Shell Your Idols: Blaseball and the Attention Economy
by Cat Manning and Sam Kabo Ashwell
Blaseball looks a little different in the new Era, and so do my recaps. For those of you new to my writing, hi, I’m Cat Manning, and I write about how blaseball’s mechanics give rise to unique ongoing stories through the lens of a narrative designer. I am the ambassador. I live on the page. So now you’ll find my blaseball writing here rather than on my substack: though if you want to check my previous blaseball writing out, it’s here: The Garden of Forking Narratives. I’m accompanied by my mildly — not wildly — suffering editor, Sam Kabo Ashwell, longtime collaborator and mutual enabler — most recently when I produced his Nebula-nominated game Scents & Semiosis. I’m grateful to The Game Band for the opportunity, which feels a little like getting to be a guest artist on a favorite album. Now that we have more options like the Feed and the Anchor to keep track of Recorded History, I’m looking forward to digging into blaseball’s mechanics and their resonance in more depth. For my first installment, I’m sinking my claws into a topic I’ve wanted to write about for quite a while now: Idols.
Idols
Idols, and the Idol board, were introduced in Season 6 (and, perhaps predictably, immediately used for necromancy). You can idolize any player, and they’ll earn money for you when they perform well. You can only have one Idol at a time, but changing them costs just 200 coins. Idols are visibly in competition: the twenty most Idolized players in the League are tracked on the Idol board. Since its inception, special effects have been conferred on the players occupying particular spots on the Idol leaderboard; these change season to season and often have major (and mysterious) narrative significance. Because these show up at particular times, Idols position results are not always a snapshot of business as usual on the board; they’re Events, a time to make offerings to the gods, jostle for position, and exert the ostensible will of a plurality. It’s another form of distorted democracy: a rowdy caucus, as opposed to the grand raffle of the Election.
The Idols board is fundamentally about attention: which characters the fans are paying attention to, feeding back into which characters get special attention from the sim. But that gets complicated.
The Complications
There are a number of reasons to idolize one player over another: the first, and most straightforward, is simply that you like that player a lot. Maybe you watched them hit a home run in a game you placed an underdog bet on; maybe you just like their name. Very often it’s the stories fans tell about their faves. Jessica Telephone was an early fan favorite, well before Idols were introduced, and unsurprisingly made a strong Idols debut in Season 6: they were a recognizable name, one of the best players in the league by number of stars, led the Pies to their second championship and the Tigers to their first. Their fan-named bat, the Dial Tone, was added as an in-game item. The game’s mechanics had already singled them out as a player to watch; fanworks had amplified it; the Idol system took something that was already in the air and made it concrete.
But the most obvious mechanical reason to idolize a player is to make money. You can idolize your favorite player as a sign of emotional investment, but lower-performing idols don’t have favorable ROI. This creates a complex cycle between fan favoritism and performance: would players like Nagomi McDaniel and York Silk have become so popular if they weren’t also profitable? Some blessings and snacks have changed the calculations on this: York Silk was always a good player, but received the Center of Attention blessing, which made them worth double on all payouts from Season 8 on. Consistently high-performing players aren’t the only ones to benefit from the high-profit spotlight: Credit to the Team, which made the worst player on a team pay out 5 times the normal Idol payments, blessed Wyatt Glover, and as a result, the 1.5 star batter carried the economy for the first two seasons of the new era.
Lastly, fame and glory attracts the attention of the blaseball gods. Placement in the upper reaches of the Idols leaderboard is often important to the overarching plot of the game: qualifying players may be granted unique blessings or curses, which often entangle them in the game’s developing story. When the Peanut was the league’s primary antagonist, any player above the ominous red line (other than the Peanut-named players; long story) was Shelled: sealed in a pod, which meant they couldn’t bat or pitch. The first season after this happened, the league and its attention economy was thrown into turmoil; some of the most beloved and lucrative players were no longer on the field, effectively missing games due to injury. So there’s another conflict: do you want your favorite player, or your reliable cash cow, to get more attention from the gods? It often doesn’t turn out real well for them. Once fans knew that the red line meant Bad Things, and that in Season 7 ten players would be above it, a propaganda campaign to “Get York Down” began. Drawing on one popular fan conception of the Hawai’i Fridays’ York Silk as an eight year old child, it invoked how concerned his (fictional) guardian would be, how frightening it would be for a child to be trapped inside a shell (but not how terrifying it would be to play a ruthless and unforgiving blood-sport): and it worked. (The interests of the team come in here too. At the time, the Fridays were a low-ranked team even with York; nobody likes to kick an underdog.) This generous mood couldn’t last, though: a larger contingent of fans prioritized the money, or didn’t share the same fan conception, or just didn’t see Shelling as such a big threat anymore, and York was Shelled the next season. Collective action can work, but it’s always swimming upstream against the profit motive.
