post #31: the paranoid fictions, worlds, and cinemas of Minecraft trapping videos
Okay, at this point, i just need to get this done and done with. it's been rotting in and out of my mind for like a month and a half now. ok let's go-- (these first two paragraphs were written back when i first got the gumption to bite it like)
I've been watching some more Minecraft trapping videos recently. I find them really compelling. They scratch a part of my brain that nothing else does in quite the same way. And clearly i'm not the only one cuz they've emerged as this concerted microgenre of Minecraft YouTube -- having now developed narrative conventions thumbnail design language and other such tropes. It's interesting to me within these emergent trends just how much consistency there is among these videos. when there are such strong and consistent generic repetitions like this i usually assume that there's a function to them -- they are doing something , there is an in service of a goal. part of this is aided by, with the emergence of this as a microgenre, there is also an emergence of a viewership communities<audiences. generic form allows for short form cut and go and other such semiotically charged gesticulations. While I won't have time or knowledge probably to work through everything, I want to try to verbally work through some of what i think is going on in the fictions and constructions of these videos -- what imaginations are they offering?
the core premise of these videos is that the narrator is a player in a battle royale or smp (survival multiplayer) server where pvp is prioritized (bracketing the inherited semiotics of battle royale in Minecraft context; or in general -- i encourage others or my future self to spend more time considering this because think there's some real teeth to it; i remember how compelled i was by the fictions of the initial wave of Minecraft hunger games videos, there's this imagined expanse of possibility; mechanics playing out at the same time as the narrative pushes past it all... interesting stuff, but mostly a tangent for this essay). starting with the battle royale trapping videos, the premise is essentially a permutation of the image of Peeta Mellark using his cake decorating skills to pain himself in perfect camouflage with the terrain in Hunger Games. this imagination that these technical knowledge can be used to trick and deceive and get the upper hand on people, making up for maybe you are not physically the strongest or what have you. whereas in hunger games, the base skill was baking/cake decorating, , in Minecraft trapping videos, the base skills are generally a combination of redstone knowledge and knowledge of minecraft's game systems and exploits.
at this point , the videos are all having +/- homogenized forms. images of constructing/designing the traps are essentially elided. While there may be a bit at the start of the video that explains the premise of the trap (often this happens in a superflat world with dummy characters & flashback mod stylization to show what trapper pov and trapped pov looks like; anyways, the set up is to try to efficiently convey what the stakes are and what the gimmick is; but it's not really about realism), we don't often see trial & error or anything else of the process. the elision of process continues in the parts of the video within the battle royale games. where there is 99% of the time an ellipsis or montage to jump over trap construction. (important exceptions to this can be, but are not limited to DoomedCow's "I Trapped the Entire End" and something like "Secret Getaway Trap" etc.) as a result, thrust of the video is about navigating & moving thru a world that is already trapped. this is what the videos rush to make happen and what they are principally concerned with and defined by. (bracketing other discussions that can be had about what the elision of setup does; for example, it increases barrier to entry to these videos; where it is not always legible how the process works if you don't already know; so the form is incentivizing a kind of complacency perhaps... discussion for another day, is the point tho). and this is the world that this essay is intending to be about.
it's interesting because trapping videos are in some ways easier to produce in the context of a hunger games situation, where the stakes are legible and it becomes more satisfying (imo) if it's like, everyone had the same time and +/- the same starting conditions, and yet the death-riddled nature of these situations also puts a hard limit on the reality of these traps and their videos' fictions. you don't actually have infinite setup time-- you have to end the match eventually. and so these videos constantly are running the line of being about the fiction of the trapper and their world & being about the realism of being a Minecraft hunger games/battle royale video where u r trying to win. because a lot of the time once u get to deathmatch with these videos, where everyone is teleported to a different arena and all previous trappings become null and void, essentially, then the allure sort of falls away. and imo this is the weakest part of these battle royale trapping videos because now they devolve into generic pvp content, and like, u could get it anywhere. there's still the trace of the trapping narrative (DoomedCow imo does this the best of transitioning to; okay, let's see if we can get this dub now that we've accumulated all this sick trapping loot-- but even he has some duds i think).
