aware of it
II. Technical limitations make it too challenging
III. Distribution platforms create standardization
IV. Authors express their ideas through internalized formats
I. People are writing like this and I’m just not aware of it
Maybe this style of writing is a thing and I'm just ignorant?
The most similar popular thing I can think of is Homestuck, which is definitely in the same general area, but feels more like a comic. Another example is House of Leaves, but that’s still pretty clearly something we’d call a “book”. Other than that, I struggle to come up with another widely-known example of this style.
I asked Claude to help me do some research, and it references Homestuck too, along with interactive sites like The Pudding and a couple of stories that don’t feel very similar to me (e.g. STET). But overall, with only a hint of LLM voice, it tells me that “17776's specific niche is genuinely rare” and “nothing else really does what 17776 does at that level of craft and popularity”.
This guy has a list of “hyperliterature” works, but it’s only 11 entries long, and that’s including 17776, STET, and Homestuck. There’s the Interactive Fiction Database, but the most popular works listed there have only a few hundred votes, and they mostly seem to be text-adventure-style games (e.g. the very engaging mystery Type Help). That’s definitely immersive storytelling that makes the most of the web, but it’s not really the same thing as 17776.
Wikipedia has articles for things like electronic literature and hypertext fiction, but strangely, these seem more concerned with the pre-Internet era, with much less to say about the last 15 years or so – just when I’d expect these genres to have exploded. For example, both articles reference Pale Fire, which I love, but come on, we’re talking about something totally different here. A few of the more recent examples come close, but some almost feel more like art than literature (e.g. c ya laterrrr).
In summary: clearly there are other authors trying to innovate in similar ways, but so far not many of them have found traction. So maybe a better question is why this type of multimedia fiction hasn’t become more popular or mainstream.
Perhaps this is a categorization problem? If your piece is too interactive, it's glossed as a game; if it uses too many drawings, it looks like a comic; rely too much on video and people might call it a movie. There’s not really a simple, agreed-upon name for the kind of thing 17776 is.
I do think that's part of what's happening here. Even this roundup of web fiction defines four overall categories – rational fiction, /newwave/, web serial fantasy, and interactive fiction – before calling out 17776 and its sequel 20020 as a totally unique category called “parallax fiction” that nothing else quite fits into. Hmm.
II. Technical limitations make it too challenging
To make something like 17776, you have to write the story, but then you also need to design a visual style, create the imagery, choose the music, record the videos, and bring it all together into a functioning website. And to make something people will love, you need to be a gifted author, artist, and technologist (or find good collaborators).
In 2017, this must have been a big barrier, but not anymore. These days, Claude Code could poop out this kind of website in a few minutes.
Sure, something made with AI wouldn't have the same lo-fi, handmade charm as 17776, but there’s a whole universe of creative possibility to explore here. Even a simple webpage can afford feelings of exploration and discovery that might be impossible to replicate in a book. Heck, just copying the way 17776 uses multiple columns and colors for different speakers would create a different reading experience, and that’s dead simple with today’s technology.
Maybe part of the barrier here is the deep hatred for AI in most creative communities. I doubt many inventive and boundary-pushing authors are using AI much at all, and even if they did, they might find their work shunned by much of the literary community on Bluesky.
A bigger factor might be the time it takes for new technologies to gain traction. AI coding tools have really only been mainstream for a year or two, and so far have mostly been adopted by techies. In ten years, will we see a generation of authors who grew up vibe-storytelling? Will they be using AI to pioneer ever-more-immersive reading experiences?
III. Distribution platforms create standardization
Let’s say you have an awesome idea for a book. You talk to some agents and publishers and one is interested. “When can you send me a few chapters?” they ask. “Here,” you say, “take a look at this webpage with a bunch of embedded GIFs.”
“What are you talking about?” they might say. “I need something we can put in airport bookstores and make into an ebook for people to buy on their Kindles. I can’t sell a website.”
Publishers distribute work through existing channels to get it in front of large, established audiences. So if you’re an aspiring author, you might not even consider creating outside of those channels, since that’s where the money is. (Presumably this is also one reason so many movies have the same “Save the Cat!” style story beats: it’s a formula that works with mass audiences.)
With all this in mind, it makes sense that 17776 was written while Bois worked at SB Nation. The existing systems for publishing and sharing literary work just aren’t really set up for multimedia content; the incentives are much better for a web-native media business that’s trying to drive traffic.
It’s not just monetary pressure, though. Someone (not me) in the pre-contest thread asked Scott if they could submit their review as a website, since they wanted to write something "in an interactive format” that wouldn’t work in Google Docs. Scott replied that he needed to run the contest through Google Docs and post the finalists on his blog, so “anything which is too complicated to work in those places” wouldn’t work.
There’s clearly a tension here. Plain text is easier to replicate in different channels, but comes at the cost of artistic expression. You couldn’t make 17776 into an audiobook, for instance.
Overall, I guess I’m surprised there hasn’t been more innovation in this space. After all, news companies have figured out how to paywall their websites. Plenty of creators use sites like Patreon and Gumroad to sell digital products. And 17776 is both popular and critically-acclaimed, so it seems like there should be a market for more work like it. Why isn’t there some kind of “web fiction store” where the platform takes a 30% cut?
