If you have not read my previous post about Blaseball and do not know what Blaseball is you need to read this first because nothing about this will make sense without knowing how this game worked:

https://hackers.town/@lori/110981498035083766

Anyway I'm sure this is probably covered in that post, but I want to reiterate how characters in Blaseball worked. Characters, or players (but players gets confusing with the fictional sports people versus the real life players of the video game, so we'll say characters) in Blaseball consist of...very little. The game is text based. Characters in the game are randomly generated names coupled with sports stats. Over time a few other things were added (like characters could have items, or weird specific persistent buff/debuff effects) but ultimately what we're looking at is a name and some stats. Characters in Blaseball did not have characterization, did not have prewritten or generated backgrounds, pronouns, genders, ethnicities, anything. They're just names. The only "canon" story aspects are what happened in the simulation, much like Dwarf Fortress--for example, some characters were killed, got brought back via necromancy effects, etc. Some story elements happen in Blaseball, like a prescripted event that changed every character whose name was Dan into Peanut (which also led to one player becoming Peanutiel). So there's a small amount of "canon" characterization, but otherwise...we're looking at a spreadsheet of names.

It's important to know this, because you cannot approach the Blaseball fandom types the way you would the fans of some TV show. For example, there's a lot of dynamics that go into people shipping characters from TV shows, and a lot of debate over, say, queer headcanons of characters who are not confirmed to be queer in media. Blaseball is a list of blank slate names. That's it.

So, here's Jessica Telephone.

lori

2023-08-31 00:54:28

So, what is Blaseball, and why do I keep saying "this is Blaseball to me" when anything bad happens online?

You're going to have to sit through quite a few details of how Blaseball works, but I promise that without knowing how it worked as a video game, you can't understand how the community worked (or didn't work).

Blaseball was a browser based horror-themed baseball simulator. You would log into the Blaseball website, and you would see text-based baseball games happening. There were a couple dozen teams, and there would be a schedule of when they'd play, and each season took one real life week. In terms of how the games played out, you would see text go by like "Jessica Telephone strikes out" and every few seconds the next update would show up. The games all ran live, you had to be on the site to watch them.

In terms of the "horror" aspect, there were supernatural elements to Blaseball that changed over time. The first of which was "Solar Eclipse" as a type of weather a game could be played under, where occasionally at random a rogue umpire could incinerate a player. Incinerated players were dead and were unceremoniously replaced by a new, randomly generated player right then and there and play would continue. There were later effects where a dead player could possess a living player for a while in a game, where players would be replaced by alternate reality versions of themselves (with different stats), you get the idea.

But Blaseball wasn't purely a spectator sport. You could sign up for Blaseball and play. But you didn't, say, play as a team. You played as a fan. And in the world of Blaseball, fans have voting power, and votes are bought. You got a certain amount of coins (with no real money ties to them, there were no microtransactions or anything, which is probably part of why it never made money) and you could bet those coins on games to win more coins. Later there were items you could buy with your coins that would give you more coins under various conditions--for example, if you bought a Sundae, you would get coins every time a player was incinerated. For 100 coins, you could buy a vote, and every weekend when the season was finished, there would be an election.

Elections in Blaseball were the highlight of player interaction with the game. The elections were broken up into two categories: Decrees, and Blessings. Decrees were kind of big rule change options you could vote between, and whichever one had the most votes would go into effect the next season. These would sometimes have narrative implications, or sometimes just be straight up rules. For example, one election saw a Decree called "Eat the Rich" win, which put into effect a rule where the top 1% of players would have their coins redistributed to the other 99% of players. Decrees typically affected the entire game.

Blessings however were a little different. Blessings were not a "most vote wins" situation, Blessings were essentially a raffle. And Blessings only went to the team that won that raffle. So there could be Blessings that, say, rerolled the stats on your worst player. Or incinerated your worst player and replaced them with someone else. Or gave regular stat buffs. Or traded your pitcher for the best pitcher in the league. That kind of stuff. Because this was a raffle, sometimes they would go to teams that barely put votes into them, and sometimes one team would win several Blessings and another would win none. Most of the time, just by statistics, Blessings would be won by the team with the most votes, or maybe second most. But there were occasionally things totally out of left field. A later system, called "Wills", allowed for more granular ways of voting (for example, a Will that allowed for two players to be swapped would let the individual voter choose the two players to swap, so if their particular vote was picked in the raffle they'd make that custom trade happen--I myself had a trade happen that literally nobody else voted for out of sheer luck).

So that's the bulk of what you need to know about how the mechanics work. As you can imagine, voting is what ultimately led to a lot of the strife in this community...but just as much of the fighting was caused by the bizarre fandomization of the game that was to follow, as people began writing fanfiction about the randomly generated players on the teams.

So let's talk about Blaseball The Community.

