Blaseball: Half as Long, Twice as Bright

Dear Ty-

When I originally asked to write this letter we were hot on the heels of season 11 of Blaseball.. I was floating in that weird cocktail of emotions that comes at the end of a sports season; I was proud of the Firefighters performance, of Ike Johnson coming into his own as a defender, I was sad our plans for blessings didn’t pan out, I was actively mad at discourse that was floating through the community. I had big ideas on how I was gonna come into this letter about how Blaseball’s community is as good as it is bad.

I don’t think that’s true anymore, though. Now that I’ve sat here for the better part of two months, I’ve calmed down and let my frustrations mostly drop away. I’m able now to identify why  the Blaseball Fandom was bothering me, and how it’s different from the community that makes Blaseball so special. 

In case you have forgotten in the past few months, Blaseball is a simulation built to approximate the sport of baseball. It has (most of the time) 4 bases, batters, and a pitcher. It speeds up each game making a whole 9 innings fly by in 40 minutes, and then at the top of the next hour it starts a new game. This goes on for a week, and then we get the playoffs, finals, and then a bit of player interaction in an “election” where you get a bit of agency in what happens to the League and its teams. All of this then gets a layer of absurdism baked into it. The players have randomly generated names, the teams can ascend into heaven, a giant peanut is a cruel god that symbolizes anti-union sentiment and the way to beat it is collective action. It’s chaos, a true combination of all of my favorite things.

Blaseball is also a hotbed for creative activity. Since there is no information about any of these characters, fans create it themselves. For a while this was just passed around via word of mouth, but eventually it grew into the Fandom Wiki. The catch here, is that Blaseball as a property defies any attempt to keep a history. It doesn’t record past games, it doesn’t have a log of who’s alive and dead, what teams have won blessings in the past, or even who’s won past championships. Everything that has been recorded has been taken down by a fan. Since there is no official record, everything that is actual history is mixed in with fan stories. This is the core of what causes a rift between the people who are here for sports, and the people who are here for Fandom.  

Fandom as we know it has been weaponized by corporations and their whims inform the way we consume culture and media. Everything is organized into easily digestible bits and facts that can then be memorized and shared. Things that are “true”, “canon”, or “rumors.” Corporations do this so we know that the only stories that matter are the canon stories that they sell to us. But again, Blaseball isn’t selling anything to us. It is pushing against this method of Fandom at its core. Since Blaseball (as made by The Game Band) doesn’t have any lore or characters on its own, anything written down is “fan canon”, so none of it is “real”.  So when someone wants to write about Jessica Telephone whipping a shitty in her Trans Am outside of a mall while blasting the Marshall Mathers LP, it starts a fight because that’s not who the character is. But who gets to have a say? Why isn’t that who the character is?

I joined Blaseball and its Discord in the middle of Season 2, and decided to join the Firefighters because I’m from Chicago (where we’re all from, obviously). I immediately got swept up in a deep playoff run and the energy of the community. The Firefighters channel was like a sports bar. All of us in there would fall in, yell about Caleb messing up pitches, Baby Triumphant striking out, how the Tigers suck shit, and then we’d reminisce about the game and vanish. Everyone else was wrapped up in lore and stories for all their characters, but we took our team for what it was- just a name attached to stats that made the number go up. Blaseball players are all like this at their core- they’re just names and stats. Entirely featureless beings that some fans ascribe meaning and personalities to.

As the seasons went on, the Firefighters did worse but we grew because the sport was growing too. This growth came along with a change of culture, though. People who started Firefighter culture left because the energy was getting too “weird”, too different in the Discord. We didn’t have the same laissez-faire attitude anymore, and were starting to get bogged down in who our characters were, in collaborating with other teams for lore, caring too much about the players on the Firefighters instead of the team the Firefighters. Some people eventually just stopped going into the Discord entirely.

People were enjoying the game in a way that was different than we were at the beginning, and in some ways was completely antithetical to each other. For starters, the advent of Twitter RP. I cannot explain why it gives me this unreasonable response. People should absolutely be allowed to play as a fake player online. But something about it–either the way they carried themselves or the way that people responded to them, made it feel like they had final say on these characters. Like they were the authors. But they don’t have true authorship over these characters because the thing about Blaseball is there is no true authorship. Right? So if they want to say whatever they want about how Derrick Krueger carries himself on Twitter, they should be able to. I shouldn’t be getting frustrated because it truly doesn’t matter.

It’s easy to say and not easy to do, though. Even though I say over and over that the viewers of Blaseball don’t have control of these characters, I wasn’t accepting that I don’t have control either. The fact that Blaseball gives no one ownership means that everyone feels like they have a bit of ownership. Which makes it both magical and a powder keg. See– Blaseball has a specific edge to it that makes it particularly volatile. It combines sports fandom with capital F Fandom. There is a cult of personality around these names and teams that, as displayed by the Game Band, have no personality. 

