play ball
existential horror and baseball simulators
Thanks so much to Charles for editing this week’s post — you should check out his fantastically-named weekly stream, LudonarrativeBrittonance. I’m on holiday next week, so there likely won’t be a new post until August.
Blaseball is a lot of things. On a basic level, it’s a text-based baseball simulator, where players with funny names play for teams with funny names, with regular seasons Monday to Friday and postseasons on Friday evening and Saturday. Fans can bet on games and spend the coins they earn on votes in the elections, held each Sunday and resulting in Decrees which affect the entire game, and Wills and Blessings which are specific boosts for individual teams or players.
On another level, Blaseball is a kind of MMO, but more in the vein of Twitch Plays Pokemon than World of Warcraft. The system of Elections — alongside the Idol leaderboard and, in recent seasons, the Gift Shop (where fans can invest in gifts for other teams) and Renovations (where fans can invest in modifications for their team’s stadium) — means that decision-making is hugely decentralised and near-impossible to fully coordinate. Additional chaos is added by the game’s sometimes-bizarre order of operations and by information deficits. It’s nearly impossible to follow everything of note happening in Blaseball at any one time, let alone all the strategy discussions fans are having: relevant information can be found in a variety of places, including the in-game Feed of notable events, game-related twitter accounts (whether official or not), and the official discord. So in this sense, you could say that Blaseball is a game about the perils of crowd-sourcing decision-making, although it’s frequently also about how much can be achieved through collective action and solidarity.
Then on yet another level, Blaseball is a horror game. Players, even entire teams, can die; they can get weakened in shark attacks; fans have been in conflict with various deities; we’ve performed necromancy; we’ve been repeatedly, violently punished for our hubris. Narrative and horror emerge through this combination of arbitrary simulation, genuinely fascinating, creative writing, and an unwavering faith in the epistemological value of wordplay — it’s extremely compelling.
I love Blaseball a huge amount, and I wanted to write about it now we’ve reached Season 23, which started yesterday and promises profound existential threat. But because it’s so many things, I think the best way to illustrate why I love Blaseball so much is by telling some stories about it. They’re in no particular order, other than the rough chronology enforced by some stories only making sense if they come after others, and inclusion is basically contingent on me thinking them fun or interesting enough to include; any concerns about exclusions or factual errors should be taken up with the concept of oral storytelling.
(If you want to learn more about or get involved in Blaseball, I recommend following twitter accounts like @blaseball, @blaseballpro, @sibrofficial, and @blaseballnews, as well as checking out some of Cat Manning’s amazing writing, including her introduction to how to play the game, the Anchor’s roundups of various periods of Blaseball history, and the official discord. Really, though, I recommend making an account, picking a team — why not join me in supporting the Ohio Worms? — and just getting involved.)
The Book
In Season 1, fans committed one of two original sins. A Decree allowed us to ‘Open the Forbidden Book’ (‘It is Forbidden,’ read the description) and, of course, it passed with 61% of the votes. A range of things happened in response to this: the Hellmouth opened, turning the Moab Sunbeams into the Hellmouth Sunbeams; some Umpires went Rogue, their eyes turning white as they gained the ability to incinerate players, starting with Seattle Garages star Jaylen Hotdogfingers; and we entered Blaseball’s Discipline Era. This is the first major example of how, when you give the fans some buttons to press, they’ll almost always press the one labelled ‘plot,’ even if that button also has a lot of signs saying ‘DANGER’ and ‘WARNING’ and ‘It is forbidden’ around it. The Book contained a (heavily redacted) set of Blaseball rules, which in themselves are a work of genius — rules like ‘b. Every day of Blaseball shall last one hour’1 are so bizarrely ominous, because one of the developers’ geniuses is their ability to not give us the precise information it would be terrifying not to give us, even on mundane things like the length of matches.
Violence, and resting therein
The death of one incinerated player, Landry Violence of the Hades Tigers, inspired fans to begin saying ‘Rest in Violence’ (RIV) about dead players. This is an early example of fans’ tendency to create their own way of talking about the game — terms and memes which accrete meaning as time goes on.
Law and Order: Peanut Crimes
In Season 3, fans committed the second of two original sins: Peanut Fraud. Peanuts, introduced that season, were a healthy snack for fans and the system got abused, leading to multiple enforced Siestas and then the appearance of the Shelled One, a giant rotating peanut, above the word ‘Blasphemy’. The Shelled One’s attempts at punishing fans for these crimes would go on to define the next few seasons.
