post #30: On the beauty&art of (Minecraft) challenge runs
This will be Minecraft-specific, to an extent. There may be other games where this applies to as well, but it's at least not going to be universally true for challenge runs in general. (And to clarify, I mean to talk specifically about the videos and other projects people create for to make their challenges legible to an audience; [though I get messy in my terms]).
I want to write about the art of these runs-- how they express beauty in semi-unique ways. There are challenge runs that don't immediately seem to me to be evoking/engaging with/creating this kind of beauty. Pokémon challenge runs can be beautiful, such as the recent video about, what is the theoretical minimum number of steps it takes to beat Pokémon Emerald? >> a video which was beautiful yet which also burrowed into me like a strong neurosis. The beauty here was in the gesture of moving toward an image of perfection. And this is essentially what I find the beauty of (Minecraft) challenge runs to be. The challenge run is where you're tearing away at the flesh of the thing in a way so as to reveal this like kind of skeletal structure-- an image of perfection that's twisted and mangled and, y'know, all these other things. A genealogy or prior existing thing which could be compared to this-- I don't have the book on hand, but in the first chapter of The Emergence of Cinematic Time, Mary Ann Doane talks about how the invention of the stopwatch produced a different relation to and imagination of time, where certain people are now conceptualizing time as something more concrete -- the stopwatch turns time into something you (or, more likely, a wealthy person) can look at on your person and see time moving. And now, because time is so visible, and there are clocks in factories and sites of industry, it is that time becomes commodified, and with this there's also now like a paranoid hyperawareness of it as something which exists and which, in working and laboring is worked against. That is, the stopwatch produces the desire to min/max labor (read: the emergence of Taylorism) because it becomes more and more legible how long it takes to do an action and thus there's a capital incentive for workers to do their same actions in a more efficient (read less time-taking) kind of way. You're now having a sense of, okay, if I move things this way, it takes 6 seconds to complete x action, whereas if I move them that way, it takes 5.5 seconds, etc. The location of the stopwatch on the person is also a gesture of synchronization-- the person needs to synch up to this and all other clocks, it's something keeping you honest, so to speak.
Doane brings up this anecdote about there's a factory owner or something who is obsessed with optimizing the movements of his workers [I looked it up, the guy's name is Frank B. Gilberth; Doane discusses his case from p. 6]. And so, seized by this neurosis of the industrialist (the want to extract value as much as possible from the earth and from the mindbody of the worker), he was fixated on imag(in)ing what the perfect movements of the worker would look-- wanting to visualize in physical, sculpted form a 3d graph of these perfect bodily motions. In other words, this was an effort to produce an image of time you could touch -- something sinusoidal and something real. But so yeah, this total abstraction of the worker into just a series of waves de-persons the worker or is anyways trying to strip away the flesh to get to the heart of the being, to image the facts of perfection itself. And so like, as you're moving through time on the x-axis, the y-axis is, you know, some body part or something going up-and-down in an undulating pendulum sort of way-- now, of course in actuality there are limits to this and whatever, but anyways, the point was in the intent. But anyways, this is sort of what I conceptualize the project of the challenge run as -- the challenge run as a want to strip the fleshes back from a game so as to open it up for to create an image of something believed to be True underneath.
Essentially, how this works, is -- to take one of the oldest example of this, i.e., the skyblock challenge -- compared to a regular Minecraft world that generates with diamonds and iron and coal and all the rest of those things, a skyblock one has just a floating island in the sky with bedrock, grass blocks, sand, an oak tree and I guess also there's a chest with some ice, a lava bucket, melon seeds, pumpkin seeds, bone meal, sugarcane, cactus, and stuff like that. Okay, so you start with these initial conditions and, using just Minecraft's base game systems, you put these systems in concert with another and through a chain of facilitated reactions, you end up at some end goal. It's a little bit nebulous what this end goal is with the original skyblock map, but it's generally, you play until you get [the thing]. And while I don't have a historical timeline in front of me, I think one innovation in this format comes when there enters a more concrete endpoint, e.g., killing the ender dragon and seeing the end credits. (I'm bracketing here a discussion about how the perception that this is the goal/point of Minecraft has warped discussions about the game in semi-unuseful ways -- where people essentially see this boss-linked ending and try to bring Minecraft into a negative dick-measuring contest with Terraria... blah blah blah. Anyways, there's a weird content ecosystem of people hyperfixating on the implications of this imagination on YouTube, so I'll leave it to them to discuss for now).
