This page contains The Games That Got Us Through, as well as the other ephemera originally hosted on the website AppliedHistoryInstitute.com. This collaborative project was funded by a grant from ASU to participate in their 2016 Emerge Festival about the future of sports. With that money we (a small and temporary creative collective we called the Applied History Institute) wrote, designed, and printed a booklet of stories about the sports and games born amid a future climate migration fleeing megadrought in the American Southwest. Several of us also attended Emerge, where we set up a fictional museum exhibit and taught attendees how to play our signature game, Cistern.
This was a fantastic project and very formative for me as a writer and futures thinker. The Applied History Institute no longer meets, but for those few months we enacted a wonderfully imaginative collaboration that I’m grateful to have been a part of. However, after seven years, the website itself was seeing minimal traffic, and I decided to save myself the hosting and domain costs and move the materials here. If you want to jump straight to the TGTGUT book, you can find it here.
The foremost prefigurative meta-history collaborative of the early-to-mid twenty-first century. We are based in Yerba Buena, California, and in hopes that the cities of the south will not burn.
Among our number are the following: Andrew Dana Hudson, Adam Flynn, Olivia Nevins-Carbins, Paige Saez, and J. Bryce Hidysmith.
“History is the sum total of things that could have been avoided”
– Konrad Adenauer
Introduction: 2112 In The Year Of Our Lord
The sign, when dusted off, read: “Not an Entrance.”
Bejli pushed away the banyan vines and got her fingernails under the edge of the door. It was the only way in to this part of the complex. The rest of the block had been squatted for a long while, but this building hadn’t been cracked for a few years at least. The old landlord had kept some sort of a holdout here. A study maybe. One of those spaces that the rich kept just to be—drawing rooms and conservatories. Now the guard patrols were gone, and someone was going to get to crack it again. Bejli figured she might as well be the first.
From outside it was a windowless box of pocked concrete and old steel. Trees embraced it, pressing into the hard edges as they stretched for the sun. Stained glass once arched around the outside door, but had been smashed after the landlord’s demise, perhaps by vandals, perhaps by beasts or falling branches.
In these times post-electric, Bejli was one of those great apes who scaled the jungles of once-civilization as the towers slumped sideways and panes of safety glass were ground back to sand.
Nobody had jimmied the lock on the door yet, which was good. A late model Schlages that you couldn’t really hack through and lasted forever. But with the stained-glass windows broke, she could just run a drone-limb around the back and turn the lock. She entered the antechamber and locked the door behind her.
A coat rack hung one decaying blazer and a centenarian cap. There was a wood stair, post-OSHA construction lacking bannisters, then the lower level, poached from what was once a parking structure. Simple chamber, all at 90 degrees. Boxes lined the walls, an irregular second layer to the room. A couple desks and a bauhaus chair of dubious replica. And strewn everywhere a cosmos of variable detritus.
There were schematics: 2d hand-drawn, CAD, and holographic. Statuettes of printed resin. Hand-carved tools. There was a model of a clock, bursting with complexity, as it was measuring much more than time. A mirrored loop of solar panels about the size of a horse leaned against some crates marked Spinerette Project. Illuminations of trees and their seeds covered a token-operated seedbank. A wall of hieroglyphs of unknown expression. Details for aquaponic systems. In a corner, a stack of boxy metal cans. A map of a hollowed-out earth. Recipes for modified concrete.
This didn’t happen. These artifacts were immigrants from the principality of rumor. This space, a hatchery of separate continuity. A coulda-been world. A maybe. Better off avoided?
The cache lay beneath Yerba Buena. Not yet cold. Not dead. Maybe dreaming. Tomorrow bristled hot and humid as night settled in above. Below, Bejli settled in to read. She had to surmise it, just enough, to get her blood flowing. Then, a rousing oratory, and a colony to get this hive moving again. Maybe they could do better than the last couple tenants.
The Games That Got Us Through
A hydro-ludological investigation into the possible destinies of the American West.
“The Motherlode” and “The Map” were written by Andrew Dana Hudson. “The Return” was written by J. Bryce Hidysmith. Editing by Andrew Dana Hudson. Cover design by J. Bryce Hidysmith. Advice, guidance and edits by Adam Flynn. Helpful input from Alex Cotton and Adam Rothstein.
Teams of the Intercity Cistern League
Cascadia United
The state team of Cascadia, C.U. is based in the Seattle- Vancouver Megacity, and has become perhaps the biggest phenomenon in new North American sports. Cascadia United has perhaps the most backing of any Cistern team, and the largest population to draw on, but also the least historical connection to the sport. Cascadia State University is responsible in many ways for the investment and media attention that has come to Cistern in the northern regions, following their usage of it as a cross-training sport for football, eventually leading to College Cistern in the Cascadian region. On the pitch, Cascadia United is noted for their raw athleticism and reliability. The Nutritionary Sciences Department of CSU provided a number of augmentation diets during the early 2040s that called into question the very nature of augmentation and performance enhancement in the field of sports. Though the NSD augmentations are now banned, their training regimen still places them at, or near, the top .
Bakersfield Sound
Initially founded in Portland before Reclamationist return brought a significant population back to California, the Bakersfield Sound was the favored team of the agricultural classes of the Central Valley who maintained a degree of unity around cultural artifacts, even in light of their rapidly changing ways of life. On the field, the Bakersfield Sound is known for their grand theatricality, frequently blending the role of player and mascot to massively confuse the other team. This, coupled with their tendency to sing though the entire game as a sort of code to ensure rapid coordination, the Sound’s primary asset their use of rapid communication and subterfuge to overcome raw athletic ability.
Yuma Fremen
Their name inspired by the water-conserving sand people in the novel Dune, the Yuma Fremen is the largest Zoner team in the Intercity Cistern League. Founded in the Ashland border camp in 2036, they made a name for themselves with a dramatic debut game with The State of Jefferson. The Fremen are known for playing an intense endurance game, especially as raiders. Their first point man, the notorious Emilia Prince, developed a strategy around simply locking down all members of the opposing team as intently as possible, forcing a 1:1 ratio on the cans. The Fremen are also known for excelling in open fields, using Coach Juan Delacroix’s “Vector Momentum Theory.” This granted them a substantial advantage in interception over their counterparts.
State of Jefferson
Another product of the climactic 2036 Ashland border game, The State of Jefferson was initially comprised of locals from the Jeffersonian region, and born out of a desire to create a greater degree of political unity among the Jeffersonian Secessionist Movement. Following a degree of investment by Alvar P. Spaulding, the noted wind-industrialist and Redding native, The State became one of the top teams to transcend out of the amateur leagues to the Intercity League. Though Spaulding’s dreams of Jeffersonian independence have been met with mixed results, his acumen as a promoter and showman is unparalleled, and the State of Jefferson has become known in many cases for the complex emotional narratives of its players, frequently dramatized in monologue to reporters. Following touchdowns in early games, several players were given microphones, connected to drone-lifted speakers, and professed grand confessional statements about their personal lives. While this attracted attention and money from the sale of various forms of swag, the team was not known for its skill on the field until the development of the Jeffersonian Star tactic, a massive improvement on other encirclement practices developed by other teams.
Photographic Documentation from the Cistern Games & Informative Installations @ Emerge 2016: The Future of Sport
Andrew Dana Hudson 