If you haven’t been graced with the knowledge of Blaseball, no it’s not a typo. Blaseball was an absurdist game that loosely followed the rules of its real-life counterpart, except you could change the rules at will and some players were eaten by a gaping maw in the desert. Okay, it’s not at all like regular baseball, and it’s not much like a video game either.
Blaseball was an interactive, procedurally-generated narrative. The matches were all simulated and you could bet on the outcomes, briefly being able to put money on players themselves as well. Each season lasted a week, at which point you could use your coins to buy votes, which in turn were spent on deciding rule changes and events that would occur between seasons.
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It’s that kind of thing that results in opening the Forbidden Book and promoting The Monitor from Custodian of the Hall of Flame (think Hell but weirder) to Food, Beverage, Tourism and Gift Shop Manager. “I’ve been thinking of the narrative that we put into Blaseball like laying down a cool bass line,” developer Joel Clark told GamesIndustry.biz. “We’re letting the community just riff and do their own solos over the top of it.”
As procedural fiction goes, Blaseball was the best. It may seem silly (it was) and you may wonder why there was so little gameplay (it’s not trying to be God of War, it’s interactive fiction and simulated baseball, come on), but thousands of peoplegot it. Teams had real supporters cheering for their successes and mourning when their players got encased in peanut shells. And it was these fans who made the game sing.
The LA Ultimate Tacos had their legion of glory hunters (sorry not sorry) and players like Chorby Soul were passed around teams due to the enormous size of his soul and the negative effect that it had on teams’ eDensity statistic and the number of Consumer attacks that followed them, both pre- and post-incineration.
If you think this all sounds weird, then I want you to understand that I am not even scratching the surface of Blaseball’s cosmic horror story. This was a magical collective narrative, created in the throes of lockdown for gamers and non-gamers alike, for people who love stories and sort-of sports and absurdity out the wazoo. It was a phenomenon, a community, a baffling bathtub of brilliance with a baseball league tacked on as an afterthought.
“The cost, literally and metaphorically, is too high,” reads The Game Band’sstatement, in which it announces the permanent closure of Blaseball and the layoffs of its staff. The developer doesn’t want the game to become “unrecognisable,” which may be code for ‘profit-driven’, and free games, however innovative, are a perpetual struggle to sustain.
We should not be sad because we will never get to the bottom of whether teams were in Bird Debt or were just in possession of Unbirds. We should not mourn the loss of Tokyo Lift, despite their clear potential. But we should extend our sympathies to all the hard working developers who are out of a job, who created this magnificent thing and the community that shaped it, who shepherded an unruly mob of internet weirdos intent on voting for the weirdest possible outcomes into a fun, fulfilling narrative that sometimes included sports matches. Their experimental game was a shining example of absurdist storytelling, and they have not failed. Capitalism has failed them. They made art, whether they were writing or coding or tweeting or anything else, and they are deserving of our praise and our sympathy. I’m so sorry to everyone who was laid off, and thank you. Blaseball was the best.
Any discrepancies in this article are the result of ILB interference and not the author’s poor memory.
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