Salmon
After jokes that the verdict of a discord-based trial whose details I will not go into (other than to say that it resulted in the accidental incineration of CEO Commissioner Prime Minister Parker MacMillan III) should be posted using a ‘.riv’ file extension — see? things like this get around — someone looked into the matter and found that there already was such a file extension. It was used in the CRiSP Harvest Model, a salmon harvest simulation tool from the mid-90s. The Society for Internet Blaseball Research (whose genuinely impressive research on other aspects of the game is also amazing) took up the call; you can find all the details in the ‘Saga of Salmon Steve’, but essentially: fans of Blaseball ended up repurposing a decades-old salmon modelling tool to display information about the game, and in the process discovered a buried easter egg, met the coder who put it in there, and learnt a valuable lesson about salmon conservation. These fan communities which established themselves around Blaseball have ended up creating so many interesting things and combining knowledge and information from so many other walks of life — it’s just fascinating. Salmon ended up being added as a type of ‘weather’. Whether it’s a coincidence or not, who can say.
The Economics of Necromancy
In Season 6, the following pieces of information came together in a very troubling way:
The Idols board had been introduced, allowing us to see the number of fans who had chosen a specific player as their Idol. This is either a sign of affection for a player or a financial move, as rewards are given if your Idol performs well.
A Blessing called ‘Lottery Pick’ allowed a team to steal the player ranked fourteenth on the board;
Incinerated players’ records still existed and they could be idolised, despite playing for the ‘Null Team’.
Adding two and two together and ending up with ‘necromancy’, fans worked together to get Jaylen Hotdogfingers (the first player to be incinerated, remember?) to fourteenth, and she did indeed come back from the dead. However, she unfortunately did so as an undead revenant with a pre-game ritual of ‘checking her pulse’ and with a modifier called ‘Debted’ which meant her ‘beans’ (hitting the batter with the ball) made players ‘Unstable’ and much more likely to be incinerated. Once she returned, the commissioner tweeted ‘PAYMENTS PENDING’; after one especially deadly game, we got ‘PAYMENT PROCESSED//OUTSTANDING BALANCE’. The person running her RP account decided to play her as penitent, featuring a lot of notes app apologies. (Eventually her Debt was refinanced and then Consolidated, making her substantially less murderous.)
mike townsend (has a remarkably affecting backstory)
In, apparently, an exchange for Hotdogfingers’ return, the Garages’ Mike Townsend ‘retreated to the shadows’. This was, it seemed, the end of a remarkably compelling arc: Townsend had started off remarkably ineffective and fan canon decided he was also an arsehole, prompting the Garages’ in-house band, also called the Garages, to pen ‘mike townsend (is a disappointment)’; a rally in his fortunes led to ‘mike townsend (is a credit to the team)’; and his sacrifice for Hotdogfingers resulted in ‘mike townsend (knows what he’s gotta do)’, a remarkably emotional and compelling climax for the series — which you can listen to here. Honestly? It slaps. That Blaseball’s community is rich and creative enough to start an actual in-game band for a team and then record a series of tracks about a narrative which at least partly came from fans. Mike’s since returned and then left again, so the trilogy became a quintet — another thing about Blaseball: it just keeps evolving.
Squid Worship
The necromancy also resulted in the appearance of what would become fans’ favourite endlessly-hungry cephalopod deity, the Monitor. The Monitor was the guardian of the Hall of Flame (the Hall Monitor, get it?), where incinerated players end up; they followed Jaylen back when she returned. The Monitor’s had a remarkably varied career: they became fascinated with the Shelled One, which they seemed to think was an egg (peanuts being smaller eggs we started being able to offer them in tribute), and ended up playing a vital role in the eventual defeat of the Shelled One through a boss battle between the Shelled One’s Pods and the Monitor’s Hall Stars, the deceased legends of Blaseball — the Hall Stars were the incinerated players we’d tributed the most peanuts to — coming back to defeat a great evil. But they could only do it after we’d tributed peanuts for no apparent end, only to remember the players who’d meant a lot to us: an unexpected gameplay outcome for what had seemed like just emotional catharsis. Now, the Monitor is the League’s Food, Beverage, Tourism and Gift Shop Manager, and is painfully overworked; on the other hand, they now have a cute little chef’s hat.
Where?
