rose

I remember running across blaseball and sending it to a few friends in july of 2020. I remember seeing the first election result with THE UMPIRES EYES TURN WHITE the first time I logged in, so it must have been a Sunday.

I remember tossing a link in my local friend group's discord. My first post about it reads "I still am not entirely sure what it is, but i think it might be democratic fantasy baseball nomic." I joined the moist talkers.

I remember seeing player and team accounts pop up on twitter and gradually realizing that all of these were being run by fans and not anyone at TGB. That a strange kind of collective storytelling was happening here.

I remember the names. I remember cheering for Eugenia Garbage in season 3. I remember everyone deciding that Richmond Harriison was their best friend. The chanting in chat was a bright light of absurd joy in those early days of the pandemic. The feeling of getting lost in a crowd, of togetherness across miles through a tiny text box. The feeling of not being alone in being confused and overwhelmed and isolated by the world we found ourselves living in.

I remember the site barely holding together, often breaking entirely at times. I remember peanut fraud and the deity takeovers starting and the excitement of trying to piece together what was happening with everyone else by telling each other stories about what we saw.

I remember the Talkers' collective sadness at losing Richmond after he got feedbacked to the Tigers, and how it morphed into a wild attempt at necromancy to bring Jaylen back after we realized dead players could be idoled. There was so much anticipation about whether it would work. Seeing the devs respond to fans trying this wild gambit and actively encourage this kind of improvisation changed the way I think about games.

I remember discovering the garages' music. I remember blasting Get Normal in the car with my partner of a few months at the peak of a nightmarish presidential administration. Something in me broke screaming along to the chorus and for a moment we were free.

I remember the snackrifice and election organizing and rediscovering how much fun organizing toward a common goal with a community can be. I remember this transferring into the rest of my life, fighting past my social anxiety, and getting involved in local organizing and protests. This also changed the way I think about games. Play is how we practice living.

I remember wandering to different teams, to the sunbeams, to the garages, and discovering that each had a unique culture that had built up over time. I have never seen a game community quite like this.

I remember playing Fight Gods on loop while we watched the first god battle, hunched over my falling-apart ancient laptop, yelling in #watch-party with so much fervor we crashed discord.

I remember seeing players released and soulscreams turning into soulsongs. The minimalist beauty of this game's writing is something that will stick with me for a long time.

I remember the grand siesta. I missed the game enough that I got into actual baseball. The side servers (and the side-server drama, oh gods, so much side-server drama), the trial (what a beautiful mess). I think this is around when I started thinking of this whole thing as an online evolution of immersive theater.

I remember the garages and Fourth Strike, rediscovering the joy of playing music with friends, learning songwriting. Playing bass on desert bus and takeover. Learning to feel comfortable with performing. Endless spin-off projects. Realizing that I want making music to keep being a part of my life. Turning my bedroom into a janky recording studio. Making album covers and backgrounds for the live shows. Being in an amazing, supportive creative community.

I remember the expansion era and the excitement of diving back into the game itself after so long. I remember the core mechanics dropping and the maelstrom of creativity that ensued. I remember how stressful it was to try to contain and direct that creativity in healthy ways and keep chat from spiraling.

I remember being a team rep and eventually a groundskeeper. Getting a feel for community moderation, of when to step in and when to step back. Of learning better ways to set boundaries and communicate across gaps in experience and understanding.

I remember how fulfilling it was to help facilitate and support a community that had been an anchor for me in difficult times. How much fun helping run this place and all the events in it was, but also the sheer amount of labor and time that went into resolving conflicts, fielding modmails, supporting lore jams, managing over a hundred channels, and tuning the vibes that made that place so special.

I remember the keepers. All of you are incredible. A lot of these stories are private ones that I can't responsibly share here but you probably know the ones I mean.

I remember all of this standing in stark contrast to my day job at the time and how much easier it was to work on something I genuinely cared for. I burnt out at that job and left. I burnt out at the next job I got immediately after that and got fired.

I remember seeing TGB post a job listing for engineers and applying for the hell of it, not particularly expecting to get far.

I remember meeting one of the kindest, most creative teams of people I've ever worked with and falling in love with making games.

I remember making the Coronation era. Helping build core parts of the sim. Having my ideas and contributions heard and taken seriously in ways they hadn't at other jobs. The absolutely cursed frideas, deities, mechanics, elections, weathers. The particular delight in helping put together a show from behind the scenes that I hadn't felt since I last did theatre shop almost 15 years ago. The feeling of making something for an audience I care about and feeling driven by wanting them to see what we had made.

I remember rushing to launch the era on time and several hectic weeks of running everything behind the scenes and keeping the site running. Late nights fixing the database. Pushing hotfixes. Seeing fans have fun with the game anyway. Realizing that I might actually be pretty good at this.

I remember the last siesta and believing there was still a long way to go but that things were starting to come together. Learning to pace ourselves. Working to get the era ready and being so excited for everyone to experience it.

I remember logging into slack on Friday and wondering why nobody was in all-hands.

And I'll remember you all, and all of these kind words, how many lives this absurd cultural event affected, how great it was while it lasted. How it was a light in dark times. How it brought people together and gave them something to rally around when everything else was falling apart. How it was a thing that helped people find a little meaning and learn how to be together when ruled by endlessly complex and unfair systems outside their control. I'll remember how what we all brought here turned into something more than the sum of its parts.

I still feel the peculiar grief of pouring a year (and more, for others) of blood, heart, bone, breath, too much coffee, late nights, spread-too-thin executive functioning, and wrist pain into a beautiful body of creative work that exists and that i am still so fucking proud of and was genuinely so close to being releasable but now will probably never be seen by more than a dozen or so people. A beautifully thrown pot explodes in the kiln just the same.

A friend of mine recently said that most things that look like magic are ultimately hidden labor, and I've been thinking about that ever since.

Another friend always tells me it's a miracle that any game gets released, and I'm starting to see what they mean.

Rest in Violence.