We're going to the moon now to find a suitable site to play three-sided football

June 19, 2010 9:06 AM

We're going to the moon now to find a suitable site to play three-sided football.
posted by ennui.bz (27 comments total)

YOU ARE EDUCATED STUPID. EARTH HAS 4 CORNER SIMULTANEOUS 4-DAY SOCCER PITCH IN ONLY 24 HOUR ROTATION.
posted by The Card Cheat at 9:11 AM on June 19, 2010 [7 favorites]

The moon is also a good spot to play Three-Cornered Pitney.
posted by Fuzzy Monster at 9:16 AM on June 19, 2010 [1 favorite]

"The game purports to deconstruct the confrontational and bi-polar nature of conventional football as an analogy of class struggle in which the referee stands as a signifier of the state and media apparatus, posturing as a neutral arbitrator in the political process of ongoing class struggle."

what
posted by LSK at 9:19 AM on June 19, 2010

Likewise, it is no psycho-sexual drama of the fuckers and fucked - the possibilities are greatly expanded! The pitch is hexagonal each team being assigned two opposite sides for bureaucratical purposes should the ball be kicked out of the play. The blank side is called the front side. The side containing the orifice is called the backside, and the orifice is called a goal. Should the ball be thrust through a team's orifice, the team is deemed to have conceded a goal - so in an emblematic fashion this perpetuates the anal-retentive homophobic techniques of conventional football whereby homo-erotic tension is built up, only to be sublimated and repressed. However the trialectic appropriation of this technique dissolves the homo-erotic/homo-phobic bipolarity as a successful attack will generally imply co-operation with the third team.

what what in the butt
posted by ennui.bz at 9:23 AM on June 19, 2010 [1 favorite]

Who masticated and ingested the various and sundry savory baked meat tarts placed before us? I submit to you that it was my right honorable and esteemed colleagues on the opposing side! x3
posted by boo_radley at 9:40 AM on June 19, 2010 [1 favorite]

So this is basically LARPing for lefty anarchist philosophers?
posted by Humanzee at 9:47 AM on June 19, 2010

So this is basically LARPing for lefty anarchist philosophers?

Well yes, minus the Live Action Role-Playing.
posted by joe lisboa at 9:57 AM on June 19, 2010

Tis is why football should be called football, and soccer should be called soccer. To call soccer football is just crazy.
posted by cjorgensen at 9:58 AM on June 19, 2010

Tis is why football should be called football, and soccer should be called soccer. To call soccer football is just crazy.

This.
posted by cjorgensen at 10:00 AM on June 19, 2010

"The game purports to deconstruct the confrontational and bi-polar nature of conventional football as an analogy of class struggle in which the referee stands as a signifier of the state and media apparatus, posturing as a neutral arbitrator in the political process of ongoing class struggle."

Has anyone really been far even as decided to use even go want to do look more like?
posted by educatedslacker at 10:08 AM on June 19, 2010 [3 favorites]

Now this is the kind of popular anarchism I can get behind. Especially if someone from the other team is getting behind it too, and are willing to pass the damn ball!
posted by cthuljew at 10:10 AM on June 19, 2010

Well yes, minus the Live Action Role-Playing.

From the second link:

Today's game involves fellow anarchists the Association of Autonomous
Astronauts (AAA) who are developing an independent space-travel project
based on the premise that all we require to travel the universe is
imagination and a map of another planet. Accordingly, today's match is to
be played on the surface of the moon, or Hackney, depending on who you
believe.

There seems to be a lot of pretending, staying in character, and proxies for political beliefs (e.g. teams as political parties). The Italian was a fascist, presumably for trying to score. To me, this seems a lot more like role-playing than a ball game.
posted by Humanzee at 10:18 AM on June 19, 2010 [1 favorite]

I see someone owns a thesaurus.
posted by ericb at 10:25 AM on June 19, 2010

To me, this seems a lot more like role-playing than a ball game.

Point taken. And two points added to the scores of all three teams.
posted by joe lisboa at 10:53 AM on June 19, 2010

A three sided football? My dog has one. He loves it.
posted by jeffamaphone at 10:56 AM on June 19, 2010

Generally Communism begins to scale poorly past the commune size. Like large scale Communism, this game has fewer winners and more loosers at a size much smaller than Commune size--although the ratio of winners to loosers is off by an order of magnitude or two. Nevertheless, it's still brilliant.

TWO TEAMS BAD! THREE TEAMS GOOD! TWO TEAMS BAD! THREE TEAMS GOOD!
posted by cleancut at 10:57 AM on June 19, 2010

The moon is also a good spot to play Three-Cornered Pitney.

