People on Earth typically view me – or other people from where I’m from, for that matter – as not liking sports.

This isn’t completely fair. For one thing, by Earth standards I’m really into juggling. (Yes, it is a sport, even if here it isn’t universally recognized as such.)

It’s also that the sports here are, for the most part, really boring. I have played my fair share of football, and despite it being nominally a team-based game, in practice the games are dominated by a couple players that are overwhelmingly better than others. Unskilled or mediocre players like myself might as well not be there.

Where I’m from, most team sports are deliberately designed to be fun even if you are in the bottom quartile skillwise. Because, well, if it isn’t fun for them, then you are not going to get them come play with you more than once or twice – which in turn raises the level of the play, so that the next quartile is not going to have fun either, and ultimately the equilibrium is that Casual Team Sports With Friends basically don’t happen, unless by sheer luck your friends happen to be at a roughly similar level in that particular sport.

To be fair, it is true that at the professional level football is an actual team game, not just nominally so. I’ve seen some world cup games, and a large part of it is about actual cooperation between team members, even if you still have occassional stars and strong individual performances.

But, frankly, even world-class football is still not very entertaining. Where I’m from, people would be baffled that this is the sport that the world has chosen for the Very Biggest Sports Event.

So let me tell you about one of the big-budget sports that we have. It’s called Fortress. The games have two teams with typically 32 people each. As you may guess, the aim of the game is to capture the other team’s fortress.

It’s not played on a stadium, because the game area is actually quite large. The early game is focused on the attackers making their way towards the other team’s base, both by running and overcoming a collection of challenges – climbing nets, swinging on a sling over a cliff, carefully pulling yourself over an extremely shaky suspension bridge, monkey bars, moving heavy boxes and lifting each other so that you can make your way over a wall, that sort of thing.

(In case it isn’t clear, when I say “sling over a cliff”, the “cliff” is symbolic, meaning there’s a net to one meter below you. We aren’t into real, physical danger in our sports, and for example don’t have the sort of sports where bear-sized men are running full speed into each other. In this game the players have a helmet with a glass visor and a full-body suit, in part because of the protection they give.)

The fortresses are the size of small apartment buildings. Think “your children’s jungle gyms, but made for adults, a thousand times larger, with corridors and vision obstacles and hidden corners, surrounded by walls and made to be hard to conquer”. Classic ways to attack: digging a tunnel, breaking a wall open and climbing on a rope to get over a wall.

(In case it’s not obvious, when I say “digging a tunnel”, I mean “emptying an already digged tunnel from all the heavy stuff it has been filled with”, obviously you are not going to dig a real tunnel in the couple hours that the game lasts. Similarly, “breaking a wall open”, means that a few people pick up a batterin ram, hit a marked wall region with it, and when the force sensor has measured enough hits of an acceptable strength, the door next to the wall unlocks – which might not happen in finite time, if this wall happened to be one of the stronger ones and there wasn’t enough people ramming.)

The way capturing the fortress works is that there’s a bunch of physical-labor-tasks that the team needs to complete. The number of tasks is multiple times larger than the number of attackers in a team. This design choice has been made to ensure that everyone can and will contribute, rather than one guy stealing the show and doing all of the tasks by themselves. In the same vein, task sets that need to be completed before the next set unlocks often just happen to be at distant corners of the fortress, and the tasks just happen to require multiple people to be present at the same time.

The way defending works is that early on the game you do your best to reinforce the defenses and make it hard to traverse to task points, and then later on the game you do your best to undo the attackers’ progress and battle the attackers. Most of this is similar to what attackers do: if the attackers want to climb a rope to get to the fortress, in order to cut that rope you need to climb a rope yourself. If the attackers need to do wallclimbing, you can also do that wallclimbing and as a reward make the route harder to climb the next time around.

The big asymmetrical part between defending and attacking is the battling. Defenders naturally have the high ground and can toss balls at the attackers. Get enough hits, and you need to make your way to a restoration point a couple hundred meters away from the fortress before continuing your attack. And even if the defender has run out of balls and hasn’t went out of their way to collect more from the ball supply, they can still come and wrestle you and press the buttons on your back – which, sure, they usually fail at, given that attackers are in groups for the most part and defenders are alone, but which does make it hard to do tasks like “pull this load together from here to there”. So the attackers mostly have to break up and try again at a different place.

There’s a ton of other things I haven’t explained, like the radio communication and GPS location to coordinate with your teammates, and it sounds more complicated here than what it feels like when it’s explained by a trained tutorial-giver in an actual fortress. Really, the basic idea is: work your way through the obstacles as a team in order to win.

I suppose there are a lot of questions people from Earth may have about the game, one being the cost. As I said, this is one of the more expensive sports, where you do need to pay actual money to get to play it in one of the arenas, not something that people do every weekend when they need to get exercise.

Still, I’ve seen the sums that Earth spends arranging the football world cup tournament. I can assure you, all the work that went into developing the modern Fortress arenas is nowhere near the same ballpark.