We Are All Love Blaseball
Takeaway Points:
We are all love blaseball. The commissioner is doing a great job.
I love blaseball. I have never cared about baseball.
Baseball, as the website will cheekily tell you, is a splort. That’s about all that they’ll tell you. The site itself features one tab called The Book of Blaseball, ostensibly a rulebook. It is so heavily redacted that you can’t read it or understand it.
Blaseball is (to give you an actual description) an online fantasy baseball league in which teams will play against each other in simulated games, and you can bet on the outcome, using in-game coins. There is no win or lose condition. It’s a rather simple mechanic.
When you open up the game for the first time, you’re prompted to choose a favored team. This has no real effect on gameplay, aside from giving you coins each time that team wins. You can still bet on any team you want, at any time.
It’s so simple, in fact, as to be infinitely cheesed. You can break the hell out of it. The win/loss rates for each match are displayed when bets are placed, which means that a straightforward application of a betting rule called the Kelly Criterion means that you can easily maximize your returns and quickly build up cash.
As a quick aside, the Kelly Criterion is a method for determining how to bet when you know the expected odds. Developed by John Larry Kelly Jr., a former scientist at Bell Labs, this formula helps to understand how to size bets properly so that you never run out of money, while also simultaneously maximizing your expected return. If you follow the criterion, losses will lead to making smaller bets in the future, while wins will lead to making larger bets, eventually maximizing your return. This is a time-tested concept which has been important in fields like investment and game theory.
In the simple form, you double the expected success rate and subtract 1. So if you have a 65% success rate, you double that (130%) and then subtract 1 (100%), leaving 30%. So, if you have 65% odds of winning, you would only bet up to a max of 30% of your cash on hand. You could bet a bit less if you wanted to play it safe, but you probably shouldn’t bet more. This also makes sense - for example, if you knew your win rate was 100%, then you’d bet all you had, and if you knew your win rate was less than 50%, you shouldn’t be betting on it at all. In between, you bet more or less depending on your expected win rate. I’ve been applying the criteria myself in playing the game, and watching my coins steadily grow. It’s pretty simple - you just look for the matches where one team is more highly favored, and bet based on the criterion.
But that’s not really the point of it, after all.
The point of blaseball is everything else that happens.
Blaseball has a distinct, weird, surreal vibe to everything, almost Lynchian. There are 20 teams in the league, each given an appropriately silly name like the “Hawaii Fridays” or the “Dallas Steaks”, or my personal favorite, the “New York Millennials”. Each team is associated with an emoji. The teams are staffed with players with randomly generated silly names, like “Felix Garbage” or “Dominic Marijuana”. Player stat pages bring up more expected stats like batting, pitching, baserunning, and defense, alongside more unexpected ones like current vibe, item, armor, evolution, pregame ritual, coffee style, blood type, fate, and soulscream. Games can be plagued by weather conditions like birds, peanut rain, microphone feedback, blooddrain, or solar eclipse.
A major mechanic is the voting system. Blaseball occurs in seasons, each a single week long. Main season games are played in real time from Mon-Fri (albeit very sped up), and then playoffs are held on Saturday. Sunday is a day off, during which voting is calculated. Players can spend their hard-earned coins on voting tickets, which enable them to cast their votes. There are two major voting elements.
The first, decrees, are major changes which have huge mechanical changes, and directly impact the game lore for that season. For example, in the very first season, players voted for the cryptic decree “open the forbidden book”, which resulted in players being able to see the (heavily redacted) rulebook mentioned above. The full list of effects from that season’s vote is as follows:
The Book Opens.
Solar Eclipse.
Umpires' eyes turn white.
Star player Jaylen Hotdogfingers is incinerated.
Hellmouth swallows the Moab Desert.
THE DISCIPLINE ERA BEGINS
What does most of this mean? Who knows, really. The main point is that these decrees have huge changes on the game, and that means that they’re ripe for building lore and stories around.
The second voting element are blessings, which have smaller effects which switch up the rules, and may provide effects which help your favored teams to win. Players often strategize with each other over discord, to decide what decrees and blessings they want to shoot for.
