I know @NotBrunoAgain again tweeted about this earlier, but genuinely: if you're interested in emergent narrative or procgen storytelling, you really actually do need to be paying attention to blaseball right now.

The rules are simple enough, for all the redactions in the Book. There's enough ambiguity (if you haven't looked at the Forbidden Knowledge/the API) to surprise blaseball glamblers; and enough granularity in the games that there's always a *reason* even a good bet comes up wrong.

Most importantly, there are scales at which randomness happens and which story emerges, which I've learned from @Bay12Games is deeply satisfying. A single player's game; a cross-team 3 game rivalry; a team's entire season. Every discrete event slots into multiple places.

But you don't have to pay attention to ANY of the ones you don't want to! I know people who can tell me Jessica Telephone's entire on-base percentage for the whole third season so far, and bless them for that. I can tell you...the Tigers' win/loss ratio, and that's it.

But I know *how* Jessica Telephone's hits at bat contribute to the second stat, even if I can't keep track of them; blaseball's core systems are intuitive. Absurd, but intuitive.

That easily grokable nature makes events that otherwise feel absurd or even punitive feel less bad.

Listen. I cannot tell you when and why an umpire goes rogue and incinerates a player.

I haven't looked, even if I could; I actually enjoy the ambiguity of not knowing what causes it. Same with how Lots of Birds works.

But because the world has set up the Absurdity here (we are in the Discipline Era! Jessica Telephone wields the Dial Tone!), there's a kind of apophenia where all my coins could be replaced by Boston Flowers merchandise and I'd be like "the commissioner is doing a great job".

The point is that blaseball has pulled off, for its fans, the one-two punch of emergent narrative: fixed occurrences can feel surprising, and genuine weird moments of edge cases, where they happen, are less confusing because EVERYTHING is confusing. Welcome to the Discipline Era!

One last impressive thing I want to hit on that I haven't seen in many places outside of Dwarf Fortress is how the procgen works to both balance the game's mechanics (ideally; no one blames the commissioner for Peanut Fraud) and to incorporate fan experience into future seasons.

The incorporation of peanuts completely changed the economy of the game. (Even aside from the Peanut Fraudsters ) Suddenly blaseball fans from casual to hardcore were shifting their money towards peanuts to see what would happen. That's a lot fewer people hoarding coins.

Not that it matters necessarily for blaseball's own economy, because I haven't heard casual betters complaining about their inability to affect things comparatively to the hardcore much, but Neopets WISHES they could have balanced their economy's inflation this well.

However people feel dissatisfied at the end of this season will get incorporated into the next elections. c.f. "Eat the Rich" & "Eat the Pies". (Also "Interviews". We can all agree that "Interviews" needs to win, right?)

The meta is well-balanced within the context of absurdity.

And that meta is specifically influenced by procgen; who's betting how much on what wins and what teams. It's not like, say, League's skill-based meta. To pick a random example.

And that's a hard needle to thread! Again, the absurdity does them favors, but I still admire it.

But again, it's not all random and absurd; there are concrete numbers and systems that give rise to these emergent narratives. And *those* can change depending on what happens in the narrative.

STOP HERE IF YOU DON'T WANT FORBIDDEN KNOWLEDGE. Otherwise: continue.

***FORBIDDEN KNOWLEDGE***
The Peanut Plague introduced a hidden stat. Peanut allergies. If a non-allergic player swallows a peanut, their stats increase; if an allergic player swallows a peanut, their stats decrease.

Jessica Telephone used to have a peanut allergy.

***FORBIDDEN KNOWLEDGE***
Jessica Telephone is a fan favorite.

Jessica Telephone no longer has a peanut allergy.

And genuinely, personally, I think that's great. I love that we're watching this game where something that feels Bad for emergent narrative can be manually removed.

I don't think, by the way, that this will spare Jessica Telephone from incineration, should that come up. That's not the kind of mechanic I've seen get messed with.

But tanking Jessica's skills with no narrative payoff feels bad. And we live in a world where that can be fixed.

Other than Dwarf Fortress the only other game I can think of that might do this off the top of my mind is Caves of Qud.

Blaseball uses the combination of procgen & live-service to respond to narratives players want, or more precisely to remove unsatisfying narratives.

I haven't touched on the way that the fan wiki expands out the lore of blaseball, but it's an excellent example of the kind of mixed-initiative co-creativity that @maxkreminski has written about far better than I can here.

I genuinely expect papers about blaseball to be written.

I'm digging into this because there's so much smart work here, & I don't want people to ignore blaseball because it seems overwhelming. The beauty of its procgen is that it allows you to dip in as much or as little as you like.

Truly, the commissioner is doing a great job.

AND NOW WE HAVE THE SECOND-EVER GRAND SHAME