Blaseball

» see blaseball.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the eulogy ~

Blaseball ran from july 2020 to june 2023, which lines up with the years i spent writing computer vision code and playing nothing. It also belonged to a part of the internet i was not in. This was a twitter and discord object, absurdist in a specifically anglophone way, and it never had to leave that world to find its audience. i am reconstructing it from the outside, and it is one of the stranger things in this graveyard.

The Game Band launched it on 20 july 2020, in the middle of the first pandemic summer, with actual baseball suspended and a lot of people at home with nothing on the calendar. The game was a website. Twenty teams to start, each with a roster of generated players who had names and star ratings and a stated preference in coffee, and every hour on the hour the site simulated a game. A full season took a week. You picked a team and were handed coins to bet on outcomes you had no control over.

None of that is why anyone remembers it. On sundays the league held an election, the coins you had won bought votes, and the votes changed the rules of the sport itself. Rogue umpires incinerated players mid-game and the incineration was permanent, with the replacement being whoever the generator produced next. People wrote eulogies for characters a random number generator had killed. The fandom built the lore the game only implied, in art and in social accounts kept in character for players who did not exist.

~ the dossier ~

~ the origin ~

Sam Rosenthal has said the idea came out of quarantine video calls with friends who did not play games but were happy to play browser versions of board games. The first plan was horse racing. Baseball won because baseball already runs on statistics and superstition, and the joke lands harder when the numbers look official.

It got popular faster than a small studio could hold. Three weeks in, on 9 august 2020, The Game Band paused the entire league for two weeks and said plainly that the reason was the problems that come with unexpected viral popularity. A longer pause followed in october, called the Grand Siesta, running to march 2021. Sportico put signups in the hundreds of thousands. The awards were not a joke either: a Nuovo Award at the Independent Games Festival in 2021 and a Hugo nomination for best video game.

~ the black hole ~

On 30 july 2021 the Expansion Era ended with a black hole swallowing the league, and the site became unplayable on purpose. That was meant to be an interval while the studio rebuilt the game underneath. It lasted far longer than an interval. A short experimental format ran under the name Short Circuits. From 28 october 2022 a weekly event dropped one returning player out of the black hole onto each team, counting down to a restart, and on 9 january 2023 Blaseball came back with the same twenty four teams and entirely new rosters.

The return did not land. Feedback was mixed enough that on 3 february 2023, less than a month back, the game went on hiatus again while the studio worked through the complaints. It never came off hiatus.

~ the inheritance ~

The end was announced on 2 june 2023, and the statement was unusually direct about why. "The cost, literally and metaphorically, is too high. So we are making the decision to end it here instead of changing Blaseball into something unrecognizable." Staff were laid off in the same move. A game that simulates a full season every week for a live audience, and rewrites its own rules by public vote every sunday, is a hosting bill that never stops and a design job that never finishes.

What it demonstrated is still standing. A text-and-numbers website with essentially no graphics held a fandom the size of a mid-tier television show, purely because the audience was allowed to change the story. Almost nothing since has tried it at that scale, and the reason it ended is the reason nobody tries.

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