Blaseball Is an ARG and You Are Not the Protagonist
There seems to be a huge gap in vocabulary and knowledge about what an ARG really is and why Blaseball is one, and hopefully this article will help close that gap and change how you view the game.
ARG stands for “Alternate Reality Game.” Wikipedia defines an ARG as so: “An alternate reality game (ARG) is an interactive networked narrative that uses the real world as a platform and employs transmedia storytelling to deliver a story that may be altered by players’ ideas or actions.”
The gist of this definition is that an ARG is a story told through multiple mediums of art (videos, writing, audio, games, etc) that uses our reality, the current world we live in, as the connection between us, the viewers, and the story being told by those running the ARG. We viewers have the power to do certain things to alter and affect the story being told by the ARG.
This means, in essence, that when you choose to participate in an ARG, you become a part of its canon. We participants in the cultural event of Blaseball are canonical to the game of Blaseball. In fact, it could be argued that our participation in Blaseball and our guiding hands that shape the teams within makes us the collective protagonist.
I am not making that argument.
An ARG is a storytelling medium, just like any other. Much like any other storytelling medium, there is an author who is crafting and writing the story for the audience to follow. The purpose of an ARG is to tell a story that allows participants of it to influence the outcomes of it, but they are (typically) not the ones who push the ARG forward or truly decide what happens in the plot of the ARG. However, because of the interactivity of ARGs, they get mixed up frequently with other storytelling mediums. This is largely due to the fact that ARGs are very fast and loose with the rules that they follow, varying between different ARGs.
Firstly, let’s start by just giving you a proper grasp of what an ARG is. The best way to really understand what an ARG is, is just by being a part of ARG communities for extended periods of time. Unfortunately for you, you don’t have five years of ARG participation behind your back (unless you do, in which case thank you for agreeing with me that Blaseball is an ARG). Fortunately for you, I do.
So, let’s talk about one of my favorite ARG’s: CH/SS. CH/SS is a story about a pharmaceutical company with more than its fair share of secrets, paranormal intervention, and interpersonal drama that caused the company to inevitably fall apart. It delivers its story through two primary forms: youtube videos styled to look like VHS instructional tapes for the mysterious pharmaceutical company and download links to files in the video descriptions.
Most of the actual story of the world is given through hidden frames in the videos that you have to pause on in order to extract (or download the video to pull frames out of, either way) and the extra files attached to each video. Thing is, these files were downloaded and extracted through 7zip. 7zip is a fantastic application for extracting zipped files, and it also allows you to create zipped files only extractable using 7zip. Files with the 7zip extension specifically can have passwords attached to prevent people from opening your files if you don’t want them to.
Essentially, in order to find the passwords to access these files, you would have to dig through the videos and their hidden frames in order to find words that you believed could potentially contain the passwords for these files. This is where the viewer participation for CH/SS comes in, because this is story provided through necessary text to understand it, but it’s framed in a way to make it seem like you’ve discovered these hidden secrets and are investigating this company on your own. Or, even more likely, with the help of other people in the comments of the videos or another online space.
I mention this because ARG’s often necessitate community outreach and communication. Early videos tended to lack files and hidden frames, or had simple hidden frames that you could figure out from a rewatch or two. These videos you could watch on your own with no communication whatsoever. As the videos go on, however, more of these hidden frames were included. They were more complex, more frequent, and they were harder to parse.
If you can’t get these hidden frames or open the extra files on your own, you simply cannot participate in the story. The videos and story will move on without you, making less and less sense with each passing upload. This process of slowly getting more complex in both mechanics and story caused a lot of participants in the ARG to stop really participating, clearly demonstrated by view count for every subsequent upload trending downward. Some would still just watch the videos and think they’re neat and creepy, but they wouldn’t get the full story and they’d be missing integral parts and themes. Without a community to work together to solve these things, most people would simply be unable to truly participate in the story and understand the messages being sent.
Another ARG that I used to enjoy, NOC+10, had something similar happen to it. NOC+10 is another youtube series, but this time it’s about an underwater science station housing an abandoned AI that began to send out videos in order to reach out to people out on the surface. The story immediately began to tell itself through obscure means, and participation began rather low.
