Blaseball: birthing hope through chaos

theverge.com:

Disaster.

We had been so arrogant — we wished to spite the god itself. So we took its snacks, its so-called “gifts,” and we sacrificed them to our dead — 100 million tributes in all.

How could we have known that it would return with its progeny to crush our champions? That it would abduct our beloved players and force them against us? This was the most public and humiliating of punishments.

This was Blaseball.

In October 2020, as season 9 of Internet League Blaseball concluded, I was left reeling. I had just watched a giant peanut god (THE SHELLED ONE) summon a team of peanuts — and players trapped in peanut shells (THE PODS) — and slap the collective fandom across the face. We were currently enduring one of modern history’s most destabilizing events, yet, apparently, this was the new, hot thing on the internet. Why? Why would anyone possibly wish to subject themselves to this chaos?

“Chaos” is the single best word to describe Blaseball. Ostensibly, Blaseball is merely a baseball league simulator and a barebones one at that. Like traditional sports leagues, Blaseball is split into seasons, each one played over 99 “days” (real-world hours) across a real-time workweek, Monday to Friday. Each weekend, the best-performing teams compete in the post-season for the season title, and elections are held. (More on that later.) This all occurs on the Blaseball website, where text and icons alone describe with a crisp simplicity all that happens in the League, and fans can bet fictional in-world money on the outcomes of matches. Similar to real sports apps, fans watch with eager anticipation as the simulator steadily churns out play-by-play descriptions of each match in real time, things like “Gia Holbrook hit a ground out to Beck