Abstract

This paper offers a close reading of Jon Bois’ 17776: What Football Will Look Like in the Future as an example of “feral hypertext,” situating the work within both the history of literary hypertext and broader postmodern narrative traditions. Emerging from a popular media context rather than an academic or experimental one, 17776 combines text, GIFs, maps, and video within a linear, scrolling interface to produce a distinctive multimedia narrative about boredom, immortality, and play.

We argue that, rather than adhering to canonical models of hypertext defined by branching structure and reader choice, Bois’ work reconfigures hypertextuality through temporal layering, collage aesthetics, and the aggregation of networked media. In doing so, it both reflects and departs from earlier hypertext theory, which emphasised nonlinearity, authorial decentring, and reader agency.

By placing 17776 alongside postmodern fiction (particularly the work of David Foster Wallace) we demonstrate how its themes of boredom, abstraction, and simulated space align with concepts such as hyperreality and depthlessness, while also engaging with the affective mode associated with the “New Sincerity.”

The paper argues that 17776 exemplifies a broader shift in hypertext from a clearly bounded literary form to a dispersed, vernacular practice embedded within contemporary web culture. This case highlights the limitations of existing critical frameworks and argues for renewed attention to emergent, noncanonical works, suggesting that hypertext persists not as a fixed structure but as an evolving mode of cultural production.

1 Introduction

In 2017, visitors to sports news website SBNation stumbled upon an oddity. Hidden amongst articles about baseball and American football was 17776,1 a sprawling, serialised speculative fiction by writer and video producer Jon Bois. This multimedia series (combining text, GIFs, video and more) explores a distant future of immortal, infertile humans through the eyes of three sapient space probes. Together, they witness an evolved version of American football played over thousands of miles and thousands of years. Longlisted for a Hugo in both the Novella and Graphic Story categories, one commentator noted that “if it were up to me, [17776] would have won that Hugo... I'm just not sure which one”[25]. The category for which it should have been nominated, of course, is one that does not exist: Best Hypertext.

This paper offers a preliminary close reading of 17776, placing it in proximity with both literary hypertext and the wider world of postmodern fiction, explicitly David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest. In doing so, we hope to address the place of literary theory in the present hypertext community. Bois is not a scholar of hypertext; he is a sports writer who likes to experiment with technology. Avowedly low-fi, 17776 represents hypertext literature "in the wild": a case of feral hypertext, to borrow Jill Walker's term [29]. As a result, this and similar works like Andrew Hussle's Homestuck or corru's Corru.observer exist in a complex relationship with literary hypertext, which itself has a complex relationship with literary theory and the hypertext community at large.

A common method in liteary studies, close reading asks us to examine a writer's specific language and stylistic choices to reveal how a text creates its deeper meaning: "a deliberate attempt to detach ourselves from the magical power of story-telling and pay attention to language, imagery, allusion, intertextuality, syntax and form" [24].

It would be possible to ask whether 17776 is ‘really’ hypertext. We would argue that it is - not simply because it is published on the web or combines multiple media, but because its narrative is constructed through the meaningful relationship between discrete textual and audiovisual units. The work asks readers to make connections across embedded maps, animations, videos, and written dialogue, with meaning emerging from their arrangement and interplay rather than from any single component alone. While it abandons the branching structures that shaped early definitions of hypertext, it retains the more fundamental hypertextual principle of organising narrative through linked and interconnected fragments.

2 Hypertext Literature: A Brief and Subjective History

Two mainstream articles bookend a particularly fertile period in the history of literary hypertext: Robert Coover 1992 essay The End of Books and Steven Johnson's 2013 Why No One Clicked on the Great Hypertext Story.

Published in the New York Times, Coover's essay argued that traditional novels were obsolete due to hypertext technology enabled by computers. Describing hypertext succinctly as nonlinear writing in nonsequential space, Coover predicted this shift would revolutionise fiction, granting "true freedom from the tyranny of the line” [8]. Just over two decades later, however, Johnson reflected in Wired that while enthusiasts like Coover envisioned readers freely navigating linked text blocks, the format proved extremely difficult to write effectively. Hypertext, Johnson concluded, is best understood as a way to organise short blocks of linear writing - as with blogs and social media - than a writing platform in itself [16].

