(upbeat music) (record scratch) - Don't throw it so fast. - Sorry. (sighs) - Let's talk about Blaseball, 'cause like thousands of people,
I am obsessed. (gentle upbeat music) So this is Blaseball. In a nutshell, Blaseball
is a free idle browser game that lives at blaseball.com and
simulates a baseball league. The first thing you'll do is pick which of these pretend teams you support from the New York Millennials to the Kansas City Breath Mints. And you earn coins every
time that your team wins, which will happen a lot, even
if you pick a crap team, because this website simulates
games between these teams almost every single hour, with
a new champion of the season being declared at the end
of every real life week. To figure out what happens during all of these pretend matches,
the simulation simply looks at the statistics of each team's players. So, if we go to the Canada Moist Talkers and look at their star
pitcher, PolkaDot Patterson. We can see how good she
is at all kinds of stuff and also that her preferred
coffee includes heavy foam and on one level Blaseball
is as simple as that. It's just surreal fantasy
fictional baseball with a sense of humour, but
Blaseball has many levels. So get ready, because going
any deeper into what makes this game a growing online sensation is like performing an autopsy
on the Phillie Phanatic. Because Blaseball is a
website, fans have been able to study some of the
games code, discovering that all players, including our
PolkaDot Patterson, actually have a minimum of 31 additional stats. To just stick with PolkaDot,
any player's pitching skill is a composite of seven of these stats: coldness, overpowerment, ruthlessness, suppression, Shakespearianism,
unthwackability, and number of fingers. Which, in PolkaDot's case, is 87. She has 87 fingers, or at least she does at the time of this video. (mysterious music) Here's the creators of Blaseball, a studio called The Game Band
to tell us what's going on. - [Joel] Making the sim,
I described a lot of it as just subconscious. Just mostly thinking
about what would be funny and just like letting it happen. - Players in Blaseball
only having a minimum of 10 fingers is just the
tip of this very odd iceberg. For example, delightfully cr*p team, the Miami Dale recently
gained electric blood and the ability to zap
the ball out of the air. And new weather conditions that
matches can take place under are still being added to the simulation. Oh, you might be thinking, like rain? No, not really. The current list of possible
weather is as follows: Peanuts, birds, blooddrain, feedback, reverb and solar eclipses, in which
beloved simulated players might be incinerated. Yes, Blaseball athletes can die. It's like Formula 1 in that respect. 260 athletes go into each
season and not all of them are going to come back out again. And yet, by the time you
are watching this video, anything I'm telling you could be a lie. And that's because unlike
the many beloved athletes who have died playing Blaseball,
the game of Blaseball is alive. And that's where you come in. All of those coins you're earning can be spent voting every week
on new decrees and blessings. By voting for blessings,
you're basically buying your team raffle tickets for
upgrades like, oh, I dunno, permanently shrinking your
team from 14 players to 13, or changing your team's
entire blood type to grass. What does that mean? Nobody knows. Part of the fun of Blaseball
is the community trying to figure out just how this
arcane simulation works. As if they were mapping a haunted house that's always growing and
changing when you're not looking. But every week players
also get to vote on one of several decrees that will permanently change the game of Blaseball forever. Like introducing a new game
mechanic, or one of them was making the most
popular team last season run around an extra base
next season. There was one
that just says the team with the most fans will evolve. We don't know what that means today. We may never know what it means. All you know in Blaseball is you're going to get what you vote for, making it significantly more fun
than actual democracy. So that is Blaseball
in a nutshell, kind of. You see, what's happening
on blaseball.com with this sport that's evolving every week is more like the rigid and
unfeeling shell of the nut. To truly understand this
game, we're going to have to tease this shell apart. Because the heart of Blaseball is love. - [Joel] I think, from the beginning, it was always like let's make a game that brings people together
and centres around a community and plays with it and sees what comes out of it. It was growing in season
one and then by season two, all the fan art started to come out and that's something I've
never had on a project that I've made, is just a tonne of fan art. I'm a Breath Mints fan. And so my first fan art that
I saw of Boyfriend Monreal was boyfriend had like a
thousand eyes or something, it was like this amazing player card. It was so beautiful. And I was like, wait, people are making art of this game. And then, the music started to
come out and like The Garages started to put together an album. And that was just surreal. - Right, you know, how passionate
sports fans can be? Tracking stats and
cheering for their team. And you know, how creative
internet fandom communities can be? Making fan art and
fan fiction and memes. Blaseball, in being both a sport and a surreal cinematic
universe, fuses sports fandom with nerd fandom and the result is a supernova of creativity. When Blaseball launched
in the summer of 2020, it was just some teams that
had funny names and an emoji and a bunch of players with
names that could have been drawn from 1995 SNES classic,
Fighting Baseball. But almost instantly
after the game launched, the community began creating
