Ask me about blaseball and teaching in semi-rural New Zealand.

What's Blaseball about. Is it a game simulator?

Blaseball was called a "cultural experience" which is one of many ok-yet-inadequate summaries of it.

Blaseball was a website made by The Game Band, partly in response to organised sports being a thing you couldn't go to during the pandemic ending up with "crowds" like this:


So they wanted to make a little sports simulator you can watch from the comfort of your own home and have watch parties and cheer for your team. Baseball works really well for this, because they could make a bunch of stats to figure out what the players do. In essence:

• the pitcher must throw the ball. We then find out if it's in the batting box or not.
  
• the batter can choose to swing or not, determining if it's a ball or a strike.
  
• if they do swing and the pitcher got it in the box, then we find out if they hit it hard enough to get a single, double, triple, or home run.
  
• We find out if the fielding team manage to catch it as a fly ball.
  
• players who are already on bases will try to run to the next base. they may even try to steal bases. (Some players, like Hahn Fox of the Hellmouth Sunbeams, had underlying stats which made them likelier to steal, and then to be bad at stealing.)
  
• defense is probably a thing. We're not sure exactly at this stage until they remade the simulator after Season 24.
  

You can actually still watch it much the same way we did when it was happening proper, using the Before site. I linked to opening day of Season 2, because everything from Season 1 except the Postseason was lost to the sands of time.

A regular season was 1 real-world week long with 99 days of play. Every day started on the hour, and ran for 24 hours a day, for 9 innings each (unless the score was tied at the bottom of the 9th, in which case they'd go on to the 10th inning and onward (the longest game in-world ran for 28 innings; the longest non-exhibition game that wasn't caused by the website slowing down was 82 minutes long)). The top teams in the league would then qualify for the Postseason, and by the end of the week we'd have a season champion.

I'd recommend going and looking at the Before site I linked because it gives you a good idea of the simulator portion of it. Before, uh, shit happened anyway.

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So you've got this setup where when you sign up for the site, you're not playing the part of a blaseball player, you're playing the part of a Fan. You pick a favorite team (mine was the Moab Sunbeams, renamed to the Hellmouth Sunbeams after the Beta Season 1 Elections, had a short stint as the --------- -------- at the end of the Expansion Era, then finally the Moab Hellmouth Sunbeams when Blaseball returned.) In real-world sports, Fans yell at the teams from a distance and rarely-if-ever impact the flow of the game or get much of a say in how the game should be played.

Where Blaseball differed was the fact you could bet in-game Coins on matches, earn more Coins if you guessed correctly, and spend all your Coins eventually on Votes. You could spend your Votes in a couple of ways:

1. Blessings were fun little prizes you could win for your team; they were kind of like a lottery so the more tickets your team poured into one, the better (but not guaranteed) odds you'd win it. When a team won a blessing despite only having put in a couple % of the total votes, that was what we called a wimdy. Most Blessings were positive improvements to the team, like maxing out batting stats on a random batter, or stealing the best pitcher in the league to join your team, or rerolling the stats of your worst players. Some were more like flavour that would only have a mechanical impact in niche situations.
   
2. Each week (and more instrumental to the overall arc of Blaseball as a storytelling experience), there would be several Decrees. These could add new mechanics, change the rules of the sport, or more often be cryptic bullshit. We'd be told how many Decrees would pass in a given season, and then they'd pick by whichever one(s) got the most votes.

You could get your votes in before the end of Sunday, a short while after the Post-Season. Season 1, fans voted to pass the Decree which would "Open the Forbidden Book". This had a couple of immediate consequences:

• Solar Eclipse. The entirety of Season 2 was player under Solar Eclipse Weather, until we voted in fun new kinds of weather to add to the rotation. When the weather is Solar Eclipse, Umpires have a chance of going rogue and incinerating players, killing them on the spot and generating a new randomised player to take their place.
  
• One of the best pitchers in the league, Jaylen Hotdogfingers of the Seattle Garages, was incinerated before the new season event started. They were immediately replaced with a fresh player, Derrick Krueger. This also had Additional Consequences, which I can get into later.
  
• Hellmouth swallows the Moab Desert. Mechanically, this did nothing except changing the name of the Moab Sunbeams but us Beams fans went kind of wild imagining life in a town where not only did a giant pit to hell open up and take half the town with it, it fucked with collective consciousness so they believed it had always been there, and that nobody had died in the incident because everything that had been swallowed by the pit had been erased from memory. Also the Colorado River is an aberration now.
  

This marked the start of the Discipline Era, which concluded at the end of Season 10 after we assembled a crack team of ghosts (with the help of a Microphone and the giant squid who guards the Hall, an afterlife for incinerated blaseball players) to fight a bunch of players who were kidnapped by an arrogant Peanut who was also a god. I'll explain that in more detail if people are interested.

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I think that covers the guts of what, gameplay-wise, blaseball actually was at its core. You absolutely could, and I imagine many folks did, "play" it by watching what happened on the site: placing bets, accruing Coins, chucking Votes on either what they thought might be fun/funny or - if they were invested in their team improving and winning Championships - whatever might boost their team's performance. Where Blaseball became something much more, both for me and a lot of other folks, was the community around it. I'll get into that in another post.