In this Johnson shares a position with Walker, who describes pre-web hypertext literature like Michael Joyce's afternoon in terms of control and restriction; this approach also echoes the epochal model found in wider e-lit scholarship. On the web hypertext went feral, becoming collaborative and bringing readers in as active participants (rather than more limited form of control over sequence found in the majority of earlier literary hypertext). These feral works are contrasted with the ‘in-genre’ examples that form the Storyspace canon, with critics positioned as hunters prowling the web in search of new and emerging work rather than in the traditional mode of close analysis and critique borrowed from linear print fiction.

Neither article is entirely one-sided: Coover's piece should be understood as advocacy, building excitement at the way hypertext can subvert the bourgeois novel and challenge linearity; Johnson's piece celebrates the importance of pioneers in the development of networked spaces. It should be noted too that the most renowned works of literary hypertext arose in the 1980s, so Coover was commenting on a field with an ongoing upward trajectory. Nonetheless these two articles serve as bookends to the most active period in the history and criticism of literary hypertext, a time when critics of the form felt they had a pretty good handle on what it was.

Then the social web came along, displacing residual ideas of authorship and control over the work. This shift placed tightly authored works like those produced in Storyspace in a peculiar position. As Games Studies matured and interactive digital narratives (IDN) acquired greater critical attention, hypertext increasingly found itself absorbed into the practices of electronic literature or manoeuvred into being but one component of more complex interactive experiences - a form of aggressive remediation [5] that domesticated what had once felt revolutionary. Alongside wider proclamations that "the great era of high theory [was] over" [10], hypertext as a medium for postmodern expressive work similarly fell out of favour, resulting in the relatively small canon of works taking on an outsized presence in the critical imagination.

Concerns about the low profile of literary hypertext and prominence of academic criticism around a small number of works has a long history within the community [11], [22]. Sometimes this discussion is diagnostic [27]; sometimes it is a call to arms [26]. Generational models (cf. [1], [13], [12]) sought to keep pace with wider developments, framing first generation works of the 1980s-1990s as burdened by their comparatively limited environments and origins in print culture.

Arguably the historic imbalance between critics and creators has now been addressed, not least because (as Anderson and Millard note) "representation of literary theory has become far less common in the ACM Hypertext Conference" [2]. As in the Electronic Literature community, the biggest challenge remains one of recognition: in Latin America, for example, hypertext often finds itself grouped under the catch-all term digital literature or shifted into the visual arts space, while in India the lack of institutional recognition makes studies of existing creative communities challenging.

There is a wealth of new work that feels (to a greater or lesser extent) like a child of hypertext - Flores [12] places the number in the low millions - but we lack the critical apparatus (and sometimes, the appetite) to capture and engage with it. It is noteworthy that there have been few close readings of a hypertext work presented at the ACM Hypertext in recent years. Close readings have been submitted for presentation, but (at the risk of betraying confidences) received scathing reviews that questioned the merit of such activity. 2 This absence should not suggest that close readings have no place at the conference - quite the reverse. One need only read Jill Walker's work on afternoon, a story [28], J. Yellowlees Douglas's The End of Books [9] or David Ciccoricco's work on Twilight. A Symphony [7] to see how much we can gain from this approach.

We are no longer ‘drunk on links’ [19] and neither is the public; Netflix's Bandersnatch may have been popular but it was a novelty, not the presager of multi-strand narrative some hoped it might be. That period bookended by Coover and Johnson may be seen as one particularly prominent manifestation of hypertext as a literary paradigm, but its supersession by the social web as a mode of creative practice does not mean the field must now ossify. There is still work to be done.

Hypertext works now have no need to be positioned against anything, since they exist independent of concerns about linearity and comparisons with the book that felt necessary in 1990s and early 2000s. Instead it can be celebrated for what it does, what it can be: a lot of work, a lot of fun. In the final chapter of Orality and Literacy (1982), Ong argues that "the new medium does not wipe out the old, but it transforms it... electronic technology has not brought an end to print; it has brought a new relationship between the spoken word and the written word" [21]. Hypertext is a medium for creative expression, the resultant works interesting not simply as an illustration of its mechanics but as exciting works in themselves.

