A pneumatic leg slams into a neon breastplate, dislodging a ball with curious, flattened sides--futuristic-looking in that characteristically impractical sort of way, like a concept car with inaccessible wheel wells. It’s a turnover in favor of Sporting Automata, and one of its robots lumbers into the phosphorescent glow of the end zone, where it spikes the ball and does a few celebratory sit-ups.

This is Cortex, an object lesson in a brand of futurism that's surprisingly hard to come by in the world of electronic sports. Its gridiron is littered with extruded geometries and embossed with cosmetic circuitry patterns. Broad-shouldered athlete-simulacra smash into each other like promo animations for the NFL on FOX as their head coach/Matrix operators look on, bottom-lit by monitor glow. It's a wildly speculative vision of what sports could one day be. It’s the kind of thing you used to see a lot more of earlier in the digital era, and a far cry from the current tack of e-sports with its gently iterative shooters and fighting games.

Maybe that's a mark in favor of replacing the human element in futuristic games like this. If you could only excise all those flimsy, unreliable human bodies, with their proclivities for head trauma and contract renegotiation demands, you'd perhaps reach something purer--sport ascended from the flesh, so to speak. Bigger but more thoughtful. Gladiatorial but safe. With blitzes that play out like chess, with mechanized athletes that can pull any move if you can just hit the right combination of buttons. Some ultimate game where nerd and jock fuse together and assume their final form.