So blaseball, right? Weird virtual baseball simulation delivering sparse play by play updates of games that didn't always seem quite right; you bet on the outcomes to generate funds to buy votes to make the weird weirder (hopefully in your favor, but even voting is affected by rng).
If you missed it, you're clueless, if you experienced it the taste in your mouth tends to vary depending on how much you got involved and how, but is generally pretty positive. The community was also weird. Cohost weird, honestly, altho definitely distinct even before you consider format influences and the fact one was surrounding a weird simulation and one was a platform trying to do (or maybe undo?) social media. The community is weird, even today, despite blaseball not existing. Somehow, groups built during the peak of blaseball are still around, chatting and making and doing. One of those groups formed around the team The Core Mechanics[1], which attracted a lot of makers[2]. A discord was made to spin out more channels than the official blaseball discord would allow a team's fans, and many of those channels are specifically for different types of making--music, art, coding, you name it. To this day it still has an eyewatering number of users and a manageable number of active ones. Reader, I'm a mod there.
Recently, one of us mechs decided we needed a gacha game. Like one of those ones with all the anime girls but instead you're pulling for pieces of giant mechas to bash together like bionicle pieces or gunpla limbs for a truly custom, if imaginary, machine. The bodies and weapons and limbs of a themed or not so themed mech would be in individual pools, and you can mix and mash as you collect. Who designs the parts for a mech? We do. One mech pool per willing participant, just write a name and brief text description for each part in your pool. Anyone is welcome to join in either to write a pool or just pull and create a mech. You can use your mech for art inspiration, for refereed play by post combat (with a more formalized system in the works), or just collect as many parts as you like; whatever floats your boat. It's a bunch of text in a void we breath to life cuz that's what we do. What we did. What we always will do. Makers.
Watching this develop (and participating) has been a joy--from some brainstorming chats to a few google forms to someone going "hang on I know how to make a discord bot do this" to a fleshed out channel category to house all of our hijinks. There is trading for pieces, a way to track how many parts you're missing from a collection, and two separate tokens regenerating over time--one to get random pieces out of a pool you have and one to get a random new pool to pull from. People are learning how to make pull requests to a github repo. Dusting off coding skills and building off someone else's code. Showing off how they can make a database in what felt like minutes. Offering some server space to host it more reliably than on a laptop. We have a database and a bot and a lot of excited people and it rules.
Last night they (we? I've done nearly nothing) had their first gacha event--a Gala[3] pool full of fancy mech pieces like a wedding ring to power your mech, a gorgeous skirt made of knives, a dress made of stars, and... kaiju blood? Everyone was supposed to get one event pull of three items--a little gift bag while we talked about our mechs at a ball, contributed to a playlist, and had a good time. The plan was to push out another bag in a day or two, and then leave the pool alone for a bit before making other opportunities to pull from the special event parts. Instead, some people got two bags, some people got one, and in one case someone got three somehow. In true blaseball fashion we're rolling this out as ideas come and someone has the bandwith to code a new feature and that means we get the delights (genuine) of bugs. While this was happening and the main movers were figuring out what had happened, someone mistyped a bot command and now we have a running joke about shucking oysters somehow. This is blaseball. It's back, in all its madcap, multiple threads, silly things are happening, what is going on grandeur.
Really, this just community. Messy, chaotic, everyone on very different pages on the specifics but willing to get together and try something to make something. This specific one was cobbled together to enjoy a silly simulation, and decided to stay together when the simulation got eaten by a black hole. Some people are able to give a lot of time to the community, some a little, but I cherish the contributions, regardless of how much or how often. This particular creation, born of many "yes and"s and "what if"s and "I can"s is an especially good outcome from it. A core (hah) rallying cry of these fans during blaseball, pulled from the sim team's motto, was "we can fix this". Something we rallied around tightly when the sim threw a curveball, ruining our team in the many ways it could. These days, I think we have another cry to go with it: we can build this.
the team that didn't get a real city in favor of a pun. What is the Core? Where is the Core? We don't know. All we know is it is down. ↩︎
this is, imo, the greatest factor in its longevity. Even during blaseball we were talking about the stuff we made as much as the sim--even in talking about the sim we were talking about the things we made to enjoy it more, to organize a voting bloc, and to optimize our income. I specifically cut my teeth on google sheets at the time, learning how to make some pretty impressive google forms and sheets to present the data from said forms so we could track how votes were spent (the game wouldn't tell us) and what kinds of things our bloc were interested in voting on. I probably spent more time organizing the slice of the community we were in than anything else; it was fun. (but I don't know that I'd do it again) ↩︎
which, I want to say is the first time the long standing meme of "mechs gala when" has become real. Mechs Gala now. ↩︎