Born during covid, Blaseball was a bizarre text-only fantasy baseball simulator that imagined, essentially, baseball as played in a world of otherworldly horrors.
I regret that I never got to play Blaseball, and now it looks like I won’t get to because developer The Game Band is shutting it down. The company is laying off its Blaseball development team and will provide them with severance pay, healthcare extensions, and a dedicated staff member for job search help.
It was a remarkable example of procedural storytelling. Blaseball players could bet on the games to win points throughout a given week, where chance encounters, Dungeons & Dragons-style could rend games, and reality itself, asunder. At the end of the week, Blaseball’s…