However, as it went on, the novelty of the videos wore off, and participation started to drop off as well. In order to keep up with these puzzles and figure out what was happening, it was required that you join some sort of community to discuss and problem solve. If you aren’t in the NOC+10 discord working with other people and solving the puzzles together, you aren’t experiencing this story on your own. Sure, you can solve a couple easy puzzles on your own, but the vast majority of this story won’t be accessible to you without outside help.
Blaseball has been doing this, too, and it’s not unprecedented. Every season of Blaseball after the Grand Siesta of late 2020 has just been adding more and more mechanics, creating a bloat of story and mechanics that is impenetrable to new players without a lot of community aid and is confusing and frustrating to veterans of the ARG as well.
Blaseball knows it’s an ARG, because they knew that there would need to be forums for discussing and communicating, and they made an official discord for exactly that. Blaseball also knew they would need to ensure new participants could catch up with past events, because they also consistently link The Anchor, someone officially paid and sponsored by The Game Band to make catch-up videos, whose youtube channel is also simply called Blaseball.
Blaseball is just different because the fans often don’t understand that it’s an ARG and don’t even know what an ARG is, let alone have the experience and understanding to know why this weird internet game is the way that it is. Most people think Blaseball is just a video game, or some kind of MMORPG, or maybe the weirdest version of an online tabletop RPG. Discussions along those lines are helpful for creating an understanding of why aspects of Blaseball are what they are, but it lacks the core understanding of Blaseball as an ARG that truly colors and informs why Blaseball is.
ARGs have been mixed up with other styles of storytelling before, too. This also isn’t new. The most common conflation of ARGs is with web series. The reason ARGs so often get mixed up with web series is because ARGs very frequently use horror aesthetics, and these horror aesthetics are so common within ARGs that a number of web series were considered to be ARGs despite the total lack of audience participation. A famous example of a web series that may have been conflated with an ARG is Local58, a series of videos on YouTube that use 1960–80’s style news bumps to share a horrific world in which the moon has an awful secret, and seemingly wants humans dead.
Local58 has no audience interaction, but it’s so mysterious and interesting that it simply begs for viewers to engage with it, theorise about it, try to learn its secrets, dig deeper. Those are legitimate ways to engage with the fiction, but they are not methods of interaction that create an ARG.
CH/SS uses similar aesthetics to Local58. However, CH/SS uses old instructional VHS aesthetics instead of news bumps, and its story is a more isolated tale of a pharmaceutical company whereas Local58 seems more global. CH/SS is an ARG where viewers don’t progress the plot forward, but instead find and access supplementary materials to learn more about the story and the world it takes place in, as mentioned prior.
If you watch any videos from Local58 and CH/SS, you’ll very quickly see that these two have aesthetics that are just similar enough that you could see them both existing in the same mode of storytelling. CH/SS, in fact, has one video reminiscent of old news channels sign-offs when the broadcast day was over, to potentially cause even more of a mix up.
The key difference between the web series Local58 and the ARG CH/SS is that Local58 doesn’t actually have any interaction with the audience, whereas CH/SS has all of the extra material for viewers to engage with. Some ARGs don’t rely on the audience to influence the story whatsoever, and instead just add extra materials for the participants to interact with to learn more about the story; some ARGs don’t let the story progress until participants solve some sort of puzzle to find the next piece of the ARG. Even if the audience doesn’t influence the story, the ARG still has that level of interaction that a web series does not.
(Edit: As of 2021, I was informed that some ARG elements were included in Local58 in the form of an external website, with hidden links that can be found and accessed in some videos. It is currently unclear if this is just paratext for the series or a right and proper ARG, but it does appear that it will become an ARG very soon if it isn’t one already. This common shift from web series to ARG is something that likely causes more confusion between the two.)
I make the point of distinguishing between an ARG and a web series so that we can understand what makes Blaseball an ARG and not any other medium of storytelling. The fact that we as an audience interact with Blaseball within our reality, as ourselves, is indicative of the fact that Blaseball is an ARG, and that should be the end of the discussion. Blaseball hits the very bottom line of what makes an ARG, and that’s that.