So if we take defeating the Ender Dragon as the end goal for a skyblock challenge run, one reason this challenge can be interesting compared to just regular Minecraft speedrunning, is because the available systems are greatly reduced. And so challenge runs like this become less about beating the game expeditiously and more about trying to solve the game to lay bare the fact that underneath it all, it can be beaten. It is a discrete and measurable thing to work towards and something which you can say yes, this challenge was possible or, no, this challenge was (as far as I could tell) impossible. And so again, in the context of the original skyblock, it's technically impossible to beat the Ender Dragon if you just load up a skyblock map on the latest version of Minecraft since End portals -- the thing you need to get to the dimension where you fight the Dragon -- aren't accessible in the skyblock void world. As such, solving the challenge of skyblock becomes about either producing a different end goal to work towards (RaysWorks, for example, has done a server skyblock project of just trying to build as large a continuous system as possibly whereby every technically renewable resource in Minecraft can be produced from the initial conditions of nearly nothing at all -- I think ilmango has done similar projects in the past as well) or find some minor loophole that lets you still complete the task. In Mud Flaps' 2023 "Can You Actually Beat Minecraft With One Block?" video, for example, he uses dungeon forcing (I guess it's like, overloading the game's chunk data using info-dense books&quills to force it to reload/regenerate a select chunk) to generate, from nothing, the chunk where the End Portal would be, had the world been a normal/not skyblock world. I know I've seen other loop holes for to solve this issue but I wasn't able to quickly excavate what videos those were (iirc one method was that in one of the first versions of Minecraft, you spawn with a stack each of the newly added items in your hot bar, of which was included end portal frames, such that you could replace and build a portal for yourself wherever u wanted).
And I think there's an allure and a beauty in all of this -- in either approach to solving the problem, but I'll mostly be talking about the latter, rules lawyer methodology. There's a certain artistic faculty embedded in these Minecraft challenge videos. Part of it comes from pedantism, yes, but I think there's other impulse intertwined as well. It's a pleasure born from circumstance. It's a saying, here the goal; it seems impossible; oh but uh, I found this nitpicky loophole, and thus *I* can accomplish it. In mind of Patricia Taxxon's riddle/puzzle typology (which I know she's outlined on its tumblr but idk which post has the most comprehension definition -- this is one pass at it which I found through a quick google, though; she may have also outlined these terms in her bean and nothingness video essay, but I didn't finish that yet cuz i haven't beaten the game yet), I think we can essentially typify these Minecraft challenge runs as riddle games. The path is foggy and the tools to declutter it don't exist yet-- it is only by sculpting time and excavating the will of the thing itself that the form and the shape and the layers of impulse reveal themselves.
Instead of having a logical puzzle, where it's, 'these are all the things you're allowed to do,' with the challenge video, u have to sort of dig thru the sand around you and be like, 'oh hey, i had this secret move this whole time!' Parkour Civilization comes to mind in this way, where's there's an inherent logic that the series starts with that after almost no time at all, it just abandons for trying to blindside the viewer as much as possible. This deluge of reveals and workarounds to impossible problems is I think one of the pleasures of that series, and in this way, it makes sense that this series has an aesthetic resemblance to skyblock as its core logic is essentially an extension of the challenge run. Initially, it seemed impossible. And everyone gave up hope. But, ah ha! Enter this, 'minor spelling error, i win'-type thing and, yea, order is restored to the universe. Order is restored, and ur wagging ur tail on the other side of the finish line, hitting the akanbe emote.