I have that issue of Mad Magazine in a basement somewhere. I always wanted to play Three-Cornered Pitney.
posted by jeffamaphone at 10:57 AM on June 19, 2010

Although the video has that unmistakable scent of slightly embarrassed earnestness that characterises art projects the world over, the fundamental idea of three-sided football seems pretty interesting from a sporting (rather than pseudo-philosophical) point of view. If you see the purpose of sport as the generation of narratives of conflict, there's a lot of potential in having three teams in the game – betrayal, paranoia, shifting allegiances. I'd like to watch a match.
posted by him at 11:25 AM on June 19, 2010 [2 favorites]

But can you play Calvinball on the moon?
posted by emilyd22222 at 12:47 PM on June 19, 2010 [1 favorite]

It would seem to me that three-sided football would be a game where good defense is absolutely a must, and that having one team with poor defense on the pitch would be an invitation for them to get pulverized.
posted by maxwelton at 12:51 PM on June 19, 2010

Now this is the kind of popular anarchism I can get behind. Especially if someone from the other team is getting behind it too, and are willing to pass the damn ball!

that attitude is completely embelmatic of the petit bourgeoisie mentality: you'll only take revolutionary action if it is socially acceptable yet you expect the vanguard of revolution ( passing the ball ) to be an aid towards your own ego-centered desires (pass *me* the ball)

the maoists would trounce these effete counter-revolutionaries anyway...
posted by ennui.bz at 1:17 PM on June 19, 2010 [2 favorites]

AskMefi discussion of three-teamed sports
posted by battleshipkropotkin at 2:06 PM on June 19, 2010

cleancut: "the ratio of winners to loosers is off by an order of magnitude or two"

I think the preferred terminology is "whiners and loosers".
posted by idiopath at 2:49 PM on June 19, 2010

Looser than what?

I'd like to see some three-sided Aussie Rules football. Also, the players should be dressed as pantomime camels.
posted by Sys Rq at 3:40 PM on June 19, 2010 [1 favorite]

I'd like to see some three-sided Aussie Rules football.

I need to find my glasses as I initially read this as "...three-sided Ayn Rand football."

Triangular Australian sounds good to me, though. I seem to remember a game in some paperback sci-fi series I read in elementary school (Myth Adventures, maybe?) that was a three-sided cross between Aussie Rules and Netball (at least in my faulty memory).

Nobody for 43-Man Squamish?
posted by jtron at 4:48 PM on June 19, 2010

In games, if not necessarily game theory, adding a third player changes the game completely. It's what amounts to a strategic "phase change", primarily because it introduces the element of diplomacy. Adding further players doesn't greatly change the nature of strategy although it obviously complicates its implementation. Two player games are very much more "clear"; it's you or me, all in. With a third person there waiting to strike the weakened victor, it becomes much more complex.

A naive version of 3-way soccer is actually a 33-way (probably less) game where any 11 given players have game-long alliances and variable diplomatic attitudes, which would probably tend to average out to "attack both of them at once", as it'd be very difficult to coordinate tactics without having practiced a lot.

3-way tennis would be very interesting, and all you'd need to make for it is a 3-pointed asterisk shaped net.
posted by aeschenkarnos at 4:59 PM on June 19, 2010 [1 favorite]

In games, if not necessarily game theory, adding a third player changes the game completely. It's what amounts to a strategic "phase change", primarily because it introduces the element of diplomacy. Adding further players doesn't greatly change the nature of strategy although it obviously complicates its implementation. Two player games are very much more "clear"; it's you or me, all in. With a third person there waiting to strike the weakened victor, it becomes much more complex.

Oh, man, it's much worse than that. See, the thing is, it's impossible to optimize for more than one variable at a time (unless one variable's being optimized results in another's also being optimized, but this is rare.) This means that game theory, which starts as a relatively trivial affair when given nearly any two-player scenarios, to the point that you can pretty much always compute the optimal result bar any behavioral psychology, starts to experience difficulty when a third player is added. Three-way games where the central goal is destroying opponents (as opposed to outracing them) are difficult because attacking any one opponent means that that opponent will attack you in return.

Crazy stuff. It's the same reason we can't get past binary logic - any added logical elements are, shall we say, inherently unstable. Ternary logic means we have to define combined values in three directions. Let's look at our current binary logic: Imagine we have a hallway, with two doors, one at either end. Now, imagine that you're a "statement" - some idea that can be described in binary logic. As soon as you start walking towards one end, you go further from the other end - terrific! The statement becomes less false as it becomes more true. But as soon as you enter a third element into the mix, things get much stranger. Imagine that, instead of an easy, workable hallway, you have a triangle, with a door at each corner. Let's call these "value A", "value B", and "value C" (not particularly meaningful, but they'll work.) Say you start walking towards the door representing value A. You're simultaneously walking away from value B and value C - but by less than you're going towards value A. Further, you can walk towards value A in a way that makes you go further from value B than from value C, or so forth - there are, suddenly, options! Instead of the more-true-or-less-true you had when walking down the hallway, you literally* have an infinity of options!

We don't use binary logic because it's powerful (which it is), or because it's sufficient to describe most sets of circumstances (which it also is.) We use it because any other option would be instantly rejected by the human mind - the options provided by even ternary logic are far too powerful for us.

In short: game theory and logic are awesome, but I'm going to stick to two-team football.

*Yes, _literally_.
posted by LSK at 8:00 PM on June 19, 2010 [1 favorite]