The bigger and more complicated a plan, the more it requires active cooperation and coordination between teams. Season 10’s biggest plan involved manipulating multiple players onto specific slots on the board — all of them dead, and thus not earning anything. The Idol Board has inertia to overcome: there are a lot of inactive or less-active players who aren’t logged in for idols-board events, or don’t actively track Plans. To make this a little easier, the Idols board was reset partway through S10, reducing the effect of long-inactive accounts. (A clue that we were going to need all the help we could get.) Representatives from various teams quickly hashed out a plan; with six slots, twenty teams and little time, it was impossible that everyone would be satisfied with the results. But enough people were persuaded — or thought it better than the alternatives, or simply wanted to see what happened — that it was a partial success, and that turned out to be enough. Community efforts are a central theme of blaseball, and produce some of its best moments — but this has never been about universal consensus.
And because of all this, a glance at the Idols board at any given time will give you a very bad idea of who the most popular characters in blaseball fandom are. Many of the most beloved characters — Chorby Short, Richmond Harrison, Mike Townsend, Wyatt Quitter — have been mediocre-to-bad players whose relevance has come from entirely different kinds of game event and fan response. Fans say ‘Richmond Harrison is my best friend’ all the time, but that doesn’t mean they make Richmond their idol. There is a tiny conflict here — follow your heart or gain power — and we mostly fail it. This is by design.
Failure
But — as in many narrative games — the how of failure can be just as interesting as whether we fail. We don’t always ignore the giant red blinking sign that portends Trouble for players favored by the Idol board; sometimes we lean into it. In Season 7, star pitcher Polkadot Patterson was Shelled; in Season 8, a tiny icon of the Monitor, who at that point was an ambiguous and sinister figure, appeared next to the highest-placed Shelled idol. Given what had just happened with Shelling and its parallels to real-world sports injury, and that the Monitor’s primary motivation was eating peanuts, it seemed probable that we were feeding a dragon. Patterson’s team, the Moist Talkers, embraced their player’s Idol status and mounted an enthusiastic campaign to feed them to the ravenous squid. The theme of “the Idol board involves a sacrifice to the blaseball gods” had been made clear enough that it was more text than subtext, and yet the Moist Talkers cheerfully produced the most politely Canadian propaganda to put their child on the altar¹. Because the board’s effects are so often a mystery, they encourage experiment and investigation — and quite often, it turns out, teams are willing to gamble a great deal on a hunch.
Occasionally, though, players come up with plans to manipulate the Idol board to surprising and inventive ends. During the season where ten players would be above the line, the Unlimited Tacos hatched a plan. As I’ve written about elsewhere, the Tacos were a mediocre-to-bad team that, whenever they got a blessing, somehow got worse in ways that broke not only their team but sometimes all of blaseball. And so they saw an opportunity. The Snackrifice plan sought to answer a question no one had ever thought to ask: what would happen to a team if they shelled all 5 of the pitchers in their rotation?
Success?
This plan succeeded; the Tacos’ entire rotation was Shelled; would they be able to play at all next season? The players figured out how to break the game using the game’s own rules, but because this is live-service, the devs were able to respond with a funny, ingenious, simple solution — which then interfaced with the sim to get even weirder. The Tacos received a new team member — a 3 star pitcher simply named “Pitching Machine”. Pitching Machine was Idol material in every way — highly profitable (because it was set to pitch every Tacos game), interestingly weird in ways prompted by the sim (apart from its unique genesis, it also randomly happened to drink blood), a capable player, and connected to major story events. Better yet, it was easy to imagine it as a simple machine, rather than a person, so we could exploit it guilt-free. The Tacos might have preferred to keep their new star player game-ready, but there was no way Pitching Machine was coming off the board — and at the end of the season the golden goose was predictably Shelled.
So, OK, the Idols board catalyzed propaganda campaigns as a central part of the blaseball metagame: persuasion and politics in a game full of unpredictability and risk, plus a basic expectation that stardom is hazardous. Sometimes they even work: compelling enough cases for why fans should throw their weight behind certain players can cause less well-known players to rise in status. As a result, this turns them into more recognizable names: the attention economy feedback loop. Fans pay attention to certain players, which brings them to the attention of more fans, which sometimes results in those players gaining modifications, which in turn makes them more interesting to fans. This era’s wavy gold line and Ego Boost modification are on-the-nose fame monster shit: we don’t know what Ego Boost does long-term, but it’s reasonable to expect that it will have more effects than is currently apparent. We have a general sense that the Idols board is a button we can push to affect the game’s overarching plot, but in the moment we’re usually not sure how. Another current example: since the end of Season 12 we’ve had a subplot going about Disappearances in the Shadows; two Hard Boiled Investigators, Uncle Plasma and Liquid Friend, are on the case — but how the hell does that all work in the context of a weird-fantasy baseball simulator? After some slight prodding from the Microphone, the Investigators were pushed onto the Idol board — and each developed a Hunch. Pushing this button does something!
