post #15: Minecraft realism and the semiotics of foodstuffs, or: Minecraft Steve is not Cook Ding

     One of the stories from the Zhuangzi (one of the two main Daoist texts) tells of Cook Ding, a butcher who's perfectly in tune with the Dao. He is able to perform his butchering actions as non-actions (not the best translation for this word but it's historically the most common one) and thus he can cut apart a cow without even damaging his knife almost at all. The comparison is that a cook who is not in tune with the Dao -- whose actions are strained -- exerts excessive force and thus quickly wears out their knife. Further, the straining cook requires a sharp knife to cut in the first place. (Here's a video I watched in an undergrad class I took on Daoism that essentially summarizes the story. When I was originally envisioning this essay, all I had was this: Minecraft Steve is not Cook Ding.

[^^ drawing of lava chicken x chicken jockey, or something ; (i haven't seen the minecraft movie) ^^]

     I'm someone that, pretty much the only part of minecraft that motivates me to play is the food system. I don't know why exactly, but that's how it is. Every time I've started a world, it's for to make food (and then I'll eventually crash out and stop playing, but that's besides the point). ...

     In middle school, I dreamed of making a mod that would add all kinds of plants and trees from around the world into the game, where you could cook with roots and tree bark and and and... I remember thinking of all the different ways these plants could look in the mincraft art style and thinking of what the crafting recipes would be...

     When I first first started playing minecraft, I would always look up a seed that spawned near a mushroom island (a rare area with giant mushrooms and special mushroom cows), so I could get unlimited mushroom stew and hang out around the mooshrooms. When dark oak forests were added to the game, I remember getting so excited because now big mushrooms were that much more accessible (they appear naturally in these forests). There was one time on one of my friend's realms where all I did was make a bunch of holes in the ground to grow giant mushrooms. Every night I ran around killing skeletons so I could grow more mushrooms in the future (bones can be made into a kind of fertilizer).

     I remember taking home economics (home ec) classes in middle school. I loved them so much,, sewing and cooking. When I moved away from the town I grew up in, the only teacher I asked my parents to invite to our move out party (something we had) was my home ec teacher, Mrs. Ross. I took every home ec class I could, even signing up for after school classes with so I could eek out just a little bit more. Since moving, though, I haven't been able to pursue those interests. The new town my family moved to was conservative and home ec wasn't offered at my schools anymore. Since then, I've only fallen further and further away from pursuing home ec activities in my waking physical life. My skills in cooking and sewing have degraded to the point where I've developed an eating disorder related to an inability to make food for myself and I have meltdowns triggered by the nightmarish mess that is the sensory experience of wearing clothes (read: clothes not made to my needs). But I still enjoy food in minecraft. However, these days it's as an anachronism with my everyday life.

[^^ drawing of the new minecraft pig variants (and the old one) ^^]

     Last week, while I was vocal stimming on the couch in the same room as my mom, I repeated one of the only lines I know from Steven Universe, "if every pork chop were perfect, we wouldn't have hot dogs!". (While I haven't seen Steven universe, the line has nonetheless been ingrained into my head; first, because it was included in the ads that ran for the show when it was first airing on Cartoon Network [the only channel i watched steadily as a child]; and second, because I vaguely recall someone from the graduating high school class above me having the quote as their yearbook quote [while i don't know the person, I vaguely feel like they were someone one of my friends knew very well -- maybe from robotics?] -- this was marked as meaningful since this was the last year students were allowed to have yearbook quotes). I said the line for basically no reason (see: vocal stim) -- I think while scrolling on my phone at the time -- but when my mom heard it, she replied something like, 'that would be funny if that were true.'
Me: what do you mean?
Mom: what, so that's to say that porkchop is the only part of the pig that hot dogs are made from? (implication: they are not)


     Reflecting on my mom's comments in the proceeding days, my thoughts came to minecraft. As far as the game is concerned, YES!, porkchops are the only (meat) part of a pig (that matters). If hot dogs need to be made from discarded pig meet, then indeed there wouldn't be any hot dogs in mincraft because porkchop are all pigs have to offer (and every porkchop in the game is perfect, in effect; thus there would be no reason to slurry them into hot dogs -- in this hypothetical)

     If what my mom says is true (which I have no reason to believe otherwise, she grew up on a farm), then either the minecraft player character is wasteful, or minecraft pigs are genuinely built different and only consist of porkchop meat. I think this is interesting. While the conceits of fiction should be respected -- that minecraft is not the real world *despite what game theory videos may suppose (/joking)* and thus operates differently from the systems, physics, histories, and cultures of the world i live in. i think it's probably reductive to leave the conversation at that, though. While minecraft, as any fiction would be, is within its rights to imagine a fiction of pigs as only porkchops, readers of the text are equally within their rights to ask what that may mean or why that may be the case (in this case i am a reader of minecraft as a text).