IV. Creators express their ideas through internalized formats
Maybe the ultimate limitation is having the idea for what to make in the first place.
Most creators seem to work within existing “formats”. Fiction authors write short stories or novels. Musicians make 3-4 minute songs and release ~8-12 song albums. Streaming services pump out TV shows with consistent 30- or 60-minute episodes, even though they’re no longer restricted by a broadcast schedule.
This must be partly because of how people are exposed to the work in the first place. You grow up reading novels, and then one day you decide you want to write a novel yourself. And it’s probably partly caused by the platform pressures described in part III above – if publishers are looking for novels, that’s what people will write.
But I believe there’s another, subtler effect at play. The more you create in a certain format, the more you internalize it as a part of your creative process.
I’m not much of a blogger, but I write a few posts a year. And after writing enough posts, I’ve started to internalize my style. Sometimes an idea will come to me, and it will arrive with the basic outline already sketched out in my mind – how I’ll set up the narrative, where the interesting or surprising bits will come in, even large sections of the prose itself. These posts are very easy to write. In fact, it’s become hard to write about anything that doesn’t arrive in my mind partially-formed like this.
I’m speculating here, but I think most people who write and publish regularly must have something like this going on internally. Asimov wrote hundreds of books and short stories in his career. To reach that level of output, he must have been thinking in “story” format to some extent and effectively just transcribing his ideas. I suspect most writers have a creative process that is bound up in the formats they know best.
So if you’ve not only spent years reading only novels, short stories, and essays, and then even more years also writing exclusively in those formats, it's probably hard to break the mold. A successful and respected author like Margaret Atwood or Neal Stephenson could easily convince a publisher to work with them on an innovative new multimedia literary project. But perhaps their processes are too calcified to even be able to do this in the first place.
On the other hand, Bois has spent years making videos with many of the same visual storytelling tools he uses in 17776. Maybe that’s made him uniquely positioned to express his ideas in this particular hybrid format.
These patterns repeat across all kinds of media. I mentioned TV shows above – people have tried to make new streaming formats, but so far they haven’t stuck. AI image generation lets people visualize anything in the world, but it turns out they mostly just Ghiblify pictures of their kids.
The example that bothers me most is (ironically) Substack. You can make almost anything on the web, but these days it seems like everyone who decides to start blogging just fires up a Substack.
It makes perfect sense. You have to know a bit about web development to make your own blog, but Substack doesn’t require any technical skills. Substack also comes with built-in distribution and monetization, and offers bigger names incentives to publish on their platform. There are definitely people making more creative blogs, but they tend to be niche. There’s a tradeoff where you give up some creative flexibility in exchange for the technical and distribution benefits, and that’s fine as far as it goes.
But the thing I worry about is the fourth factor above – that people will read a bunch of Substacks, and maybe start writing their own, and internalize the format. They’ll start creating in the Substack “style”, rather than using Substack to share original work. They’ll forget they could make anything they want.
3. The Gestalt
So what does all this have to do with football? What is football, anyway?
Obviously, football is a sport where you score points by getting into the end zone. But it’s also throwing a ball around with your friends in the backyard. It’s rooting for the team from your state to beat the hell out of the team from the state next door. It’s a weekly ritual, a way to build community. It’s a soap opera where players get injured tragically and make heroic comebacks, only to be traded to another team. It’s watching human beings struggle against nature – wind, rain, blizzards. It’s a Kafkaesque rules system where many of the penalties are subjective and the referees often determine the outcome of a game. It’s sitting around shooting the shit over a beer, remembering obscure players from 20 years ago.
Bois explores each of these distinct aspects by re-envisioning football as a format or a genre unto itself, like the novel or the album. This lets him highlight different facets of the sport he loves with exaggerated examples. What if games were played literally between states, with players trekking hundreds of miles across the country? What if we eschewed the gameplay entirely, and all that was left was the rules-lawyering? What if the sport was really all about collecting memorabilia? What if a game took place in a tornado?
This focus on exploring the “football game” as a creative format replaces more straightforward narratives about winners and losers. In fact, in all the games that feature in 17776, nobody wins. Nobody ever even scores any points!
It seems almost impossible to tell a story about sports without having winners and losers. Every Disney baseball movie, or even every kitchen-table recap of a high-school basketball game, boils down to who won and who lost and how it happened. But Bois manages to zoom out and zoom in at the same time, presenting snapshots of moments within games that last decades or centuries.
The futility of each game, with none of the players able to make progress, mirrors the broader cultural stagnation depicted in 17776. Thousands of years into the future, surprisingly little has changed. People are still podcasting; they’re still basically Twitch streaming; they’re still watching Law and Order reruns. They’re stuck in the same old formats.
Of course, there is one major cultural change. The characters in this world think in football games, much the same way authors might think in stories, or novels, or blog posts. They have internalized the format. They discuss philosophical ideas through different types of games. One character visits a far future New York City, underwater from a massive rise in sea level, and describes his inspiration for a football game played on speedboats amidst the skyscrapers.
Read in this way, 17776 is self-exemplifying: it’s a creative expression in a new format (multimedia fiction) about creative expression through a new format (football). Perhaps it can also inspire some of us to break out of existing structures and create something original.