However, Blaseball is a bit different from other ARGs in at least one key aspect: Blaseball leans much more heavily into the “game” part of “alternate reality game.” Blaseball is, indeed, a free-to-play, browser-based video game. You make an account, you bet on games, you make money, you spend the money to make more money, you use the money to affect the future of Blaseball. I’ve played fully dedicated video games that have less interaction than Blaseball, and yet Blaseball is still an ARG and not just a video game.
This is where we get back to the “transmedia storytelling” part of ARGs. See, while Blaseball is indeed far more game-like than other ARGs are, it still employs a number of aspects of storytelling that a traditional video game is not allowed to employ. For starters, there is the twitter account @blaseball for the various versions of the commissioner for the Blaseball games, meaning Blaseball now tells its story through two modes: a browser game and a twitter account. There are also other twitter accounts for other characters, but just one account is enough to make an ARG. Then, there’s the existence of Blaseball 2, a complementary website holding its own secrets, depicting an image of a door in various states. Now, that’s 3 modes of storytelling. Blaseball has checked another general trait for being an ARG.
While Blaseball’s video game nature influences the outcome of Blaseball as an ARG heavily, video games can be a part of an ARG without necessarily pivoting its main mode of interaction to playing it like a game. For example, the ARG Catghost uses both youtube videos and paired video games to tell its story. The games associated with every episode of Catghost are not at all necessary to enjoying the story that the videos present at face value, but they do add a lot of supplementary knowledge that greatly enhances the experience of Catghost. Catghost also used a website that would sometimes change to give extra information for savvy viewers to poke through and learn about.
Blaseball, however, does give a lot of agency to participants of Blaseball that other ARGs don’t generally have. In fact, I would argue that Blaseball is the largest ARG to date that offers as much agency in the story as it does. Most of the time, ARGs limit the amount of agency that participants have in favor of ensuring the creator can still guide the story to tell the story as they want it.
Part of what makes this extra agency possible is the intense speed at which Blaseball delivers updates to the plot. Most ARG’s are delivered in a way that makes it so that there are very long stretches of time between installments. Once you’ve figured out everything you can about one installment, all you can do is wait for the next one. Another thing Blaseball has as an ARG: Plot not happening at all and then Plot Happening All At Once.
Blaseball is a bit different because games happen more often, and so the ARG feels less like “just sit and wait” and a little more “play the game and poke at it until something works.” The fact that Blaseball has managed to keep a pace this fast at all as an ARG earnestly impresses me. It’s super, super fast
Now, while Blaseball does lean heavily into being a game, it still is extremely distinct from traditional video games. A great variety of video games can offer linear experiences, however video games still give greater agency to the player because the story of a video game simply cannot move forward without player participation. If the player just chooses to not play the game, then the game never gets to move forward, and the player has chosen to end the story there. Blaseball continues to move forward no matter what participants do, due to the fact that the games within Blaseball are run automatically by a program that determines all outcomes for every game and every player.
As well, Blaseball limits participant agency in a few other ways as well: The only way that we actually affect the outcome of the story is through elections, where every season we vote on what changes we think the game should undergo. However, the changes offered to us are not changes that we as players came up with and chose to enact. In a traditional video game, if you see an obstacle and choose to jump over it, that was your choice. You could have chosen to duck beneath the obstacle, walk around it, break it, totally ignore it, or anything else and you chose to jump over it. In Blaseball, election possibilities are handed to you, and your only tool of interaction is voting for the possibilities you like. Video games are limited in how you interact with them, too, but Blaseball is far more deliberate in that limitation.
The most recent breakthrough point in Blaseball was based around teams being able to manipulate their eDensity, a stat that indicates the literal density of the team based on a number of team resources. Normally, eDensity sits somewhere close to a value of 1, but a couple of teams changed their eDensity so that they either went below 0 or above 2. However, in order to achieve those states in the first place, there had to be massive coordinated efforts. Lots of people getting together and making big decisions to break and surpass those thresholds. There were puzzles to solve, and solve them we did (well, the Atlantis Georgias and the Ohio Worms did. Either way).