Hypertext as a field has drifted away from (or beyond) literature and the literary. From its profound entanglement in the 1990s, when it was described as the realisation of literary theory [6], this field now has a relatively minor place in works on hypertext (as it does elsewhere). There was a continuum from postmodern literature to experiments with hypertext, one that ended decisively with a shift to the web and has not been recovered. The loss of these ties to the wider humanities may, in part, explain the perennial existential crisis within the community; if not a gathering-place for those occupying adjacent disciplines, what prevents it from becoming a secondary venue for scholarship belonging to the wider world of what we might call applied hypertext?

In Wolfgang Iser's 1978 The Act of Reading, the author suggests that each system “has its own ’underworld’ of excluded possibilities"[14], with the role of literature to bring these to the surface. If platformisation and social media have become hypertext's mainstream, then the underworld is that smallweb universe of idiosyncratic human experiences curated on the indie web. These strange works are perfect candidates for exploration through the long history of hypertext scholarship. Weird experiments like 17776 should be celebrated, placed in their context as part of a continuum of exploratory work. There seems to be an appetite for a baked-in lo-fi aesthetic, one that cuts through the extraordinary gloss of modern online experiences: consider The Roottrees are Dead or Sam Barlow's acclaimed Immortal.

The following analysis seeks to situate 17776 within some of the wider conventions of the postmodern work, alongside critical approaches to hypertext more generally. Comparisons with key ideas from hypertext's history are neither positive or negative, but a way to explore the work and its affordances. This close reading is by no means exhaustive, but intended to serve as a reminder that such an approach has value.

3 Analysis of the work

While defining and characterising Bois’ work may be, as Kristen O'Neal says, “a half-impossible endeavor" [23], it's probably worth starting with an acknowledgment of the frame. 17776 occupies a quasi-rogue presence on the website SB Nation, where Bois is credited as Innovations Editor. In keeping with this, the first screen of the project loads like a standard article titled What football will look like in the future, before “degrading” into a seemingly-endless calendar that offers readers piecemeal exposition for the narrative to follow. This collapse forms an intriguing bridge between the textual decomposition of Danielewski's House of Leaves or Hall's The Raw Shark Texts and the glitch aesthetic of Hypnospace Outlaw or Menkman's The Vernacular of File Formats (2010).

Deconstruction and pastiche prevail. Most of the ensuing pages are rendered in a decidedly Web 1.0 or Terminal dark-mode aesthetic, with color-coded dialogue interspersed by GIFs containing maps and artifacts, or YouTube videos that type out the text in real time. This playfulness recalls Jameson and his "visual masquerades" of postmodernism., in which media surrounds us with "simulation of historical style" that leaves us disoriented [15].

It's through the dialogue of three satellites (Pioneer Nine, Pioneer Ten, Juice) that we discern the premise: 15,000 years in the future, humans are able to live forever and are thus plagued by boredom. Their response to this existential ennui? Football, played on a massive scale. Nine, Ten and Juice discuss both fictional and real-life players (former NFL quarterback Koy Detmer gets a lot of attention, for example) and games, which are now played out over thousands of miles.

From the outset, then, this text operates as an outlier in myriad ways: its surprising premise and form, its hosting context, its author, its resistance to genre. Close reading, however, reveals 17776 as operating well with the traditions of both modernism and postmodernism. It's easy to see the similarities between the heroes of Bois’ text and those of Beckett's Waiting for Godot, for example. In Chapter 7 of 17776, the satellite Nine says to Ten, “We don't…do anything, right? … There's nothing we're supposed to be doing?” Ten confirms this, to which Nine replies, “So now we just…hang out. We perpetually hang out.” In this way, the duo calls to mind Beckett's Vladimir and Estragon, the latter of whom assesses his sparse, absurd landscape and concludes that there is “nothing to be done.”

If Bois’ work can be said to capture a New Lost Generation, though, it's one steeped in a sort of Gen-X, slackeresque, postmodern sensibility. But while Ian Crouch draws tonal and thematic connections to Don Delillo (and End Zone especially), we find particularly strong connections between Bois and another prominent postmodernist, David Foster Wallace. Both writers are concerned with boredom, for example, and also with the relationship between stasis and entertainment. Speaking about popular entertainment in David Lipsky's Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself, Wallace says, “The really formulaic stuff… gives you a sense of order, that everything's going to be all right, that this is a narrative that will take care of you, and won't in any way challenge you.” We hear echoes of this sentiment in 17776, as in the moment when Ten reports that ”boredom is [human beings’] only enemy,” and that “recreation and play sustain them. Football sustains them. And if you find yourself in a football game that's such a gargantuan task, that seems undefeatable, that will claim eons of your time and your passion? … I think that makes you one of the lucky ones.”

