Feb 7, 2021

Emma and Gil chat with Sam Rosenthal and Stephen Bell of The Game Band, known for their
bizarre cosmic horror sports sim Blaseball. We discuss the unique
feedback loop between Blaseball’s fans and its creators, the
benefits of apophenia, and how baseball was uniquely suited for
this treatment at this moment in history.

SHOW NOTES

7m00s: The score bug that Gil is
referring to is the graphic that appears overlaid on most sports
broadcast, showing the game’s score and other vital stats. Gil also
refers to
external chest protectors that baseball umpires used to wear,
an icon of baseball from decades past.

7m59s: The
Blaseball wiki.

10m00s: The music that Stephen refers to is literal fan-made
music. Fan canon says that the team the Seattle Garages are
actually a rock band forced to play Blaseball. Fans have actually recorded and
released these albums.

19m05s: Here’s
Cat Manning’s excellent Blaseball primer. It’s a good way to
get a sense of the lore of the game.

22m11s: We chatted with game designer and wide receiver Adrienne
Smith in
Ludology 240 – Are You Receiving Me?

26m15s: Apophenia is the
tendency to make connections between disconnected things. Game
designers can use it to make meaningful experiences and memorable
stories, but other people can use it for
very bad things.

27m42s: Kayfabe is a wrestling
term that denotes the acceptance of the fictionalization of staged
events. In other words, a wrestling announcer working in kayfabe
will treat a match as if it is a genuinely-contested sporting event
with an uncertain outcome, not a scripted match in which all
participants know the winner ahead of time.

Kayfabe is very much another example of a magic circle. You can
hear Geoff Engelstein and Ryan Sturm discuss the magic circle with
game designer Eric Zimmerman in
Ludology 79 – The Magic Circle.

29m34s: SIBR is the Society for
Internet Blaseball Research. Their name is a reference to SABR,
the Society for American Baseball
Research. (In real-world Major League Baseball, SABR is the
organization that devised “sabermetrics,” the advanced statistics
that powered the Moneyball
movement.)

SIBR has written several academic papers
analyzing the effects various aspects of Blaseball.

32m54s: Taskmaster
continues to be one of Gil’s favorite shows.

35m44s: Uncharted is a series
of video games about uncovering historical mysteries around the
world, and killing a lot of bad guys in the process.

44m02s: More info on Twitch
Plays Pokémon. Also, Our Place, a
MUD.

48m17s: More info on the John Cage composition As Slow As
Possible (Gil misstated the title as “As Long As Possible”).
You can watch a video of one of the note changes here.

Also, Gil should have mentioned the 10,000 Year Clock, a Jeff
Bezos-funded clock that is being built within a Texas mountain that
will be designed to run 10,000 years without any human
intervention. This is not the kind of scale humans are used to
thinking in, which is what makes these projects so strange and
intriguing.

53m04s: Welcome to
Night Vale is highly recommended for anyone intrigued by the
idea of comic cosmic horror. For example…

“The City Council announces the
opening of a new dog park at the corner of Earl and Sommerset near
the Ralph’s.

They would like to remind everyone
that dogs are not allowed in the dog park. People are not allowed
in the dog park. It is possible you will see hooded figures in the
dog park. Do not approach them. Do not approach the dog park. The
fence is electrified and highly dangerous. Try not to look at the
dog park, and especially do not look for any period of time at the
hooded figures. The dog park will not harm you.”

55m51s: Baseball has several “unwritten rules” of decorum. One
of them is that bunting to break up a no-hitter tends to be frowned
upon. It happens every few years; in 2019,
a minor-league team broke up a combined no-hitter in the 9th inning
with a bunt, which resulted in a benches-clearing
altercation. 

1h00m42s: Here is the Blaseball Discord
server.

1h05m40s: Gil is referring to Marcel Duchamp’s readymade
sculpture Fountain
(although there are rumblings that the piece was
actually made by Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven).
Afterwards, Gil refers to the Star Trek: The Next Generation
episode
Chain of Command, in which a Cardassian tortures Jean-Luc
Picard by inflicting pain if Picard does not claim he sees five
lights when in fact there are only four in front of him (which
itself is a reference from a scene in 1984).

1h06m57s: “The Commissioner Is Doing A Great Job” is
a common Blaseball meme. The Coffee Cup was the most recent
season of Blaseball before this recording, which was a knockout
tournament of nontraditional Blaseball teams instead of a
“traditional” season (whatever that means).

1h08m03s: Twitter links: The Game Band, Blaseball, Sam Rosenthal, and Stephen Bell. Here is
Blaseball’s
Patreon.

1h10m16s: Guess which
blaseball team Gil follows?