backstories, not just for these players, but for the teams, even for the mechanics in the game, acting as a kind of hive
mind Rumpelstiltskin, the community began spinning this characterless
surreal straw into gold. Development of one of
Blaseball's simulated players often starts with the community of fans in the team's Discord channel
using the players name as a springboard to discuss
who that player might be. That's how the fans decided that a player called
Quack Enjoyable is a duck or how Jessica Telephone looks like this. And from there that
player gets a Wiki page, a backstory, fandart, memes, trivia, players might create Twitter
accounts to roleplay as them. And yes, Blaseball athletes
have even inspired musicians to write songs. (rockbeat music) ♪And he pitches the ball in the same way ♪ to the same place every
time, like an (beeping) And if you get into reading this stuff, what's really delightful about Blaseball is that it's near endless. To truly understand
the scale of Blaseball, realise that each of the game's 20 teams has a unique community that's constantly expanding
their own lore and the bios of a total of more than 280 players, so long as you include
all of the dead ones. But even this joyous stuff,
doesn't fully explain the appeal of Blaseball, which isn't in the community's
marvellous world-building any more than it's in the
developer's bizarre simulation. The true magic of Blaseball
is in how these two sides, the developers and the
fans, feel a responsibility to develop the game in collaboration with what the other side is doing. - [Joel] We have things that
we're planning well in advance, and we also are very much
listening to the community and checking the pulse, especially when they find
a big goal as a community. Like we definitely try to encourage that. Sometimes I think that the
community is making this game just as much as we are. - I'll give you an
example of exactly this, that shouldn't sound too
much like inside Blaseball. In season six, the
developers introduced idols, allowing players of the browser game to choose their favourite player. and earn coins, every time they hit the ball or struck out a batter. The devs also added a
leaderboard, ranking players by who was getting idolised the most, as well as a blessing in that season's elections that let a team steal the league's 14th most idolised player. However, Blaseball's
community then realised that nothing stopped them
from idolising players who were dead. They were just listed in
the system under "null team". This allowed The Seattle Garages to try and coordinate a rather
unexpected act of resurrection. If they could just nudge the previously incinerated
Jaylen Hotdogfingers into 14th place on the idol board. And, if their team could be
the winners of the blessing to steal the 14th most idolised player, then maybe they could steal
the dead Jaylen Hotdogfingers back onto their team and into the realm of the living? Now this was all theoretical
science on the part of the players, but the
developers went full "yes and..?" on the situation. Yes, Blaseball players should
be able to do this. And, necromancy should have consequences. When the next season began, Jaylen was back on The
Garages team and pitching like nothing had happened
until something did happen. Fans watching the simulation
were alarmed, shall we say when the now undead Jaylen Hotdogfingers was revealed to have picked up the habit of throwing the ball at the players on the other team, leaving them unstable and drastically increasing their chances of being incinerated. Elation turned to horror
throughout the league, as it was revealed that
batting against Jaylen could now be a death sentence. Another example of Blaseball's developers, just mentally going
where the players were, was the time the Unlimited
Tacos managed to trap their entire pitching lineup
in giant peanut shells. Don't ask. Just to see
what would happen if they had to play a match, but couldn't pitch a
ball and to the delight of the community, the developers responded by giving the Tacos a new player with the first name Pitching
and the second name Machine, who at the time of this video
is the most popular player in the league. Think of it like supporting
a sports team in real life it's already exciting and unpredictable, but then Blaseball asks
the additional question of what if a team's fan base's passion and fervour and
ingenuity could actually help that team and inflict changes,
not just on that team, but the entire sport. It's also a lot less
toxic than sport's fandom traditionally is, because
the developers of Blaseball, in giving the game such a dark brooding and mysterious tone are
able to act as antagonists. - [Steven] On one level,
Blaseball is a horror game, but it's a story about, I think for us, building community
like amiss, malevolent forces that are outside of your control. So we have to play the role of antagonists for that community to rally against. - So the developers of
Blaseball are always watching for what the community find funny, or scary, or are just interested in. And then the developers put
more love into those corners of their demented website. And then for the players,
who are sharing all this fan fiction and fan
art, that side of the game is made so much more exciting
because these players that the community are falling in love with have lives of their own
within the simulation. Which means they still have
the capacity to surprise us. Remember Pitching Machine? In its second day in the simulation, it randomly happened to be
playing under blooddrain weather and drank another player's blood, making it an even better pitcher. And the crowd went wild. (upbeat music) Equally, fans would never have agreed to a mechanic being introduced
in Blaseball's second season that sees their beloved fictional athletes getting incinerated. Goodness me.