If we're to position 17776 in dialogue with other postmodern narratives, we might also note the ways in which two central postmodern concepts - Jameson's depthlessness and Baudrillard's hyperreality [4, 15] - appear in both Bois’ narrative and Wallace's Infinite Jest. Take, for example, the scene in Wallace's novel which depicts Eschaton, a game of world domination played on a tennis court by students at the Enfield Tennis Academy. Soon after the game begins the students start to argue about its significance, with one yelling at another, “It's snowing on the goddamn map, not the territory…”

A similar ‘hyperreality’ drives both time and space in 17776; we see it in Chapter 20, for example, when we learn of Eddie Krieger, the safety for Louisville who's been hiding in a cave for 9,313 years and passing the time by playing the vintage video game Double Dribble (“The screen is, I mean, you can barely even call it a screen,” he says. “It's just a printed picture of a basketball court and a few little LCD illustrations that flip on and off in front of it.”), and in Chapter 17, when our three main characters fail to predict the path of a football that's shot out of the Denali Cannon and ends up hitting the famous Livermore's Bulb.

Figure 1: Section from 17776

A section from work ‘17776’, chapter 17.

What's notable in this scene is not only the shared grandiosity of scale, but the ways in which said scale contributes to the kind of “flatness” or “superficiality” that Jameson writes about. So much of the world in these texts — Eschaton, Double Dribble, the game of football itself — is rendered as abstract, simulated, hyperreal. As the tone of the dialogue above suggests, though, the destruction of a famous landmark illuminates the game's ‘hyperreality’ when, all of a sudden, the stakes are higher and the ramifications of the outcome more measurable. In these ways, the game becomes more "real." Meticulously edited Google Maps images show the world as it exists during the game, the impossible geography rendered strangely plausible.

This grandiosity is matched by a profound absurdity. When humanity achieves immortality, it doesn't conquer the stars or solve the mysteries of the universe; they completely stop progressing. The text treats the end of human ambition not as a tragedy, but with a deeply ironic warmth—arguing that arbitrary, self-imposed rules (like a country-sized football game) are the only valid defense against an eternity of existential boredom.

Relatedly, we see the work reflecting another recent aesthetic trend: that of The New Sincerity. Tonally and thematically, 17776 seems to exemplify some of the same ideas that Adam Kelly wrote about with regards to Wallace — that fiction might seek to serve as “an answer to problems raised by the legacy of a modernist insistence on an aesthetic view of the world, and on the priority of authentic expression, or artistic autonomy, over sincere communication” [17]. It seems reasonable, then, to align texts that Kelly says “are ultimately defined by...the affective response they invite and provoke in their readers, with questions of sincerity embedded, on a number of levels, into the reader's contingent experience of the text” with 17776, a text which O'Neal calls a “crash course on empathy.”

These features will be familiar to many readers who have engaged with the "modernist digital poetics" of literary hypertext [19]. On an ontological level, 17776 and first-generation literary hypertext share a foundational resistance to the Gutenberg galaxy. Where Shelley Jackson's Patchwork Girl (1995) stitches together historical literary texts with a digitised schematic of a body, and early web experiments like Stuart Moulthrop's Hegirascope (1995) pull from a fractured pool of news broadcasts and internal monologues, Bois constructs a contemporary media collage from familiar fragments. By weaving a digital tapestry out of digital ephemera (chat logs, text-to-speech YouTube videos, Google Earth overlays) Bois mirrors the archival methodology of John McDaid's Uncle Buddy's Phantom Funhouse (1993), which demanded readers sort through a hyper-textual cabinet of fictional "found" files.