In order to manipulate their eDensity to either go below 0 or above 2, the Worms and Georgias needed to to use tools given to them through the gift shop, a midseason mechanic that allows teams to choose gifts they would like to receive and donate money to other teams to help them get gifts they want. This is where player participation and the medium of Blaseball as a browser game is key. Those mechanics were still built on games running. If games aren’t running, you aren’t getting coins. Sure, there’s breakfast, but the passive income from breakfast is nothing compared to income from in-game events. Without the games actively running, there is no solving of those puzzles. Without the schedule put in place to ensure gifts and other things happen regularly, you don’t get to participate in the ARG properly.
On that note, we get down to potential methods of manipulating eDensity. eDensity is manipulated by a lot of things, from the size of a player’s Soul, how many wins a team has, what kind of items players have, and other such things. However, most of those things are just not enough to break the necessary thresholds to move the ARG forward, meaning that teams needed to rely on the tools provided to us within the gift shop to do so.
Realistically, it didn’t matter which teams broke what thresholds. The Game Band built the game in such a way that would ensure any team could break the thresholds. I mean, all of us were diving up and around the 1.0 mark for a long while. Had someone like the Miami Dale decided to go hard and sink as fast as possible to break 2.0, they could’ve. Had the Kansas City Breath Mints decided they should be the ones floating below 0, they could’ve. None of our teams or our individual players truly mattered in that regard.
I am extremely willing to believe that this was on purpose. The Game Band built this part of the ARG in such a way explicitly to make that possible. The reason people sank and floated so much on eDensity was due to gifts and, to a lesser degree, stadium additions. Things that we all had equal access to were the true solution to the puzzles given to us by The Game Band.
This lack of agency is compounded even further by the fact that you, as an individual, have very little voting power. There are thousands of participants in Blaseball, all with the exact same capability for acquiring and using votes that you have. As such, your individual votes mean less and less as more and more people become participants in Blaseball.
People, myself included, sometimes draw comparisons of Blaseball to tabletop roleplaying games, such as Dungeons and Dragons. In those games, there are typically two types of participants: Game Masters , who create the world, non-player characters, and stories that the Players interact with, with players serving as protagonists in the game. In this analogy, we generally refer to The Game Band as the Game Master of Blaseball and all of us participants as players. The Game Master creates a guided experience that we players follow along with, while making our own decisions along the way and exerting our agency.
However, there is still a very key difference between tabletop roleplaying games and an ARG: Tabletop roleplaying games are extremely collaborative forms of storytelling, and the amount of agency that a Game Master has to give a player in order for the game to work means that players have a lot of agency to exert over the way a game plays out. They decide who they talk to, who they fight, why they fight, if they even fight at all. As established, the game band doesn’t give us any such choices. Our modes of interaction with Blaseball are making money, watching games, and voting in elections that have very limited choices.
We are not the protagonists of Blaseball. What we desire in Blaseball means extremely little, because this is a story being told by The Game Band wherein we’re simply allowed to interact with it and follow their crafting hands. By all means within the mechanics of ARGs and the way that we interact with it, this story is not about us and it’s not supposed to be about us.
Now, that’s the perspective of the mechanics an ARG creator implemented for getting participants of the ARG from point A to point B. What about the story that they’re trying to tell? Like, that’s kind of the point of an ARG. It’s a weird storytelling medium. This next section takes readings of the text of Blaseball alongside its mechanics and the general mechanics of ARGs to come to a further conclusion about why Blaseball is not about us.
ARGs and video games are storytelling mediums, and as such we don’t need to be taught the frame of mind necessary to interpret their stories much like how a movie doesn’t need to teach us how to read it from a feminist lens. I’m approaching Blaseball from an anticapitalist lens, but it is a lens that I had learned to use outside of Blaseball. Video games should have to teach you how to jump in order to interact with them. Blaseball has to teach you how to make bets and vote. The stories of either do not need to teach you how to interpret them or how their mechanics fit into their stories.
We all know Blaseball has anticapitalist themes. We all know Blaseball doesn’t really care about the treatment of players, because the ARG creators don’t actually run games. Games are all automated by a machine. That machine is also a stand in for capitalism, because it’s just this thing that churns games out over and over and over because the only thing it was built to do was run games. It doesn’t care about the happiness of the fans or the players, it only cares about churning out games. Capitalism only cares about churning out capital.
