12 Days To Go: Entertainment On The Planet El-Bayna & Baynan Breakage Ball
How Are People Entertained On A Planet With No Television And No Internet?
Baynan Breakage Ball
El-Bayna is unlike the earth of today when it comes to entertainment. Our top forms of entertainment are music and television. While there is, of course, music on the planet El-Bayna, there is no such thing as what we would perceive as television or movies.
No one has invented these forms of entertainment in that way. People acting as other people, or films or movies, never became a legitimate widespread form of entertainment in this world.
El-Baynans have what they call simply “screens” or “communication devices”; these are small cubes that can be extracted to the size of a standard tablet. Or they can extract to the size of a fifty-inch TV screen and people can place them in a room, similar to a TV.
These display only live addresses from the supreme leaders or their heads of state and government. News updates and general interest stories. They are more for information than entertainment.
Inventors have not yet created crisp color displays, resulting in most pictures appearing as sepia tones or black and white, often getting lost in static. This area of El-Baynan tech is slow to progress, despite ships being able to travel faster than light, and androids being invented.
Watching live performances is the norm. This includes music, “movies” or “films” the latter would appear to a human from earth as some kind of elaborate theatre display. The idea of watching a performance on a flat screen just does not happen on the planet. It’s just not how entertainment has developed in this world.
If you want to watch someone, you either attend a live event, be it a “chat show” a musical performance, or “acting” you go live, it’s seen as affording the entertainer the respect. El-Baynans would find it unusual to watch entertainment on a screen, similar to sitting in front of a friend and using a mobile phone to talk to them. You just wouldn’t do it.
Books are read throughout the world by large numbers, Osihlian, Zumien and Golkann alike. Stories, fiction and nonfiction and even comic books. “The internet” does not exist, but screens or communication devices can display green text with information, which people can select similarly to the old service ceefax.
However, the most popular form of entertainment, the one thing that seems everyone on the planet watches, and the only sport that is given the privilege of being shown on screens, is BBB. Baynan Breakage Ball.
Two teams of ten players fight for one large metal ball, which must be thrown accurately through holes in the ceiling or at the limbs of the other players in an attempt to break them.
The ball can’t touch the ground, only under certain conditions. Opposing teams’ arms and legs are fair game. If a player throws the ball towards an opposing player and drops them for a certain amount of time, the team scores bonus points. Taking them out of the game, gains the other team not only a points bonus, but an advantage with player count.
The team that loses five players to injury, scores the most points via launching the ball through the allocated holes in the ceiling (different point per hole), or throws the heavy ball into the “drop slip” a basketball style net either side of the soccer pitch sized court wins.
There are hundreds of teams and leagues throughout the planet. In a world in a near constant state of religious war, Baynan Breakage Ball brings often warring sides, for just 60 minutes, together for a short period.
El-Bayna to a modern human would be an unusual place. No internet or smartphones, and black and white “TV’s” yet fully automated walking talking androids, flying “cars” and space craft.
It would resemble earth but would take a significant amount of getting used to. Unless you like Baynan Breakage Ball, don’t expect much entertainment at home. Get up and make your way to an event in person, or read a book!
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