Most recently, I've been watching Neurotic Goose's "Beating Minecraft's Hardest Modpack With Nothing" series where he tries to complete the GregTech: New Horizons modpack from the starting conditions of just a void world. I'd previously watched his BigDig series which was how I had initially come across him last Fall. Since I started writing this essay, I also watched Mud Flaps' newest video about trying to beat MITE (at all) -- what's being marketed as "China's Hardest Minecraft Mod". Similar to Goose, I first came across Mud Flaps' videos last Fall with his Better Than Wolves Nightmare variant challenge video -- where he tries to beat what had been going around a certain YouTube thumbnail ecology as "Minecraft's Hardest Modpack."
In order to beat these mods/modpacks, you don't sit down in a world and come up with an idea spontaneously, like, "Oh, while i'm here, i wonder if it would be possible to beat the ender dragon in x y z starting conditions." Usually for these series there's some working out before hand that happens (i.e., there's a lot of invisible labor). As such, the videos are not necessarily a documentation of a let's play or a testing world or anything like that, they are performances of trying to materialize through spending real time playing the game the knowledge that you have harvested or accumulated previously by dredging through wikis and sometimes even scraping through the source code itself.
The beauty of these series comes from the ways that each person is buffeted by the these geisting gales of time they must trudge against to realize their goal -- the ways each video differs slightly from the others doing the same challenge or even just the challenge as it was envisioned on paper or while reading the wiki. The beauty that comes from trying to orchestrate perfection while the world rots so quickly around you. It's a dance between muscle memory and suturing and making do. The person sees what they must do but they cannot walk in the straight line as they want to -- their will is not formed in this way; nor is their body. Even the littlest nudge can send you spiraling into wasted days or wasted hours trying to repair or get back on course. When you zoom out to look at where things are from where they began, you see a chart of imperfect but which bears traces and sinews of a line of best fit of something better. It's in the little ways every person wavers differently and which loop holes they seek to capitalize upon -- how they choose to pick apart and solve the problem -- where the beauty lies. It's this grand machinery and especially with larger mod packs and mods, there's so many interlocking systems tracing at once intended super structures and yet always jutting out these vestigial remains of scrapped content or wayside material and the beauty is in watching the profane and forgotten be called upon in court give the key testimony to produce cinematic justice. The beauty is in the fact that the maze starts out already solved, but not yet walked through. It is the beauty of testing a hypothesis -- the beauty of always being not quite enough, of always falling short. I know what I must do, I just don't know if I have the strength to do it. It's like Maze Runner where you know the maze but the maze is shifting and the pathways quickly crumble if don't strike at the perfect window of opportunity. Or you realize only too late that your math was wrong and so you did too much or not enough. It's always at once the micro and the macro. The maze is shifting around you, but you are also cutting through the maze. It's a constructive thing. There beauty in it because it's not just the playing of the game, but the narrative of the playing transcribed into a video. If it were just about doing the challenge, then all that really would matter is the initial conditions -- someone saying, these are the rules, these are the files you need on your computer, go have fun. Rather, it is about the pretense of the challenge -- this adopted framework, this imagined set of rules -- and the ways these are confronted and themselves buffeted by plausibility and rot and the rest of it as they too must be reworked and negotiated with.
The videos may say in their thumbnails or in their narration that the time they took to produce certain labor or certain digital materials matters, but this is just the performance yet again. Rather, it is about how the things are crystallized and about how someone grabs the ether of the (Minecraft) world itself and is at once ripping apart its fabric and compressing them. It's a pushing together of the firmaments -- a saying, I am going to wrest order from chaos. And yet even as they do so -- as they're wrestling with this thing, and trying so hard to grip it and strangle it and pull it into a straight line-- it's almost this serpentine being that's just writhing and writhing and thrashing and thrashing about and sometimes it hits you and it knocks the wind out of you and you stagger and take a moment to get up and sometimes you really do have it in a chokehold and you bend the planets' forces beyond even what the makers imagined -- and you cut a path through. (You being this nebulous contortion between the subject of the player, the narrator, and the receiver of the video). And in all these little ways in which the human (or Goose) is deterred by this beast that is chaos and a mindbody that fails, it is the perseverance of ingenuity in its very immenseness which towers over as a thing of beauty inside and out. It's a kind of beauty that exists in other spaces, yes, but the reason why I think it's noteworthy as it is in the context of Minecraft is because other challenge runs-- like Gamechamp3000's videos where I assume she's also mapping out the challenge beforehand and it's like, okay, there's this niche speedrun thing where if you clip into this wall it allows you to skip this otherwise mandatory boss or this tutorial fight where you would need to attack an enemy and through these circumventional mechanism, you become able to beat the game without killing any enemies. Which this is a similar type of beauty, to be sure.