This button does… Something!
The Idol board offers several different mechanical incentives, which are usually in tension with each other: the desire to make boatloads of coins from high-performing players, and the desire to solve the puzzles blaseball dangles in front of us and impact the metagame. Sometimes that involves the most beloved players, and sometimes the most interesting or most amusing. The Idols board is, in a sense, a way for fans to mechanically express what they want: but the audience of a game always wants lots of different, conflicting things, and can’t foresee their consequences.
From the point of view of narrative design, this is useful regardless of how the fans use it: irrespective of why a character ends up in a top idols-board slot, the players have signaled that they’re interested in them, and therefore that it’ll be interesting to have them feature more prominently in the story later on. In role-playing terms, this is like telling the GM what your character cares about, so that they can push your buttons and offer meaningful story hooks. We care about these characters, so we’ll probably have Feelings when things happen to them. And this builds complicity: whether we knew what we were doing or not, it was us who put these particular characters in the line of fire.
The Idol board, like many other blaseball mechanics, is a strange, conflicted, ominous shadow of the thing it is presented as. Many of the things we want from our favorite players are messy and irreconcilable, in part because the game’s audience isn’t one monolithic thing with neatly-aligned desires, in part because that’s how stories work. So we (for a broadly defined “we”) want them to be good players, but we also want them to be happy and loved with their current team — which is difficult when good players get stolen constantly off the Idol board. And we want them to be cool and interesting and heroic and prominent in the narrative — whether that’s in the more authored plot moments or the emergent stories the sim spits out — but we also want them to be safe. We want their struggle to be real, not kayfabe, but we also want them to get satisfying narrative conclusions. We cannot have everything, and we do not get to choose cleanly. This isn’t a blaseball-only phenomenon, of course; parasocial relationships are often marked by these impossible, conflicting desires. People with a platform, however small or large, are often expected to be bold and accessible and controversial and generous by the same audiences that turn on them at the first sign of a bad take. No one can give their fans everything, in blaseball or outside of it. This is one of the major subtexts of blaseball, and the Idols board makes that concrete.
The board and Idolatry itself aren’t direct representations or commentary on celebrity; we’ve said that blaseball is a dark mirror, a shifting, amorphous systemic representation of one potential angle on real-world problems. A lens, rather than a roadmap. So there’s no “solution” to what to do with the Idols board, or which players we feed to it; even when blaseball’s scattered communities can come together for a league-wide plan, there’s never universal buy-in. We have no choice but to stan.
A mirror, darkly
When we’re narrativizing the success of Plans in blaseball, there’s a bias of hindsight: we tend to focus on the Good Story, the successes against the odds, the hilarious pratfalls, the cruel twists of fate. We tend to quietly forget the Plans which went nowhere because they weren’t very good, the well-meaning attempts that never gathered much steam, the many, many times we didn’t really actively choose anything because we didn’t figure it out, or had other priorities; because at any given time in blaseball there are a lot of different people who want a lot of different things.
You can imagine a version of the idols board that is more clean, design-wise: that separates out the money-making component from the fan-favorite part, that lets you have multiple faves and more accurately reflects which characters are well-beloved, that has an entirely separate system for nominating players to special Plot Roles. But blaseball isn’t a clean game; it’s a game about mess, about messy systems that interact with one another in ways we can’t entirely separate.
This is good, actually: complexity and complicity, irreconcilable desires and the messiness of their resolution, the embrace of emotional difficulty, are at the heart of what makes blaseball both relevant commentary and compelling narrative. Blaseball offers us moments of catharsis and resolution, but they’re never simple, and they always lead into further entanglements. The most audacious use of the idols board, the first Necromancy, was a moment of collective triumph and agency, a resolution of character arcs, the satisfaction of ingenuity and co-operation, the surprise of holy shit we did it — but it also unleashed a revenant and a bloody slaughter. There are very few neatly-resolved stories. We are given what we asked for: but we don’t get to know all of what that means. And sometimes what we’re really asking for is the opportunity to get into trouble.
The Moists got their wish: the Monitor chomped down on Polkadot Patterson and declared them “spoiled”, and the player survived to keep playing blaseball with nothing more than the modification “Squiddish”. The fact that we do not have troves of fanart depicting the Sacrifice of Polkadot Patterson to the Gods is the biggest letdown since Tillman Henderson stayed behind when the Crabs ascended.