As Cat Manning caught, the legendary batter Nagomi McDaniel once got traded from the Hawai’i Fridays to the Garages and then to the Boston Flowers in one election, but then, because the Flowers had separately moved the player they ended up trading for Nagomi to their ‘shadows’ (back-up roster), she ended up unable to play. When I say ‘order of operations’ chaos, this is what I mean: the Sim handled Nagomi’s moves between teams as a kind of game of hot potato, then crucially processed the move to the shadows before it processed Nagomi’s swap to the Flowers — and there’s no other way this could have happened without that.
Throwing the Ball
There were, obviously, more Idol board shenanigans. The whims of the Shelled One meant that the players above an arbitrary line on the board — in Season 7, the season we’re talking about here, it was the top ten — were ‘Shelled’ and unable to play unless they were one of the players originally named Dan or Daniel, who had previously been transformed into Peanut Bong, Peanut Holloway, and Peanutiel Duffy. They were fine. So, obviously self-preservation and (probably) plot dictated we should put those three up there. The fans of the LA Unlimited Tacos — at that point just the Unlimited Tacos after the events of the Grand Unslam (don’t ask) created the cities of Los Angeli, and before that the Los Angeles Tacos — launched the ‘Snackrifice,’ planning to shell all their pitchers to test one of the rules in the Forbidden Book: ‘f. The pitcher must throw the ball , unless .’ This required, honestly, a ton of coordination, with two competing plans requiring a total of eight players to get in only ten slots while fans’ financial incentives might be elsewhere. Bafflingly, they both came off, and the Tacos’ pitchers were all Shelled. The game’s response? The Shelled One arrived and foregrounded Blaseball’s themes of collective struggle as it asked:
WHAT IS THIS THOUGH?
A SHOW OF UNITY?
YOU WITHHOLD YOUR LABOR?
YOU THINK THAT GIVES YOU POWER?
PITY
The thing is, fans really did come together here to do something hugely impressive — even if it ended up being pretty pointless. Immediately after the Shelled One’s missive, the Commissioner tweeted that ‘Play must continue’ and a player called Pitching Machine joined the Tacos. Pitching Machine ended up having a storied career, occasionally playing as a batter (which is fun to imagine; I like to believe it just fired bats at the ball) and ending up voted an MVP so many times that it entered the Vault of Legendary players (more on that next).
Parker
From the start, one of the most continually hilarious parts of Blaseball has been the Commissioner, Parker. He might have died and been… uh… replaced?... a couple of times — and demonstrated a somewhat troubling ability to recall his past lives in the process — and he is, sure, generally pretty confused about whatever’s going on. His product placement after player deaths is hard to swallow. (Unlike, I guess, ‘Yes Plz Coffee’.) But it’s hard to blame him for that; I’d be confused too if I had to keep track of all the various goings-on in Blaseball, and I guess you gotta grind somehow.
Recently, however, dark times have come for our boy Parker. It has recently become possible for fans to purchase replicas of Legendary players — those who’ve come near the top of the Idol board at the end of a season — for their teams and, notably, those players have the same name format as Parkers III, IIII, and IIIII. Some of these Legendary players had never existed — except they were, it turns out, from Blaseball’s past, something we slowly worked out through dispatches from the League’s official Historian, Lootcrates (pronounced as if it’s ancient Greek). These dispatches also told the story of Parker MacMillan, a player who had to be imprisoned in the Vault with a Force Field item which forces him to stay put, because one of his abilities, Firewalker, led to entire teams becoming Unstable when he left locations — which he would at the end of every week due to his Super Roamin’ ability. This led to the incineration of multiple entire teams, seemingly including (riv) the Downward Dogs (who you can, for the record, pet.) The original Parker can now be seen attempting to Roam, but failing; this has occasionedsomedistress from Parker IIIII. It can only be a matter of time before he succeeds, given that at the end of the season we’ll see an exhibition match with past Legends, including both Parker and New Megan Ito, whose whole deal is that she steals items from people (like, uh, the Force Field keeping Parker in place).
That’s just one of the existential threats awaiting us this week, and these are just a few of the stories you can find in Blaseball. I just adore that so many different moving parts — fans, complex systems creating unpredictable outcomes, and the writers’ fantastic work — come together to highlight themes of existential dread and solidarity, but also to just create something which is really good fun. I really recommend getting involved in the wonderful community, and if any of this seems overwhelming in its complexity — Blaseball is really just a game about stories, and you can focus on just the ones which interest you, appreciating the pay-off even if you weren’t around for the build-up.
In the original, the blank space is grey to indicate redaction, but that kind of complex formatting is apparently beyond Substack.