SamKeeper

Then Eve, Being A Force

Laughed At Their Decision



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here's an article I wrote about one wild incident of emergent narrative weirdness, an at-bat where a little frog refused to stop swinging at pitches and locked up the entire engine for a while.

oh and also the Herman Melville story Bartleby the Scrivener. it's about that too.

as Blaseball wraps up, and in the face of a few pretty disappointing years of collapsing fan-driven projects like it, I'm feeling a lot of the ambivalence that comes late in the piece:

Characters like Bartleby and Chorby appeal to me because they represent a disruption, a suggestion that things can be different than they are if we simply... well, not "stop playing by the rules", exactly. After all, nothing here was against the rules, it emerged from the rules themselves, and the force of Chorby's and PolkaDot's natures colliding together. No, this was malicious compliance, carrying out orders to the letter of the law, behaving like a silly little automaton, doing exactly what the boss says even when doing so would obviously result in disaster.

This kind of thing doesn't necessarily work out for the maliciously compliant. Sorry for the spoilers for a century-and-a-half-old story but Bartleby ultimately dies in poverty. The Magic did not win the game in which Chorby carried out her heroic string of foul balls.

I guess it's hard for me not to look at the postmodernists like Slavoj Zizek for whom Bartleby is an iconic figure, and look at the kind of "leaderless" and "demandless" movements driven by ambient refusal that they championed, and not feel like just refusal and random malicious compliance don't make for a particularly sustainable movement. by the same token, The Game Band seems to have really tried to operate their company differently, to opt out of some of the business practices that we all kind of hate the game industry for employing. a live service game that doesn't include a form of gambling with real money? a franchise that encourages fans to produce their own merch? wow! then later: ah, well, nevertheless.

it makes me think of a bit in Graber's Utopia of Rules where he describes the difficulties of an anarchist house collectively owning a car, and how they come not from anything as obvious as scheduling, but from figuring out how to define that collective ownership within a legal state framework that assumes one person's name will be on the insurance. it seems difficult to build a new world parasitically inside of, and from the matter, of the old.

RIV Blaseball.


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