Blaseball: The New National Pastime

Blaseball is my favorite game to come out this year so far, and that’s kind of an odd thing to say considering Blaseball barely feels like a game at all.

Blaseball is a splort in which 20 teams compete under the Internet League Blaseball organization, day and night, rain or shine, and at the behest of us fans who vote to remake the league in our own image.

That’s what the Blaseball FAQ says anyway. Less cryptically, Blaseball is a browser game — a massively multiplayer one at that — in which a league of fictional teams play something vaguely baseball adjacent while we as fans watch from afar through the window of an ever updating list of box scores. We don’t actually play the game — the in-universe game rather — but we are able to participate in a number of ways, like eating peanuts, which…well, I still don’t understand what eating peanuts does, but it’s a thing you can do.

When you first log in to Blaseball, you’re asked to choose a team, with little to go on other than their name and logo. Dallas Steaks, Baltimore Crabs, Hellmouth Sunbeams (wait, where is Hellmouth located?): once you’ve chosen, you’re now a fan of that team and are given a small amount of coins with which to gamble (virtual currency only, this is one of those rare free-to-play games that is actually free.)

And that’s how you’ll be interacting with Blaseball most of the time: betting on the day’s games, Salty Bet style. Every hour, there are 10 games going on, and you can look at the next 10 games starting the next hour and place your bets accordingly. Blaseball developer The Game Band even helpfully puts the odds next to each team’s chances of winning, so you can make an informed decision.

The money you earn from gambling can be spent on a handful of items in the Shop tab, but the most important one is purchasing votes. Votes can then be cast in a weekly election that can affect individual players, teams and the entire league itself. This is where Blaseball truly shines, and it’s what takes it from a relatively straightforward clicker/idle game into something special.

Elections are split up into two categories: Decrees, which are often league-shifting decisions made by majority vote, and Blessings, which are drawn raffle-style to bestow benefits to specific players or teams. An early decree voted upon was “Eat The Rich,” which redistributes the coins of the top 1% of participants to the other 99% at the end of each week/season (Bernie would be so proud.) While a blessing like “Vulture” would let your favored team steal the best hitter in the league and add them to your squad.

Watching the league evolve week to week is engrossing. Elections give fans just that tiny bit of interactivity, tilting the splort in one direction or another, and watching the results with bated breath. It’s a phenomenon I haven’t experienced since 2014’s Twitch Plays Pokemon, and similar to that socially-driven experiment, the community has embraced the game wholeheartedly, creating a deep, crowd-based lore behind every little detail and enhanced by the developers’ sometimes light — and sometimes quite heavy — touch.

After the first season of Blaseball ended, the blessing “Max Out Hitter” gave then-Dallas Steaks’ Jessica Telephone a five-star rating in batting. Fans interacting on the Official Blaseball Discord Channel began to attribute this surge in power to Jessica’s bat, dubbing it The Dial Tone. The Game Band supported this, and by Season 3, where player items were officially added to the game, The Dial Tone now was called out in the box score whenever Jessica came to the plate — and later, on her player profile after fans voted to “lift the Microphone” so they could get to know the players better.

The give and take from developers and fans is a fascinating one. While sometimes the interaction is friendly and collaborative, like in The Dial Tone instance, others have a very SUPERHOT-style antagonistic tone to them (and it doesn’t hurt that they share a similar color scheme as well). An example of this comes from Season 6, where the concept of Idols were integrated into Blaseball. Fans could idolize one player from any team and their accomplishments (hits and home runs for batters, strikeouts and shutouts for pitchers) could net fans extra cash. Jessica Telephone, being one of the best hitters in the league and a fan favorite, easily topped the idol leaderboard. But then, in a targeted form of discipline that’s plagued fans in a variety of ways since Season 1’s opening of the Forbidden Book of Blaseball rules, Jessica Telephone was “Shelled,” literally trapping her inside a giant peanut that skips her in the lineup. How long is she stuck like this? Who knows…

But that’s the great thing about Blaseball: nobody knows. And sometimes, the developers seem surprised at what’s happening as well. A recent blessing stated that the team who won it would steal the 14th most idolized player in the league. Fans began a campaign to make sure pitcher Jaylen Hotdogfingers was number 14. While normally this wouldn’t be a issue, the problem was that Jaylen Hotdogfingers was actually dead at the time, having been the first player to be incinerated by a rogue umpire after a game (another of the disciplines handed down by the Blaseball Gods). This isn’t something that could easily be done. You couldn’t just navigate to Jaylen’s player profile on the Blaseball site. You had to know the specific URL to the profile’s page, which seems to support the idea this wasn’t something intended by the developers.

When Hotdogfingers ended the season as lucky number 14, he…she….it (the Blaseball community is mixed on this, and The Game Band is staunchly in the camp of allowing every fan’s canon to be valid, only making things like The Dial Tone official when they appear to reach a critical and consistent mass in the community) returned from the void and seems mostly ok…other than the fact that random opponents are sometimes hit by Jaylen’s pitches and become Unstable, temporarily affecting their stats for a number of games. Probably nothing to worry about.

It’s a beautiful mess of a game. A never-ending ant farm where every ant has a backstory and occasionally a random ant gets an exploratory surgery that increases their pitching stat by one star (sorry, kind of lost the metaphor there…) 

There’s a 2018 interview with game developer Jade Raymond where she envisions what games might be like 10 years in the future:

Well, I’m thinking in the past maybe what we were trying to create was the Pixies concert or whatever. And now I think that we want to create this neighborhood bar. You could go and hang out and sit alone and read your book at the neighborhood bar. You could go and participate in karaoke night with your friends. You could go become a regular and everyone in the bar knows you, like in Cheers; you walk in and it’s like, “Norm!” You could be like the VIP. What you’re looking for out of that place can be very different, but it’s an appointment and a place you can go over and over again, and do pub trivia night with your friends if that’s what you’re into.

She goes on to talk about utilizing data to change the way a game works over time:

There’s some simple ideas, like, for example, if you take Game of Thrones, you know let’s say at one point in the story you’re going to have the Red Wedding. You know that at one point some family is all going to be obliterated. You can put these kind of big story beats there in your overall story. Then you could say, we’re going to do it based on data.

Let’s say you have a traditional faction system and let’s say players are really gravitating towards this one family, and they’re the most beloved. If you really want to shock the community the most, those are the ones you plug in to kill off — based on who players are really interacting with.

These are things Blaseball is doing right now, not 10 years as Raymond foretold, but in just two. Fans participate in Blaseball in a number of ways. Some make streaming audio broadcasts of the games, some share theories on Discord, some create incredible fanart and others just check in on the site every few hours or so. And as for the Red Wedding? Well, I told you about players getting incinerated and shelled, right?

So go play Blaseball right now, tell the commissioner he’s doing a great job and become a Hades Tigers fan to help my team win some blessings. It’s truly the cultural event of the season.