post #29: "new Minecraft sucks" (or, sniffer hate = ragebaiting)
No one is as good at ragebaiting me like conservative Minecraft creators. (Perhaps because no one is as confident that they are the single arbiters of truth as conservative Minecraft creators; that they know what is right and what is right is the opposite of where the game has headed). I have a couple of other essays in the works, but this one has been eating away at me like,, a very strong acid since I watched the video where person is making these claims and at this point I just want to get it out of my system so I can stop ruminating on it. As always, I refuse the satisfaction of taking to the comments of this video to tell the person why they are wrong, because I don't believe them to be arguing in good faith as they say they are and I don't want my rage to contribute to this argument's algorithmic success. Nevertheless, I will provide context for what it is that has me currently frothing at the mouth. In what is currently the most recent video on the youtuber Nerotic Goose's channel, "Fun Times With Eldritch Horrors - Goose Plays Vintage Story (2)", the (tasteful) avian nostalgia baiter goes on a side tangent about how Mojang's design philosophy is mathematically corrupting the very playability of their game. Appropriating cubicmetre's concept of storage entropy, Goose argues that the pattern of each Minecraft update adding new items, blocks, and features to the game produces an entropic bloat which saps at the player and has completely turned Goose off from wanting to pursue it any further. (storage entropy is saying that as more items get added to Minecraft, by some metric cubicmetre lays out in the video, "The Crisis in Storage Tech", it takes theoretically longer to find what you are looking for; you can see cubicmetre's video for more specifics --> the mechanics aren't actually that important to Goose's argument, just this concept of an increase ofThe following is a transcript of Goose's tangent rant about the degeneration of modern Minecraft,
More stuff in the game doesn't just increase the entropy (read: chaos) of your loot pile, it increases the entropy of the game itself. Every new block Mojang adds to the game reduces the average likelihood that any single block will be relevant. Every new biome added reduces the relative chance of finding a biome that you want to live in. This addition rule applies to everything. And the end result is that even though you can now do and see and mine and build more different things, doing the one specific thing you want to do is on average meaninglessly more complicated, proportionately less rewarding, and i would argue less fun for no substantial benefit whatsoever. now, to be far, this is unavoidable, and it kind of puts Mojang in a bit of a bind design-wise because simple games don't sell. In order to keep the game relevant and interesting for new players and to retain their existing ones, they need new stuff. But the more new stuff they add, the less of an impact it has and the less it will get used. So, they need more more new stuff and the vicious cycle continues. To give you an example, horses when they came out were gamechanging. Llamas when they came out were barely a novelty, and I defy you to name a single reason for sniffers to exist other than as fan service. To continue on this trend with a bit more of a specific example, buttons fill a useful technical niche in certain redstone contexts. It makes sense to have a button in the game. We have 14. Can you name all 14 kinds of button in Minecraft? I sure couldn't until I looked them up. Why do we have 14 types of button? They all do the same thing mostly. Well, because getting rid of the 12 unnecessary varieties of the exact same thing we had, and adding the miraculous substance known as paint isn't something you can make shiny new concept art for and sell to Mojang's target audience. Keep in mind that this audience is the same group of people that thought phantoms were a good idea to add to the game. So, quality of life and good design are clearly not their priorities here. They are far more motivated by pretty shiny pictures and less so by the long-term implications of game changes. The end result of this conflicting set of motivations is bloat. And the bloat, I think, is what exhausts me about newer versions of Minecraft.
Now, to start off with, I think it's fine to come to the conclusion Goose comes to. If someone doesn't like that there are wood variants or multiple animals with 4+ legs in the game, and that exhausts them or saps their will to play, that's fine, honestly. You don't have to like everything and it's fine to dislike things. What ragebaits me is when Goose frames this as an objective rather than subjective stance -- suggesting that it is objectively scarring to add Sniffers to the game, that it objectively ruins the sanctity of... by having stone and blackstone buttons, that it is objectively injurious for people to play the game in different ways (to not have specific objectives that they are at all times working toward actualizing; trying to scope out the shortest possible route to, say, tracking down an Ice Spikes biome).
I get that Goose isn't necessarily being literal in his argument. I understand that he is likely speaking metonymically about his general feelings re: playing "modern" Minecraft (an ambiguous construction but that's besides the point; he doesn't really use the term anyways, so it's not getting too much into the nitty gritty) and using these two examples as a locus to do so through. Even if buttons are 100% the pinnacle of everything Goose hates about the game, it is almost certainly that they are not the only thing the he hates about it, just the thing that enough points of vitriol intersect within. As such, I don't want to get too lost in mitigating the exact minutia of his argument and litigating every little point (as much I can help it; even though I make this caveat, I sense I will get pedantic still). At the same time, it remains the case that Goose used these examples to illustrate his point and so even though they should not be understood as literally the embodiment of his argument, it remains that they are significant enough to Goose to specifically single these out among the other similar examples that could be used. (E.g., button is specific instance of wider pattern; for example, this fact of variance also applies to pressure plates). Nevertheless, it's important to give people the benefit of the doubt that they just didn't have the whole object in their mind at once when they were articulating their point -- at least from personal experience, I all the time forget the words for what I'm trying to say or will afterwards think of a better example I could've brought up to strengthen my argument.