Many first-generation works operated on a logic of spatial navigation and multi-linear branching paths: “more than one entry point, many internal branches, and no clear ending”[19]. In Michael Joyce's afternoon, a story or Bill Bly's 1997 archival fiction We Descend, for example, the reader must actively construct their own trajectory by clicking through an invisible web of hyperlinks, creating a fragmented, reader-authored experience where closure is deliberately withheld. Conversely, Bois revokes this navigational autonomy by flattening 17776 into a unidirectional, strictly linear scrolling timeline. While Moulthrop's 1995 Hegirascope attempted to strip control from the reader by automatically refreshing its hyperlinks every thirty seconds to force them forward through time, 17776 achieves a similar temporal pressure through the relentless downward scroll.

First-generation literary hypertext granted the reader agency but favoured an austere, text-dominant sensory environment (a consequence of early technological constraints and perhaps a favouring of the written word.) Early pioneering web works like Judy Malloy's 1986 Uncle Roger relied entirely on database text strings to deliver its narrative; in contrast, 17776 inundates readers with a dense, automated deluge of sensory information, where looping animations and synthesised audio narration take equal footing with prose. Where 1990s hypertext used the link to fracture narrative into infinite, unrepeatable variations, Bois uses the modern browser to assemble these fragments into a singular, cohesive structure.

4 Conclusion

By placing Jon Bois’ work alongside both canonical literary hypertext and postmodern fiction works, particularly Infinite Jest, this article sought to demonstrate that despite emerging outside established academic traditions, 17776 engages with enduring concerns about form, authorship, temporality, reader experience. Its linear yet materially layered structure, multimedia composition and interplay between irony and sincerity demonstrate how hypertext practices have developed within the contemporary web environment.

More broadly, the discussion highlights a shift in hypertext from a clearly defined literary form to a dispersed mode of cultural production that can be understood through the idea of feral hypertext. Returning to such works through close reading reinforces the value of literary analysis, while also suggesting that hypertext's future lies in recognising its hybrid nature and its capacity for continued formal exploration.

Little of this will be surprising to those for whom the heyday of literary hypertext was lived experience. We do not anticipate gasps. We want only to remind readers what hypertext fiction can be: a lot of work but a lot of fun, as Bois himself puts it.

Literary hypertext within the community faces a generational challenge. Established scholars find themselves suppressing a sigh as a debate seemingly settled in 1993 surfaces once more; simultaneously, the fragmented nature of its community (otherwise a significant strength) means scholars find themselves justifying not only the validity of their interpretation, but the value of critical scholarship at all.

At the risk of eliciting that aforementioned sigh, what is hypertext? For Ted Nelson, it was simple: “non-sequential writing—text that branches and allows choices to the reader, best read at an interactive screen” [20]. By the 1990s, Landow had determined it was “text composed of blocks of text—what [Roland] Barthes terms a lexia—and the electronic links that join them,” forcing us to “abandon conceptual systems founded upon ideas of center, margin, hierarchy, and linearity and replace them with ones of multilinearity, nodes, links, and networks” [18]. Later efforts have repositioned hypertext as a method of enquiry [3] or sought to recognise or reconcile the different ways hypertext was understood[2].

“It has been studied and explored for over 50 years,” write Anderson and Millard, “but a complete definition seems ever more elusive”[2]. We need not think of hypertext as even intrinsically digital - Nelson's definition is followed immediately by the qualifier that “a magazine layout, with sequential text and inset illustrations and boxes, is thus hypertext… Computers are not intrinsically involved with the hypertext concept.” In the AI web, each document will be a unique version: no more iterations. What is hypertext then?

Well, that's the point. Hypertext is whatever we decide to make it. It is easy to think of hypertext as a medium for the collective: a way to connect individuals together, to facilitate frictionless communication. It is also a medium for the individual, for the idiosyncratic, for the literary and exploratory. It is a medium always waiting to be discovered.

Notes

1 https://www.sbnation.com/a/17776-football

2Lest this sound like sour grapes, the author(s) of this paper have never submitted a close reading to hypertext. Perhaps we are part of the problem.

Source

ACM full-text HTML

ACM Digital Library

Imported from ACM’s structured HTML source. ACM Reference Format: Sam Brooker and Chris Boucher. 2026. “It's a lot of work, but it's a lot of fun.”: Rediscovering Hypertext in Jon Bois’ What Football Will Look Like in the Future. In 37th ACM Conference on Hypertext (HT '26), September 14--18, 2026, London, United Kingdom. ACM, New York, NY, USA 5 Pages. https://doi.org/10.1145/3800935.3830887

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