One of my “pandemic projects” was a python-based web-browser game that was loosely inspired by Blaseball. The premise was that we could see a different version of the “Olympics” in a post-scarcity future where humans are augmented. The goal was to highlight and delight in the excesses and absurdities in modern Olympics, but the project eventually died as I got busy with real commissions and real projects. What ultimately killed it was a bug in the code that was discovered when a hockey fight created infinite clones of all athletes and had them wail on each other for all eternity. As metal as a universe-shattering hockey fight sounds, it revealed that I was out of my depth as an amateur coder, and I haven’t had the time or skill to rewrite the game from scratch.

Below, I want to take a moment to share some of the “playable” countries from our alternate future. It was a lot of fun imagining how a different history would shake out and how that would be represented by the political lines, names, and flags of our futuristic nations and city-states. I tried to strike a balance between historical projections, fantastical, silly, and aspirational potential nations. While the list below doesn’t include the non-playable nations or the nations that are banned from the futuristic Olympics (yet), I hope you can enjoy a glimpse into a project that will probably stay on the drawing board.