The Cultural Event of Blaseball (Part 1)

It was July 2020, and COVID had been keeping people in their houses for five to six months at this point. Animal Crossing: New Horizons had been out for about three months. And a team of indie game devs, inspired by friends' comments about wanting simple, web-based games to play during quarantine, were about to release a baseball simulator.

I personally learned about Blaseball at the beginning of August, after a few early articles about it, but primarily because Friends at the Table sponsored it. (FatT is a tabletop RPG podcast I've been recommended many times by my gay friends.) It appeared very suddenly one day, and it seemed like a funny little thing, so I looked into it.

'Very strange' - A lot of people on Twitter

Screenshotted 08/04/20

I made an account, chose the team with the name that most appealed to me (the Yellowstone Magic), and began poking around the site. I wasn't really sure how to read the play-by-play of the games, so I looked at everything else.

A snippet of the rules of Blaseball. k. Crying in Blaseball is [redacted]. 5. [redacted] and You. a. Should the Participants open the Forbidden Book, [long redacted bit] suffering [redacted] banished [redacted] The Discipline Era shall last until [redacted] atoned.

Screenshotted 08/04/20

A screenshot from the Blaseball shop page. BEG. If you have no coins, you may beg the Blaseball Gods to grant you more, so that you may continue gambling. Free. Unavailable.

Screenshotted 08/04/20

I watched the Ticker go by for a while. Even in the early days, the Ticker had a lot to say.

A screenshot of the Blaseball main page. 'Season 3 Day 39' is cut off by the header. Blaseball (BETA). The Discipline Era: Uncertainty. The ticker reads: You are now participating in the cultural event of Blaseball. The First Labor. Another message is cut off at the side of the screen.

A ticker screenshot, with two messages cut off at either side. The readable ones say: The First Labour. Everything is peanuts.

A ticker screenshot. We have eaten negative infinity collective peanuts. You seeing all these birds??

A screenshot of the Blaseball main page. The ticker reads 'The Discipline Era continues. The Commissioner is doing a great job.' A game between the Firefighters and Lovers has ended, 2-8. The heavily favored Lovers won the game.

A ticker screenshot. 'The Commissioner is doing a great job' is cut off at the left. We are all love Blaseball. Cut off on the right is the Runs Batted In leaders.

All screenshotted 08/05/20

It was all, frankly, very funny. I remember grinning a lot that day, this seemed like a wonderful little thing to keep an eye on. But the information on the site was not enough for me! I turned to the Blaseball Wiki, which already existed at that point.

A screenshot from the Blaseball wiki. Categories to visit include: Teams, History, Incinerated Players, and Players.

Screenshotted 08/04/20

An important aspect of Blaseball, throughout its entire lifetime, is that many of the details are fanmade. The site itself says very little about the players apart from their stats, so it's up to the fans to fill in those blanks. Some players ended up with pretty standardized portrayals for whatever reason, while some varied wildly. The fandom and wiki even adopted a concept of a multiverse to fit all these different interpretations of the characters.

This is important now because the Blaseball Wiki is really funny. People ran with the concept and started writing silly lore. The fans were already so ready to create lore and jokes based in the way the site was written.

A screenshot from the Blaseball wiki. Splorts. Splorts (long redacted sentence). Another long redacted sentence with 'splorts' in the middle. The rest of the article is redacted until the last word, which just says 'splortsmanship'. The next line says 'See also Glolf.'

Screenshotted 08/04/20.
The wiki has gone through at least one server migration since this screenshot, so it looks different now.

A screenshot from the Blaseball wiki. The Clonflict.

Screenshotted 08/04/20

A screenshot from the Blaseball wiki. The knowledge and study of birds, also known as ornithology, is largely speculative. However, it is apparent to all observers of Blaseball that birds are opaque and capable of hate.

Screenshotted 08/04/20

It is one of the seven deadly Blaseball sins.

Screenshotted 08/04/20.
I gotta be real, I didn't expect all this to still be up on the wiki, checking 3 years later. I'm delighted.

This seemed like a wonderful thing to keep an eye on, so I kept it open in another tab to check on games sometimes. I followed the Twitter account. I watched my friends and mutuals tweet about it, people who were able to follow the games. A new thing to fill the ever-expanding void of quarantine time!

The day I started writing this, June 2nd, 2023, was the day it was announced that Blaseball would not continue. I didn't realize until then just how much I was looking forward to watching weird things happen in Blaseball again. It was a simple browser game, but so many people (including me!) loved it so much. There's a band who was inspired to make leftist punk music because of it! There were union training and charity events put on by the community! It's undeniable that Blaseball was something special.

When I started work on the Events page of this site, I always knew I was going to get to Blaseball, because oh my god I have so many screenshots and memories I want to share. I didn't know I would have a good reason to so soon.

My goal in this series of pages is to archive my experience with Blaseball. It won't cover everything; I don't think I could, because so much of the experience was just being there. It was watching and participating in a silly little community of people watching simulated baseball games, and all the other things that came with it. It was a joy to be there, and I don't want the experience to be lost to time. I want you, the reader, to understand what it was like.


Created Last Updated
June 3rd, 2023 February 13th, 2024