The Top Ten: Fictional games
We've done make-believe villains, buildings, countries and fiction. Now this, suggested by Isabel
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Your support makes all the difference.1. Quidditch
The rules make no sense whatsoever and the films confirm it would be useless as a spectator sport. But it's on flying broomsticks.
2. Brockian Ultra-Cricket
"The winning team shall be the first team that wins." From The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams.
3. The Hunger Games
It's kill or be killed, except that Katniss Everdeen, who won, refused to kill anyone except in self-defence, and hid in a tree.
4. Pod racing
Well, I like Episode I: The Phantom Menace.
5. Calvinball
Invented by Calvin of the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes as a protest against team sports. Players wear masks and never play it the same way twice.
6. Card Wars
From the animated TV series Adventure Time. Became real collectible cards and a computer game.
7. Tri-Dimensional Chess
As seen in many Star Trek TV episodes and films. Opening gambit from Mr Memory and Spinning Hugo.
8. Centrifugal Bumble-Puppy
From Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. Josh Blacker could also have mentioned Riemann Surface Tennis, Escalator Squash and Electro-Magnetic Golf.
9. Sburb
The fictional computer game that triggers the end of the world in the webcomic Homestuck.
10. Rollerball
Many nominations, but Adrian McMenamin specifies the "original, paranoid 1975 film version".
Next week: Insults worn as a badge of pride (such as suffragette)
Coming soon: Words you think come from one language but come from another (eg dilettante is from Italian). Send your suggestions, and ideas for future Top 10s, to top10@independent.co.uk
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