Since we have no control but act like we do, we get incredibly invested in these characters at the fan level but the game itself just does not care about them. I remember Ruby Tuesday, a day that lives in infamy as the day Jaylen Hotdogfingers ran wild on the league, killing six players. It was amazing, and the most invested in the game that a lot of people had been in a long time. But some people who were invested in the Fandom of the whole thing were mortified. Characters that they spent so long writing about and crafting relationships with were just fucking dead. RPers had to choose to either ignore the incinerations and keep on truckin’ or just drop their accounts. The amount of bleed was honestly devastating, and it all comes from the fact that we put so much of our hearts into this random number generator.

This kind of thing draws differences of the community into harsh light, because this cannot happen in real sports. We’ll never have a day where 6 players just eat shit and explode on the field and the game just keeps going. It happens fast and just jostles you out of your seat every time. Wiki pages are locked as people flail around, caught in both mourning the player they lost and the mad dash to write lore for the new character that appeared in the rubble. It all happens and the game just keeps moving because it does not care about Moody Cookbook. 

The Keepers (mods) and Umps (devs) honestly put in work to try and minimize the discourse, but no matter what they do, you can’t break the hold that Fandom has on people. In a real story, you wouldn’t just lose a character instantly for no reason. So you have people trying their best to explain it. People will refer to it as a murder, and others will refer to it as a Wacky Races style death. This difference then pushes the people in the Blaseball Discord against each other because both can’t be right. Is every player in Blaseball trying to stop playing because this is a hellsport? Or is everyone having a blast and the deaths are just an accepted part of the game? 

Again, the anger and discourse stems from people trying to fill the space in the way they’re used to. If the wiki page is a collection of facts about a character, and that character is now dead, what do you say about them? If there’s nothing true other than “they’re dead”, how do you end your story? If your headcanon isn’t on the wiki, does it matter? What does the wiki matter if it doesn’t include Tillman Henderson’s Butler or Clones? Like I said before- Blaseball itself refuses our attempts to categorize it, and that is a bitter pill to swallow. 

I think in hindsight, I should have been part of that group that left the Discord and never looked back. I’m still in there today, and have a much healthier relationship with it now, but for a while I was allowing myself to get extremely heated over things that really didn’t matter. Because Blaseball had been something we loved, and we were desperately trying to hold onto the weird sports bar vibe of everyone just watching a sport, shit talking our rivals, swearing at our players, and new fans were not interested in that. They wanted the Firefighters to stand out like the Tigers or the Crabs did, to have personality in our characters and be more than just a middling team that was from Chicago.

Blaseball is, for some, a random numbers generator that gives you the feeling of watching Baseball in 40 minutes. For others it’s a fanfiction and OC generator. For others they’re just there for the community. These people can coexist in the same space, but their wants can sometimes get in the way of each other. This is where we get the biggest discourse.

I hate Declan Suzanne- it’s true. He’s the firefighters worst player and has never done anything right. I desperately, desperately, want to get him incinerated by a Blessing so we can get a chance at a better player. But other fans of the Firefighters hate this because they love Declan. He’s a gamer clown and the butt of every joke, his boyfriend is a rich scumbag and he has cat headphones. He brought home Tyreek’s jacket, even! But if you’re someone who wants to win and not someone who cares about the lore, none of that matters to you, and if you’re someone invested in the lore, the thought of blowing up one of your characters sucks.

I talk a lot of trash about Declan and vote to send him to the great beyond every chance I get, but I am still endeared by him. He is a Firefighter. He has a story that I do find fun, and that’s because the Lore folx put in the work to make him compelling. They took an absolute boober of a man and made me care about him. That’s what makes Blaseball special, and why the fandom/Fandom thing works. It truly doesn’t happen anywhere else because of The Game Band’s commitment to leaving the story and characters in the fans hands. When the monitor complained about Tillman Henderson, we all felt it and went wild. Because that’s our awful boy. We know this terrible man because the entire league (but mostly Marn S) created him. It is truly unlike anything I’ve experienced in another game. 

Blaseball provides these moments of pure, unhinged joy. Watching the Crabs Ascend, Watching the Shelled Ones appear for the first time, everyone working together to try to get the Snackrifice to work. Every single Sunday my heart is pounding because I want to see how the Election goes. I know it’s never going to go well, but it’s always exciting. I still get to hop into the Firefighters channel and yell about it with everyone in there, even if they care about some characters more than I do. I get to see a huge group of people I would have never met or talked to before all this, complaining about how we were robbed again.

This is what sport does for so many people, it creates a community where none existed before. Fandom may turn it into a pressure cooker too, but that’s where we get things like the music and the art and the goofy dating sim version of the garbage man when he was dead. This game is so special, and I really believe there is nothing else like it. Sure, I’ll get mad when the season is going, but that’s sports, baby. I miss Blaseball so much, and when it comes back, you better believe I’ll be in the stands of the firehouse praying for an incineration against the Tigers.

Hope this helps

Riley