I’ve written an article to talk about how Blaseball satirises real world sports injuries, and in that same article I indict capitalism as being one of the reasons real world sports injuries are so bad. Our teams and players getting beaten down and incinerated due to random chance is intended text. This is a system that does not care if our teams are doing okay. “Play must continue.” This is a system that runs games and nothing else. The only reason games would stop would be if a team couldn’t play anymore, and even then they’d get someone else to step in and replace that team, as was revealed recently with the Alaskan Immortals
The protagonists of Blaseball are not us, the fans who continue to exploit the players within as they go through hell for our entertainment, but instead all of those players as they try to survive the worst circumstances handed to them, and often don’t. We fans are a faceless crowd in the stands, and the players of the games never learn who we are. We don’t even really exert agency as ourselves, but as a huge faceless mass who managed to organise the tools handed to us by The Game Band together just enough to make numbers do funny things.
The games are still controlled by the various characters that exist within the fiction, such as the Commissioner, the Coin/Boss/Ownership, the Monitor, the Microphone, and now the Ticker and the Reader. These are the characters that The Game Band has created and intends for us to follow and become invested in. The narrative surrounding them is the narrative that is intended by The Game Band, and it’s the one that we followers of the ARG are given to follow. They are the protagonists, not us.
While there is a common and encouraged atmosphere in Blaseball to create fan works that flesh out and give life to the great many players on the Blaseball teams, the narratives that appear and are crafted around Blaseball players by fans are still completely inconsequential to the story The Game Band is telling, as the events that take place in the games are entirely up to chance. We participants latch onto the players and create stories for them, but creating fan work still does not equate to agency. The fact that we have to make these decisions because they just straight up aren’t on the website speaks to this fact. Sometimes our collective decisions about the narratives for players and teams may be picked up by The Game Band and canonised further, but they still are only incidental to the grander narrative that The Game Band is telling. The Game Band is in control of the narrative, and we are simply along for the ride.
This ARG makes us feel bad because we put our own ideas and life into it. To the creators, and to the sim, the players are just numbers and names. It’s you and me who put more meaning into them and treat them so highly. The mechanics don’t care about them and the larger themes of the game don’t really care about them either. If that feels bad and you don’t like that, that’s okay! I can’t take your emotions away from you and honestly? You’re probably right to feel bad, and that’s almost certainly an intended effect on the part of The Game Band. However, if feeling bad because your team (and let’s be real, most of the teams get kinda dunked on real bad in general) got mashed is the intended effect, that means that The Game Band’s ARG is doing exactly what they want it to do.
However, this does not mean that Blaseball could happen without our input as the participants of the story. The current arc of Blaseball is (was?) based around a conflict between the controlling Coin and the oppositional Reader. In the election for season 19, there were only 2 options for decrees: One posted by the Coin and one posted by the Reader. While it was very clear that the option from the Reader was going to win, the fact of the matter is that without us participants voting for that option, the story simply wouldn’t have continued.
This is true of all of the elections. While the changes that many elections cause aren’t always big ones that change the course of Blaseball in huge ways, they’re still changes that we are meant to affect and push forward. This is a narrative with our interaction in mind, and we are integral to the story being moved forward.
However, this can and does coexist with the idea that the story isn’t necessarily about us. We are, at most, an important side character, but more realistically we are a force of nature. We are a faceless mass that loosely decides the fate of the players and the teams with the money that we, with almost surgical precision, maximise every season for stadium renovations, gift shop purchases, and elections. We attempt to tear other teams apart so that our chosen team might win more, or we act with desperation to keep our favorite teams together.
We are micromanaging the details of a much larger and grander plot that The Game Band is putting together, and most of the time these little details don’t matter to that larger plot. There will be teams that win, and there will be teams that lose. We don’t decide which players get to fight the horrors of the game, and we don’t even get to decide what those horrors are. We are an important aspect of the story of Blaseball, but we are not the core of that story.
Blaseball is an ARG, and we are not the protagonists.
