I’ve been following blaseball pretty keenly this year.
I don’t think I’ve ever watched a full game of real baseball, yet I’ve found myself following along and “playing” blaseball for several months now. You might have already seen articles or videos trying to explain what blaseball is, playing on its supposed aura of impenetrability. It’s true that it’s not the most approachable piece of media, owing to the propensity of its fans to stay “in character”, and some possible confusion around what it actually means to “play” it.
What you need to know is that there is a website, blaseball.com, that runs text-based simulations of a game that is very similar to baseball, between fictional teams and athletes.
Yes: even as the MLB used videogame technology to insert virtual fans into live broadcasts of baseball games, I was playing a game where real fans cheered on virtual teams and athletes, represented by some text and simple graphics on a website.
Blaseball players can bet on the results of these simulated games and vote on changes to the rules of blaseball—which can be quite drastic, hence why I called it a game very similar to baseball rather than actual baseball. The fictional premise of blaseball, which is equal parts comedy and cosmic horror, makes these rules changes quite bizarre. For example, a blessing might increase a pitcher’s capabilities by granting them extra arms, or a rule change might cause a black hole to appear when any team hits ten runs which siphons off past wins from their opponent.
You don’t “win” blaseball by getting lots of coins, but those coins come in handy for shaping the game with other players. In a way, blaseball is more like a visual novel or roleplaying game where the story that you get is more of a reward than any scoring mechanism.
Regardless of its strange setting and rule changes, at its core blaseball is a reflection of the culture of professional sports and sports fandom. As such, blaseball isn’t just about the simulated games happening on a website, in the same way that “a bunch of games happening in stadiums” isn’t all there is to a sports league. Movies and TV shows about sports have harped on this many times, and this year we saw sports leagues and sporting goods companies remind us in sappy advertisements that sport transcends physical boundaries to bring us together in tough times.
At this point I should confess something: I don’t actually follow any professional sports closely. Sports and sports fandom are things I intellectually understand but could never get myself personally invested in. The only time I came close was when I briefly got into the Championship Manager/Football Manager simulation games and did research on the various football leagues to figure out which up-and-coming players to recruit.
My gateway to caring about sports back then was through a simulation, so I found myself in familiar waters as I started getting into blaseball this year. Yes, I understood that part of the appeal of sports was seeing human beings execute physically challenging manoeuvres at the peak of their ability. But sports as a story told through numbers and stats and rules oddities and team histories and rivalries always fascinated me more than pure execution.
Blaseball understands that.
It understands that what we talk about when we talk about sports isn’t just a player scoring a winning hit or a goal.
Instead, it’s the story of the team’s struggle to get consistent results all season leading up to this game; it’s this particular player facing off against an ex-teammate; it’s the decades-long rivalry between the teams stemming back to a player union dispute from the early days of the game; it’s the new rule instituted this season that let the team swap in this player at the most opportune time.
It’s the story that makes the game mean something more than just a person hitting a ball with a part of their body real good.
So I didn’t have a huge problem understanding what was going on with blaseball. In fact, I ended up having more difficulty figuring out how proper baseball worked so I could understand the language that blaseball was using to tell its story (for a game that touts a “World Series” as the culmination of its Major League, baseball has relatively shallow reach around the world).
I could see blaseball wanted to explore the culture of fandom and folk mythology surrounding the athletes and teams, and I could see how the structure of the simulated league invited us to be more than mere spectators by ourselves becoming “players” in the metagame, participants invested in its design and maintenance.
The first thing blaseball does isn’t to explain how the game works. No, the first thing it asks of you is to pick a team that will become your team. You get bonuses when your team does well, so you care about your team. You get to choose how the rules evolve along with the game, so you care about the game. You get to pick individual athletes as idols and get bonuses when they do well, so you care about them individually.
Blaseball didn’t just want us to play: it wanted us to care. It wanted us to care about a simulation of a sport in the same way we care about real sports teams and players that we technically shouldn’t have any reason to care about.