None of these mechanics are really explained in much depth. In fact, attempting to understand the mechanics generally falls under the heading of “forbidden knowledge” and is discouraged. Instead, players are encouraged to riff on these touchstones, making up their own explanations, their own theories, and their own fanon. One event in season 3 called the grand unslam led to the city of Los Angeles being dimensionally shattered, renaming team the Los Angeles Tacos into the Unlimited Tacos. Things like this are par for the course - blaseball is about making choices you couldn’t possibly understand the ramifications of, and then living with the consequences.
Players are also not expected to be called “players”, as this might cause confusion with the actual randomized “players” who are playing the (simulated) baseball games. People in the real world, who “play” the game of blaseball, are referred to instead as “fans” or “spectators”.
And that’s what blaseball is - it’s a pure spectacle, divorced from context. It’s not really about betting, fantasy sports, or baseball at all. It’s about having fun and participating in a shared universe. One could imagine the exact same formula, except that baseball is replaced with simulated RPG adventurers going into dungeons, sometimes coming out with sacks of gold, sometimes getting cursed, and so on, while the spectators vote on what they should purchase with their loot, or whether they should pick up the ominous red orb. (Blaseball developers, if you’re reading this, you owe me money for this idea.)
The game isn’t the point, the spectacle is the point. We enjoy participating in this world, hopping into this shared delusion that imagines a place where we’re not all in quarantine and the world isn’t burning down due to climate change (although blaseball is certainly no stranger to large-scale incineration events, clearly).
There are games, like Dark Souls, where the minimal ways in which players are given information is a part of the draw - games like those exist in a symbiotic relationship with internet lore, with wikis and let’s plays and lore summary videos on youtube. Blaseball is a game created entirely for the sake of wiki generation - it is more discord, more wiki, than it is a game. People chat, root for their favorite players, invent catchphrases for their favorite teams, collaboratively invent new lore. The developers encourage this, thrive on it, incorporate it back into the game on purpose. The engine drives on.
Why am I even writing this review? Other people have done it better. Cat Manning has put together an excellent primer. The world doesn’t need another review of blaseball.
I don’t know. There’s something about this game that has absolutely caught me. When I open up the game, I’m greeted with a simplistic, black and white interface. Swapping between various menus happens quickly, smoothly, instantaneously. All the buttons are round. There is nothing extraneous. Everything is so simple and smooth, that I just didn’t get it the first time I opened it. It. was deceptively simple, I thought that there had to be more, somehow. It feels like a polished stone you picked up off the river bed as a child. It is slick, visually pleasing, and unassuming.
But that’s precisely what makes blaseball compelling. That slickness and simplicity is real minimalism - minimalism which hides the fact that some kind of monstrously complex machine is running all the numbers underneath, where you can’t see them. It’s not an empty canvas, but instead it’s a canvas with just enough lines on it that you can imagine numerous pictures which fit into it. Am I mixing my metaphors? Yes, I don’t care. I’m not writing for my university professors anymore, I’m writing for myself and I do not care.
Blaseball is genuinely surprising. It doesn’t feel like it should work, but it does. It’s genius. It feels like the early days of idle gaming, when idle games were minimalist and simple and didn’t need anything else to be exciting. It’s the first time since Journey that I’ve just played a game and been hit with a feeling, a vibe so intense that you can’t explain the game to someone else without having to spend five hours futilely attempting to explain the vibe.
How do I end this review? Who knows. Go play blaseball. This week, I got to explain blaseball to my therapist. It was awesome.
About Adam Fisher
Adam is an experienced fitness coach and blogger who's been blogging for 5+ years, coaching for 6+ years, and lifting for 12+ years. He's written for numerous major health publications, including Personal Trainer Development Center, T-Nation, Bodybuilding.com, Fitocracy, and Juggernaut Training Systems.
During that time he has coached hundreds of individuals of all levels of fitness, including competitive powerlifters and older exercisers regaining the strength to walk up a flight of stairs. His own training revolves around powerlifting and bodybuilding.
Adam writes about fitness, health, science, philosophy, personal finance, self-improvement, productivity, the good life, and everything else that interests him. When he's not writing or lifting, he's usually hanging out with his cat or feeding his video game addiction.
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