People like to blame the statisticians for ruining baseball, and they’re not entirely wrong. But what the cliche fails to explain is that baseball would have been ruined anyway. Bill James was still underground when the cracks crawled through the foundation. He supplied the tools, but his presence was the most minor of the four almost entirely independent forces that brought about the modern era of baseball. Free agency, of course, ripped apart the faded tapestries of the game’s myths. Dan Okrent and his pals codified a new and ultimately dominant method for interacting with the sport, in Rotisserie Baseball. And most damaging of all, a bunch of guys sitting behind plywood desks in Connecticut taught the world that sports were being played even when they weren’t being played.

Baseball is a sport of waiting: for spring, for our turn in the order, for the next pitch. It was inevitable that we’d start using all that dead time. These seconds and years, and the urge to maximize them, are what truly inspired our age of analysis, both inside and outside the game. The game of summer became the game of winter. Player collection eclipsed player execution, and general manager rose above manager. Sports are now the creation of engines; we point to the Dodgers and Yankees, their on-field and prospect talent both unstoppable, as an example of self-propelling motion. 

Twenty-eight other teams, including the Seattle Mariners, now follow that same exact model. The game itself is now just a piece of the metagame, and there is only one way to play, an optimal allocation of resources. Losing has taken its rightful place in the narrative arc, the hero’s origin story. We don’t actually play, but we play at playing: baseball is a video game that our older brother is playing, and we’re holding the second controller and pressing the inputs.  

***

Forager (2019, all major consoles) is not a great video game. It has no ambitions to be a great game. Its pixelated graphics are straightforward, bright, and clean; its combat is simple to the point of simplistic; its story is non-existent. The game consists of performing three simple verbs: move, click (to attack and to break), and menu (to build things with the stuff you killed and broke). 

That’s it. Forager is a crafting game, a distilled version of Minecraft, which itself was a distilled version of earlier role-playing games. You chop down trees to gather wood, mine quarries to collect stone, pick flowers to have flowers. Once you’re stocked with raw materials, you build a forge to smelt iron and gold. Those get used to build refineries, which create oil to build factories, and buy more land. And, at every level of the chain, so on. 

Propelled by Minecraft’s almost infinite success, the crafting genre has been imitated and incorporated into nearly every major game and genre, to the point where a pared-down version hardly seems necessary in 2020. It absolutely isn’t necessary. Forager doesn’t do anything that hasn’t been done, just does it seamlessly. It’s a slot machine that doesn’t require coins, just the time it takes to pull the lever.

Video games often aspire to art, but usually they end up more like jigsaw puzzles: pleasant, meaningless activities where the art is just the background, technically necessary but mechanically divorced from play. The mechanics of Forager are identical, in formula, to the vast majority of European board games: get materials. Use those materials to build an engine. Use that engine to get better materials to create bigger engines. Win. The difference is that in this case, the game is solitaire, and that it’s impossible not to win, given enough time. The challenge to Forager is being done with it as quickly as possible.

Baseball isn’t that different in its overlaying of mechanics onto art, but instead with humanity. The game needs people to play it, but fans don’t really need to know who the people are, the extent of their personal lives, who they vote for. Often, that ignorance is invaluable. They’re characters, and wear the good and evil on their sleeves like the white and black-dressed gunmen of the old westerns. And since sports, like genre fiction, makes no pretense toward art, it leaves nothing to get in the way of the real prize: those sweet, sweet gameplay mechanics.

Baseball, it turns out, is a crafting game. But that’s because everything is a crafting game. We’ve been raised in a culture of accumulation, a world in which each possession, each skill, each thought, is part of a machine to produce more. We invest wealth to grow wealthy. We learn to grow smarter. This has been true forever, but the modern vocabulary of games, both tabletop and video, have lent the universal language of experience points, of progress and advancement. You don’t just sit and spend a few hours watching a baseball game anymore. You grow with it. 

The Seattle Mariners, perhaps better than most sports franchises, understand this principle. Winning and losing, the traditional measurement of franchise success, are obsolete: They exist in some other tense, past or future, apart from the marketable present. Sports fandom is ancient compared to the Ford and Chevy Men of the 1950s, or the stans of today, but the process is the same. You root for a corporation. You acclimate yourself to its culture, bind your affiliation to its fandoms, develop expertise applicable to future baseball games. You wear their company logos, advertise, proselytize. The smiling people who paid to provide cardboard avatars are co-workers of Kyle Lewis and Evan White, albeit remote interns, paid in dopamine.

*** 

We submit to this because it’s the system that underlies our entire lives, from preschool to RV retirement. It’s the Protestant work ethic that arrived with the original colonies, adapted to serve the self over the needs of the community. That mindset transitioned smoothly into the bootstrap philosophy of Horatio Alger and Ayn Rand. Now its roots twist around our education system, quantifying student success through test scores, converting (as it has always done, but now far, far more successfully) the personal pursuit of wisdom into tangible, marketable skills. The gamification of education will only expand as progress reports are literally translated into experience points and levels, reading comprehension becoming fetch quests. It’s easier to explain that way, and motivate, but particularly easier to grade. After all, crafting is just a formula, simple math. You put in this much time, effort, and resources, you get this other thing out. Success is guaranteed, as long as everything can be put into numbers. 

But we also submit to the philosophy of progress because it feels fucking amazing. It cheats death by stealing every spent hour and combining its value to the next one, such that nothing is ever really locked into the past. No moment is ever truly wasted. We may be older, but we’re higher level.

Fandom is crafted, which explains why seasoned veterans despise the bandwagoners, even as they broaden and enrich the community and raise all ships. It’s because the bandwagon fan, by only arriving in the good times, reminds the battle-tested fan that they could have, too. Their arrival immediately dispels the illusion that anything was earned in the duration except plain, effervescent enjoyment, which should have been enough on its own. 

Every crafting game is a lie: In the absence of true art, no levels are permanent. Art is where the experience of experience points can’t reach: the rare moment where a story, or a perspective, changes and broadens us as people. Games, like other forms of media, can reach this level when they want to. Baseball allows for it, but you have to do the work yourself. You create the art in your life. 

Everything besides art is illusion. Because when it comes to these skills, this quantifiable productivity, at some point, whether it’s Forager or an MMO or baseball or your forty years’ experience selling vacuums and vacuum-related equipment, at some point you hit the power button and it all vanishes. All that you have left are the memories, Felix waving goodbye with no trophy and no Hall of Fame plaque, a human collection of a decade of warm, forgotten summer evenings. And when you do, the question will not be whether any of it mattered, because it didn’t. The question will be: Did you have fun?

Forager can be fun. The Mariners can be fun. It’s all they can be. They’re about as good, and as bad, as each other.