Fans have decided that lots of the Blaseball athletes are in romantic relationships
with one another. And yet, that's why it's so
important that things like life, and death, and how good any of
these fictional athletes are at Blaseball, should be out
of the hands of fans and in the hands of a
horrible, uncaring simulation, because that makes every
player in the league feel that much more fragile,
which in turn makes them that much more lovable. And this is why a season
of Blaseball is so engaging to watch as a fan. Think about the emotional ringer you get put through watching a
real life sports team. Now imagine that in a particular game, your favourite athlete
could burn to death, leaving behind their best
friend and lover and dad and dog, who are all also on the team. That's what we're dealing
with here and it's fabulous. Blaseball is getting more
and more fans every week. And I'm thrilled to say
that the developer's Patreon is getting more and more
love, because talking to the developers, this is a game that wouldn't have even existed if 2020 hadn't been such a tremendously cr*p year. - [Joel] I think the world
does feel kind of like in this horror state, it's
just, there's so many things going on. Nobody can
really keep ahead of it, which, you know, sounds like Blaseball. - [Sam] We were also developing this while, uhm, very closely
monitoring the MLB's situation and to watch like their
decision making process and to see the values of money
trumping the values of safety, it kind of eked its way into the game. - [Stephen] It's an
insane world right now. And Blaseball is insane,
but at least Blaseball takes the mask off and is
very honest about that. And my instinct is that
the fans find community in that gallows humour. What they bring to Blaseball
is care and the horror comes through in potentially losing them or horrible things
happening to these products of their own imagination. And that's incredibly fascinating to me. - Thank you very much
for watching everybody. If you've enjoyed this video, taking you into a world
of splorting legends, you've got to wonder, would
you enjoy real sports as well? Ooh. Oh yes. That reminds me. This video is brought to you with the help of CuriosityStream, a streaming platform, home to thousands of documentaries,
including Knuckleball, a documentary about two of the baseball world's
most unusual stars. What's a knuckleball you ask? Watch and learn. (rockbeat music) Just cut to the. - [Narrator] You need the
fingertips of a safecracker and the mind of a Zen Buddhist. Because you throw the ball
off of your fingertips, but if one of those fingers
happens to catch on the ball, or stay on a little
bit longer, it tumbles. And once the ball tumbles,
it was like batting practise. You know, here hit it. - A lot of times, it
has a mind of its own. - [Narrator] It's going to do
whatever it feels like doing, and you don't know what
that's going to be. - You know, you let it go
and see where it takes you. (melancholic music) - CuriosityStream loves
to support creators. So if you sign up now,
you'll also get access to another streaming service,
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it already is home to a
bunch of YouTube creators, including People Make Games. It's a place where we can create all kinds of experimental content
without fear of the algorithm and all totally ad- free. In fact, last week, Chris hosted an episode of
the Working Title series, where he talked to the person behind Dark's incredibly unsettling
opening credits and asked him embarrassing questions like this one. - Whose idea was it for
the Dark title sequence to be so fleshy? Because it is, by the way. - You can get a full year
of great documentaries on CuriosityStream and
Nebula for less than $15. Look, all that matter is you use the link in the description of this video to get that discount. It's time for me to make a move. Thanks for watching everybody. This is one of those good
news, bad news type situations. The good news is People
Make Games has loads of other videos, if you enjoyed this one. The bad news is I'm not
wearing, that was rubbish, a sparkly outfit in the rest of them. But why not check out me going to Second Life's most expensive brothel to interview the women who work there. I love that piece. It's really good. Try again. Jeez. Thank you. (rockbeat music)