Jessica Telephone was one of the earliest "big name" Blaseball characters. Remember, Blaseball has 24 teams (it started with a couple less but whatever), each with...variable sized teams as time went on due to various in-game effects. So at any given time there are a few hundred characters involved in the game. Of course, some will die and be replaced, later there were ways for new players to be added (in-universe they are hatched from eggs fully formed to walk onto the field) so over time there's been a shit ton of Blaseball characters. So it takes a lot for a character to become notable in some way. In these early days, most notable characters were either due to them being extremely good players, extremely bad players, or having extremely funny names.

Jessica Telephone was a really good player. I never followed stats super closely but my memories of them in that time was that they tended to either hit home runs or miss entirely. But ultimately Jessica Telephone was good. So what do you do when a player that is on someone else's team is too good and getting too popular? You boo them!

See, when Blaseball was still extremely new and the first big wave of new players hadn't hit yet, there was a lot of cheering/booing in the chat. Because, well, it's sports. That's how sports worked. But when the big wave came in, the people joining were not really sports people, they were fandom-y people. And so they found booing players or trash talk or even just cheering a little too hard for your favorite team to be rude and mean. Why can't you just be positive and be nice to the other teams? All rivalries were thought of as distasteful, all the teams should just be friends.

If you actually like sports, you find this extremely miserable.

And it's not like I'm some hardcore sports person. I don't get angry over sports. But part of the fun of sports is like...rooting for things that don't ultimately matter. Getting invested. In a way, it's kind of a game you and the other fans are playing together, you're all treating this as extremely important and you are going to put your all into saying My Team Owns, Fuck Your Team, We're Going To Beat You. It's not mean, because there's this social contract here where we all understand that we're playing this game. We all understand that saying fuck your team isn't a personal attack. We all understand saying I hope your team loses is fine and encouraged, because the other side gets to do the same. If anything, the immature people everyone hates in sports are the sports fans that are dead serious about it to the point of getting angry.

Sorry, I know all of these posts are long, but I have to slowly introduce how this community worked, because...there's so many layers to it. I can't just describe a sports simulation and have you understand why any of these dumbass fights happened the way they did without this understanding. You have to understand that this was a sports game that got absolutely flooded with players who hated sports and hated sports fans.

So anyway, Jessica Telephone was a big name character. Think a MIchael Jordan, a Tiger Woods, a Kobe Bryant. The people who love them love them, the people who hate them hate them, and that's how sports are.

But the problem is...some people weren't here to watch simulated sports. Some people were here to get horny.

A certain subset of the community really rallied around Jessica Telephone. And they started coming up with headcanons for them.

I would say writing fanfics, but Blaseball was kind of different. Yes, people have written a lot of fanfics of it, but one of the biggest sources of drama in the community is the idea that Blaseball should be treated more like SCP. Except an SCP with no gatekeeping, so everyone that had an idea about what kind of character each randomly generated name should be should be incorporated into a single idea. A fan wiki was made for people to contribute to, which was just nonstop fighting, because instead of everyone having their own headcanons, everyone had to come to a consensus on what they'd all picture in their heads.

Imagine whatever fandom you know the most about, imagine if every fanfic someone wrote had to be agreed upon by all the fans.

It's a nightmare.

Jessica Telephone was one of the first characters to start having some heavy headcanons, and the most common was that Jessica Telephone was a trans lesbian with a lot of wives. A lot of Blaseball headcanons were basically just focused on giving characters genders and sexualities and races, and very little else until people got bored enough to write more. So some people started calling Jessica Telephone a trans lesbian. That's fine, whatever.

So you now have two groups: you have the sports fans that were already there for sports, and you have the new fandom people coming up with little nuggets of headcanon for Jessica Telephone where she's a trans lesbian.

Now, let's remember, this game has random weather effects, such as a solar eclipse that would sometimes kill a player and replace them with a new player, with text that a "rogue umpire incinerated [player name]". So people who wanted Jessica Telephone's team to win less would really love to see their best player deleted from the game.

Now, how do you think this goes when the sports people start chanting, say, "incinerate Jessica Telephone!" while some percentage of the playerbase is thinking of her as "the only trans woman in Blaseball"?

The problem is, the sports people aren't getting into the fandom stuff. Like, completely disinterested and not really paying attention to what the fanlore people are doing. It would be like going to my parents, who watched The Walking Dead, and trying to make them engage with some Tumblr user's high school AU TWD fanfics. It means nothing to them and they don't care, they're just watching the show, some hyper specific fandom content is something they know nothing about and don't care about finding out about.

So the sports people keep yelling "incinerate Jessica Telephone", and the people writing fanfic about Jessica Telephone Trans Lesbian are FURIOUS.

Suddenly, the sports people are transphobes. Homophobes. Based on something a few random fans made up out of thin air that they did not interact with whatsoever.