Blaseball is a Horror Game

April 29, 2021 1:09 PM

Blaseball is a Horror Game
A short free zine inspired by the cultural event of blaseball. A group of friends and I have been chatting about the splort and decided to explore more of blaseball's horrific aspects, which sometimes get elided by fanworks in favor of pure weird or optimistic reads.

Role: contributor

posted by restless_nomad (4 comments total)

This is really excellent. I do generally try to keep my personal Blaseball experience pretty light and frothy. But it's good to be reminded that there's some real unsettling and uncanny stuff going on in the game, and that if we're gonna be imputing personalities to these bags of numbers we should keep in mind that they're probably all fucking terrified. For this reason "The Least Popular Player..." was the most effective for me, though maybe it wouldn't have been without the preceding ones to sort of set the scene. Going meta works well for this incredibly postmodern game and implicating the reader (assuming, reasonably, that they are participants in the Cultural Event) is an effective response to the tone set by the first three stories.

Thanks for posting this - I enjoyed it!
posted by valrus at 9:10 PM on May 3, 2021 [1 favorite]

god how am i only just now seeing this
posted by cortex at 11:18 AM on May 28, 2021 [1 favorite]

Hah! I mean, you get the emails...

There should be a second one coming before the next onseason, with a loose "romance" theme.
posted by restless_nomad at 11:03 AM on May 29, 2021

Second one! Diamond Hearts, a romance-and-relationships-focused zine. Some of the same authors, some new ones (not new to the crew, but new to actually getting something together in time). I'm really proud of this one - I think it's rock-solid.
posted by restless_nomad at 6:18 AM on August 5, 2021