[^^ drawing of,,, something; i wracked my brain for weeks trying to come up with a visual; this is the result ^^]

     An increasingly common observation I see people make about Minecraft is that it's genealogy is colored by a historically and culturally informed context and imagination. (see this video about mob redigns ; see this video the enchanting table language ; see this video about the addition of leave particles). While minecraft post-the microsoft acquisition has branched out a number of different directions from how it initially initially looked like (see: piglins and the nether, mostly; and I guess whatever is up with villagers and pillagers -- basically, the ways minecraft has moved into having a distinct [read: non-tropey] lore)-- so while more recent updates to the game have added to and changed the systems first present during the alpha builds of the game, for example, there still remain many of the systems and images that were originally injected into the game. (E.g., the generic suite of hostile mobs). The upcoming minecraft drop is interesting to coincide with this, as one of the main features it's adding to the game is to shake up the aesthetics and spawning mechanics of the passive mobs that have for so long been default to the game (cows, pigs, chicken, sheep). While there may still be a Euclidean ideal for what a pig is in the minds of players used to the systems of the game, the internal systems (what the developers have written those to be) have shifted such to disrupt that.

      **To be specific for those who don't know, pigs used to be always the same pink pig no matter where they spawned, and they could spawn in lots of places; now there are three pig variants -- each with a different model [even classic pig is redesigned a bit] -- that vary depending on the temperature of the biome they spawn in (cold, hot, or other; where other is pink pig, and cold and hot are all new ones). Even though there are new aesthetics to the pig, the porkchops remain the same (i.e., are still dropped by all) and only meat the player gets when killing a pig.

     *side note: I think there's an argument to make that the game's segmented development history of repeated avoidance of adding consumable drops to animals added to the game reflects a kind of settler relation to meat/food which valorizes moral veganism / demonizes meat consumption*

[^^ drawing of the ingredients for to make beetroot stew ^^]

     Essentially, I'm arguing that minecraft's implementation of passives mobs -- here, pigs -- is perhaps indicative of a political imagination (or something else) which imagines only certain, ubiquitous images for what food can be. That said, my thoughts beyond this are still loose. Regardless, I think there's a lot of room to run in considering the politics of minecraft's food systems. For example, while I'm not sure what golden carrots are, they're the objectively best food source in the game (and, they are most easily acquired via the dubiously conscripted labor of villagers ; i.e., them being the best encourages players to conscript village labor [is one reading of the text] ; see also, Folding Ideas' video on minecraft + colonialism). Or consider that while porkchops and steak are roughly equivalent in being alternative stand ins for the #bestfoodsourceingame (golden carrots), mutton is an remarkably worse food to eat than either of porkchops or stake, as such the game systems perhaps construct a hierarchy which imagines some cuisine better than others. (provisional side note/interjection to say I'm not that educated on the irl nutrition or whatever of these foods and I'm also not educated on butchery or animal biology). In having food be a necessary part of the game for that players need to invest in and find solutions for it (i.e., food is the most constant resource being requested from players by the game), I feel there's merit to saying that the game's systems place a hierarchical weight on the cost of comming to eat a given type of food (i.e., not all food is equal). The games systems say, in effect, that people who eat pork are better (at what?) than those who eat lamb.

[^^ drawing of two porkchops. i swaer that's what the picture is :) ^^]

     I'll end with this. Outside of sweetberries, I like most all of the food sources in the game (even tropical fish, even suffering, even kelp; each of which I've had as my primary food source at various points in time). And so, more than anything else, I just wish there were more. While people may rag on beetroot soup for being arcane and pointless (e.g., this video) or complain that rabbit stew is impossible to make or that it wastes time and gives less food than the base things started with, I'm mostly fine with these things -- in fact, i wish there were more. Let me make lamb stew. Let me make fox jerky. Let me eat fucked up shit or let me be healthy. I really like it and i would like it there were more opportunities to do more. (Though I suppose there's a point where it becomes overwhelming and a barrier to entry... a matter for another day). My happiest memory playing modded minecraft (which I'll write an essay on anorher day) was playing on a server with friends and having my base be a bunch of different farms and food sources. I forget what the name of the mod is (I looked it up! it's called "Pam's Harvestcraft" ! -- only supports up to version 1.12), but adds a bunch a bunch of food to the game and a bunch of cooking and food prep mechanics. My end goal in the server was to build suitable infrustracture for producing the ingredients necessary to make the best food source in the game (i had to look this up too, the food is called "Thankful Dinner" -- i'd link the wiki, but there's only the Fandom page, so). Each time I got on the server I would make a little bit more progress toward my goal, little by little unlocking the ability to make more and more food items. I think I end up quitting shortly after achieving my goal, but the journey itself still comes with smiling memories in my head :D

     As for the future, I want to try out caves of qud at some point. I watched a video recently showing off a datapack the youtuber made which revamped minecraft's food system to implement the one from caves of qud. I didn't know about this game before, but it sounds like basically it's a procedurally generated recipe system where there's a ton of different ingredients (the video had around 50 in the data pack iirc) that you can combine to give your dish different effects depending on how you combine them. And then for the recipes, you can try to experiment and make dishes, or you can find the procedurally generated recipes in the loot chests from villages and other structures. I'm interested in how the gameplay experience feels with either of these -- I think I want to try it out to see how it goes;
Anyways, that's some food for thought-- Something to chew on. Okee bye ヾ(＾ ∇ ＾).

     **the "realism" in the title is that the food is not realistic bc there should probably be more meats coming from these animals; u telling me the white poof just disintegrates all the ribs and face meat, for example?**

**saying that minecraft doesnt do realism is not meant to say that the game is bad ; although it is a qualitative observation, the intent is not to qualify it in the good/bad kind of way**