Wild guess, but is your desktop using X11 or Wayland? PyOpenGL is pretty ancient and creaky at this point, and I recall Wayland making it trickier in various ways for it to get a context it considered valid.
If you are indeed running Wayland, I'd say try to run from the latest Playscii source (last public commit was August 2022) as I did add a few things after 9.17.1 for working on newer Linux desktops.