and so even though the allure of the,, everyone starts from the same conditions, and someone made a trap maybe and it could be anywhere (but it can't be everywhere) is so propulsive in it's ability to capture attention or audience... it is a broken fiction. the paranoid fiction, to be clear, is that a world with trappers in it can make anything suddenly transform into machines that kill u kill u kill u. the paranoia is not on the part of the trapper but of the trapped; the trapper constructs the paranoid fiction by their performance (baiting; it is about an acting as much as it is about the machines of death) and their game knowledge. the point of these videos is both to give the visual pleasure of seeing people trapped and to construct the fiction of that these are things that exist. there are trappers in the world and they could be anywhere. Look What We Can Do-- these videos seem to be saying. And they use things like flashback mod and other technologies to turn their trappings into cinema (and the construction of a cinema is a CRUCIAL component of this imo; cinema is about the close-up and harvesting emotions and it is about the black hole of the eyes and the while wall of the face-- things written on and things destroying all writing <to continue to leach from a vicarious understanding of Deleuze<Guattari's concept of facialization (comma, machine of)>; the cinema is what elevates it about the real and is the moment where we are producing paranoia of it all). but the truth is that even cinema can only do so much. u can make it seem as if the world is poisoned at every touch, but this is actually a framed world (see: cinema). this is not a real world but a fictional one. if u as a living player enter this world on the other end, u will see the illusion fall apart eventually. the paranoia says it's everywhere and could be anywhere and anything u do and anyone u see could be an agent of violence to turn on you at any minute and cause the very earth to fall out from under you, but if you move long enough in these rhythms u will learn there are certain spaces they can't access. u can only prepare so much. even as innovations come and new game breaking mechanics are used, in floating blocks and stuttering you game etc. (ctd: more ghost blocks ; etc 2.) there is only so much that can be done. sure, maybe one day tricks will reveal new ways to destabilize the world, but u still need to set those up. see, for example, the classic dilemma of trapping in solos and just not having enough time to set up your trap or there not being enough players to trap once you are done setting up, such that it takes many tries to make work or it just doesn't end up working in time (e.g., <1> <2>).
so anyways, these are the fundamental shortcomings of trapping in the context of battle royale. and i think it makes sense in this purview why some ppl (e.g., JudeLow) have turned to now primarily trying to trap on smp servers. the important shift is with smps, you have, essentially, infinite set up time. and so once you get going and one the machinery gets running, it is within the smp that the paranoid fiction of the trapping video can truly become real. this is demonstrated perhaps no better than the latest JudeLow video that came out in my time working on this, where in the video we hear people directly state their paranoia about the fiction of the trapped world. the existence of a trapper, who can turn the world into violence at any level makes anything and everything potentially unsafe. and so you become needing hypercautiousness but even then it is not enough because the trapper (in their fiction) becomes able to exploit even your wariness and turn it too against you. the world is having these invisible death points everyehrer and you cannot see them until its too late. this is the heightened point of it all...
and yet this too is a broken fiction. because it misses the permadeath of the battle royale. people die in these traps when the world turns against them and the ground falls out from under them, but then they respawn and ask for their stuff back. but it has to work that way otherwise it becomes no fun at all. because it is an act of social play, it all. if the stakes were too high, it would become that much more ethically problematic to be doing this. but it gets to ride this line of producing and cultivating paranoia but being just a joke at the end of the day too.
but it's the fiction that i'm fascinated by. that it is impossible or never comes to full fruition is sort of a non-observation-- this is the nature of all fictional worlds. the time and space and ehtico-political reality of the world shifts as u try to realize ur whatever type of eden. and so i think even though it's worth keeping the limits of the fiction in mind, it's also worth just playing into the fiction to see what it wants and what the fiction is trying to image. and that's what i was trying to get at when i started writing this essay. i think these videos are constructing fictions about a world where there can be mimics and where there can be danger always and where it is unknowable and violent and chaotic to even traverse the natural born steps of grass and dirt. this is not a fiction of blood and death like other kinds of fiction are (at the end of the day the smp or the battle royale are somewhat incidental, imo). it's a fiction of a kind of self-fashioning. YOU can make the world into a paranoia producing instrument. YOU can pull the hood over other people. it is a bit creul in this way. it relies fundamentally on a kind of exploitation, it must be said.
[^^ white supremacist dog whistles in doomedcow comment section ^^]
I don't quite know how to end this essay, so I'll end with this. As much as I enjoy buying into the fiction and fantasy of these worlds at times, I am also aware that they are perforated with problematics. white supremacy and misogyny are abound in these as other Minecraft YT spaces. and the fiction makes me uncomfortable if i sit with it for too long. exploiting children and cultivating paranoia is kind of a jerk move. it makes me feel slimy and gross if i rlly sit with it. which is why the narrative is so important in these videos. u can't humanize the ppl too much, they have to be machines. don't get me wrong, there can be a kind of playful banter involved especially when repeat players emerge in things, but that's i think a consideration for a different frequency
anyways. some other trapping yt channels that i didn't mention yet are, Shadow, BlockIced, Slaptear,,, and some others, idk, my sub feed is too long to parse 4 this.
I'm thinking in these later parts about Frostbyte Freeman's recent video essay about the emergence of cinematic narrative in mcyt. Especially relevant is this history Freeman offers of how technological innovations such as flashback mod have informed the developments of these modes (theatrical; cinematic; etc.).
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