The absurdist browser-based baseball simulator,Blaseball, is known on the Internet for cultivating its own dedicated playerbase. The community surroundingBlaseballis hardcore in every sense of the word, with many being drawn tothe game’s emphasis on inclusivityas well as the strange absurdity of it all.
Now, theBlaseballcommunity has begun building its own union organization workshops dedicated to help players in their real-world work lives. Thanks to a group ofBlaseballfans known as Spies Organize, awebsitewas built for interested players to gather and join the workshops, further enabling a sense of community around the strange browser game.
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To put it simply, a labor union is an organized group of workers that come together and make decisions surrounding things affecting their workplace, usually with the goal to bring about economic and social justice. However, not all industries and workplaces have organized unions. For example,Amazon employees in US are currently trying unionizewith the goal of gaining better bargaining abilities for employees. Now,Blaseballfans are hosting online workshops for members of the community to learn about workplace unions to help put learned skills into practice in the real world.
Speaking to Polygon, members of the Spies Organize website that hosts these union workshop said it has been a big success. “It’s been a very good way of showing what collective organizing can do, building on each other’s capacity,” said one facilitator named Auri. “Doing that mutual aid, working through each other, our ability to enact change is massively increased.”
The community surroundingBlaseballseems inherently strong, thanks to how niche the game is. At the end of the day, it’s a pretty cool example of what a video game community can do when they work together.