But Minecraft is importantly about construction-- it's about creating and about mining and crafting (some people disagree with this last part, maybe). And, for example, that also doesn't happen in FNAF World challenges. Even if there's a type of generation evoked in these games, it's in Minecraft that you can really see the ripples (if you know where to look; and maybe it's just that I don't know enough for other games). You can see the chain of reactions as one thing leads to another, as a set up is paid of and paid off and paid off (though sometimes not for many hours). And there's the cosmos and the circling spheres of creating and being and emptiness and all these factors are gyrating and there's like this magnetic plasma-like force which you can't conceptualize and is larger than any person and louder than anything and this overwhelming invisible inaudible inperceptible whooshing, shuddering quick and overwhelmning it its certainty. And then, well, the other thing is that, with this, and so many of these larger art forms, it is that it takes so much time to do the action-- I see the path; I know the path; I know how to make it; I move; I know that movies are possible to make and I know how to make a moviel I just have to walk this-- we have to go through pre-production and we have to do it. Let me shoot the thing and we have to, you know, be in that process do all these other things and While it's rooting then we do reshoots, and then we have to do post-production and all of these things where it takes time, and it takes energy, and you have to keep persisting, keep resisting and push through it and push through it and push through it and like rip reality and time and all of these other factors of the universe apart and stitch them together where you can and otherwise let them be born into new things, into new forms into new spaces and iterations, and ways of being...
That's, that's how all art works. And I think there's a particular kind of beauty in how it is expressed in modded Minecraft challenge runs-- how different people approach solving a challenge, approach depicting their solving... I think it's beautiful.
with all of this being said, i think it is deeply irresponsible to glaze these spaces completely uncritically. in fact, i think there are a lot of very problematic sentiments that run completely unchecked in this ilk. weird capitalist brain stuff i don't think i can win people over on, but the misogyny? it definitely REEKS! and can't be easily brushed away. a lot of the main people making videos in this space are, more or less, tech bro-type people and have the biases and stuff that come along with that. Neurotic Goose, for example, while he makes fun enough and interesting enough modded Minecraft videos, he occasionally makes mention of or even does a video with his wife, and the dude is just like, insanely misogynistic where i'm like, really..? c'mon. like, for his 100k subscriber special, he asked his gf to pick out horror games for them (him) to play, and she did, picking two slightly silly ones, and he just complained about them the whole time and constantly cut her off and talked over her and just in general belittled her contributions. which like obv i dont understand the intricacies of their relationship, and their on-camera personas are not necessarily who they are as people, but she clearly puts in a lot of work into helping him run his channel (like he's mentioned at several points that she gives him advice about how to engage with his community, what types of videos people probably would like to watch, etc.) but i guess because it's seen as more feminine labor, it is both taken for granted and then downplayed. but then when she suggests they should do a video together because she said she wants to spend more time with him and she understands this is something that's important to him and so she wants to try to understand it better, he spends the whole time making fun of her for how she doesn't have the same encyclopedic knowledge of these obscure modpacks as he does, literally framing a 45-minute around, watch my wife humiliate herself as she tries (and hilariously fails again and again) to build a gregtech vac-nuke for the first time <imp of, women in tech? lol, that's a ~Fukushima waiting to happen>
even though it's not explicitly related, it feels irresponsible to pretend like it's not there. well it makes me uncomfortable, in any case. the world is hard for autistic white boys, i get it, but why does the thinking then completely jump over the fact that, well maybe it's hard for autistic (white) girls too