Before offering clemency, though, I will needlessly fixate on the language that Goose used to explain with exasperation how his arguments are not logically sound how he seems to be suggesting them to be. To start with, while it's true that buttons fill a technical niche where buttons give a signal pulse when pressed -- with stone ones giving (time-wise) a slightly shorter pulse than wooden ones and wooden ones being able to trigger when hit by entities like an arrow (i.e., in addition to triggering when clicked by a player) -- this is not the only function that they fulfill. And even within technical applications, there can be logic for using one kind of functionally identical button over another. That is, buttons can be used for building -- maybe a bamboo button fits better with your redstone build's aesthetic than an oak button does, in this case it makes sense why you would want to pick a matching item. But also in the context of non-redstone-related builds, buttons can be used to add texture or detail to a build. Different colored buttons are often used to look like pebbles on a path or as detailing on a wooden feature (e.g., BdoubleO100's Silo build in Hermitcraft S10). But, also, it seems like Goose knows this because he complains about, why doesn't Mojang stop dragging their feet and add paint to the game? (This is very modded Minecraft player brain, imo. I'm not saying it's a wrong opinion; I don't think adding paint is objectively better or worse for the game -- it's just very indicative of the form of muntia-level customization afforded to modded Minecraft since for a while; where you can color things whatever color you want, but there may be less attention focused to the individual textures or contours of the game since things are streamlined with respect to an imagined universal interchangeable matrix). While I understand how paint could alleviate work on a wider scale, it doesn't really change the math on the entropy of things when taken into consideration of just the buttons. My explanation for this will also seek to explain why entropy doesn't necessarily correlate to the argument Goose claims to be making with buttons, sniffers, etc. Buttons are not a mandatory item and they are only in rare edge cases even a collateral. This is because the player doesn't encounter a button except for if they craft one, and they are crafted in singular quantities so it's much easier to make the amount you need in a given moment such that entropic excess of buttons is not a real problem players on the whole deal with. (The exceptions to my statement about not naturally encountering buttons are that they can appear in naturally generated structures like strongholds and Desert villages; however, even in these cases, the fact that they generate in these locations doesn't inherently interface with whether or not the player is able to scope out the one single item they are looking for. The same essentially is true with sniffers -- these are not something the player has to worry about unless they choose to engage with the feature (Sniffer eggs are only originally obtainable through excavating underwater ruins). I'm not going to say that there has never been an unavoidable, bloating feature added to the game (an example that doesn't really fit but which I could see more defensibly argued for in this way is, the switch from iron etc. ores dropping the ore block when mined with a regular pickaxe to dropping an iron etc. chunk <and where those chunks can then be crafted into a raw iron etc. block>).
[^^ drawing of the live sniffer reaction (real) ^^]To be clear, Goose is not especially original in the types of claims he's making. This is essentially just another iteration of the complaint that, younger/newer people being able to do things that you weren't/didn't do in the past (read: not having the selfsame experience as you did) makes them and their ontological worlds lesser in some way. This is what I mean by this is a fundamentally conservative argument. The world moves on without you sometimes. And that can be sad and grief inducing and despair inducing and those are valid reactions, but I don't think that is justification to say the world has failed you or has fallen to Evil. And, to be clear, I know I'm strawmanning Goose's arguments to some extent. I just don't have that much patience for this line of argumentation and I was already getting fed up with the general conservatism Goose had been trending toward in his videos and the gross misogyny he that colored the very being of his two Halloween 100k sub special videos -- but I'll talk more about that in another essay I'm working on.
As much as I understand the impulse that leads people to make these conservative arguments, I think running with them winds up trafficking more problematics than it does protect the sanctity of goodness. The assumption in these claims is that new is degeneration-- that is, the assumption is that the old must have been better; that the original must have been the ideal. There is never a question of if the starting conditions were in any ways broken to begin with. The White, Western, colonial logic of Minecraft (the game famously developed by the fascist-
TL;DR --> The sniffer is actually the BEST thing ever added to Minecraft because it has simply broken so many conservative weirdo's brains. The sniffer is a good addition because if I hear someone who is going on and on about how the sniffer contributes nothing to the perfect machinery of their comfort game, I can just go, mmm okay, yeah ur probably not someone I need to have in my YT feed anymore, now I don't have to hem and haw over the more subtle dog whistles and fence sitting you lot are so fond of. I'm sure there are sniffer haters who I could find common ground with and I'm sure there is at least one sniffer hater who isn't just frothing at the mouth mask off when they talk about it, but, for the time being, I feel comfortable enough to make the overgeneralization in saying that the silly, dopey dinosaur guy that triggers the chuds is good, actually <3
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