Blaseball encourages fans to craft our own stories around the teams, the players and the game. Blaseball doesn’t just live on the main site, but in the fan wiki which collects fan-created lore about the teams and players, and in the Blaseball Discord where fans craft the culture of the team and make up chants while they watch the games. Going to the Discord to see the New York Millennials fans doing call-and-response chants of “WHOSE HOUSE?” “NOT OURS, WE RENT!”, or Hawaii Fridays fans putting any mention of other days of the week behind spoiler tags in the chat, is blaseball to me.
This isn’t so different from the behaviour of “real” sports fans. Being a fan of a sport and a team is learning to tell its stories and being a part of them. You learn the nicknames and the in-jokes. You follow the arc of a team in a season, and place it within the arc of a team’s entire history, and you tell yourself “I was there for that” and feel like a small part of that history.
When the only “real” things about blaseball are numbers and text on a website, players who imagine and share stories that interpret those numbers become part of that story in a real way. Being able to see people turn those numbers and text into fanart and fiction which then get adopted and remixed like old folk tales has been a real highlight of my foray into this fictional sport.
Getting involved in a “fake sport” was particularly resonant this year when we had to contend with what sports and live entertainment mean to us, and what costs we were willing to bear or see others bear to keep those traditions going. The idea of imaginary players simulating a baseball league in a fictional hell dimension is not so far-fetched in a reality where moneyed interests put professional players and staff into “bubbles” and piped in fake crowd noises to keep up a façade of normalcy for the millions invested in the continuity of sports.
Based on the latest happenings in blaseball, it’s becoming clear that The Game Band, its creators, have a good handle on the larger metanarrative of this game. My guess is that this narrative will act as commentary on the arc of professionalisation and commercialization of sports. However,, large parts of the lore around blaseball are still driven by fanworks and The Game Band often make very direct references to fan lore and speculation in the game.
In professional sports, the rules are usually tweaked and adapted to “level the playing field” or “make things fair”, which might sound like it serves some ideal of sportsmanship or purity of the game, but is often really to keep things engaging for the spectators and fans. For example, the introduction of shot clocks in professional basketball is ostensibly to stop teams that have commanded a lead from playing defensively to run out the game clock. This might seem in service of the “spirit of the game”, but it’s also instituted to keep spectators engaged in the game, since offensive moves are often deemed more exciting or attractive than defensive ones.
Blaseball allows changes to major rules surrounding the game to be driven by player votes. Though fans can influence the game through these rule changes, ultimately The Game Band decides what rule changes are on the table, and often obscures exactly what the fans are voting for.
There is an author’s hand at play, but it feels more like a tabletop roleplaying game campaign where a game master is making things up in response to other players in the shared space rather than a tightly plotted sports manga.
A team coordinated picking idols to sacrifice all their pitchers to spite a vengeful peanut deity and got their entire pitching rotation replaced by a pitching machine (or a player whose name is Pitching Machine?). Players came together to resurrect the first player that had ever been incinerated in the game, Jaylen Hotdogfingers, but despaired when we learned they had returned with a debt to repay and were causing a wave of fresh incinerations. These are stories that the fans made happen, and I doubt the creators could have predicted them, but they responded with gusto and made something truly special together.
In the first half of the year, I was unemployed and ended up spending a lot of time designing tabletop roleplaying games and thinking about how they are made and played. It’s a medium that has always fascinated me, especially because of how malleable and responsive it is to player input. To me, it most clearly shows how games and media exist in the dialogue between its participants and creators, and how tenuous all of it ultimately is when you strip it down to a guided conversation between people. The dice and numbers and words mean something because we want them to mean something and make sense for a story we want to tell.
Seeing the parallels between baseball and tabletop roleplaying games let me appreciate the thought and craft that went into designing blaseball and responding to the fandom it spawned. It let me appreciate that blaseball wasn’t just something that some game designers made for us to enjoy, but a community coming together to make the game alive in our minds. There is no one author: there’s just us and the stories we want to see in the world.
This year, the one thing that has provided common ground for all of us around the world was a global pandemic. Not the most positive thing to bond over. I think that’s why I’ve been so happy to have blaseball as something else to connect with people over, something that laid bare our shared love of stories and communities and how they reinforce each other. Even if I still don’t quite get how “real” baseball actually works.
Aaron Lim (twitter, itch.io) is a board game and tabletop RPG designer based in KL/Selangor, Malaysia. He likes multi-use cards, tragic melodrama and bad wordplay.