post # 33: the frictions of Minecraft's fictions, and how people (try to) get around them
motivating this is a number of things. the tl;dr though is that this is picking up on an ongoing conversation with some friends. this is one of the messages i'm having in mind in writing this--
"Like another way of looking at it would be, Minecraft teaches its players that the inevitable result of the unending pursuit of 'efficiency' is factory farms and work camps (and that therefore the unending pursuit of efficiency is bad)
Like we can learn from games that incentivize immoral behavior, about why people end up engaging in said behaviors (its easy to say nazis are bad; its more difficult to understand how the people ended up collaborating with the Nazi regime, and thus how to avoid doing the same in the future)"
other motivations are, this video about Minecraft game design and a thousand others like it and the many other passes I've taken at this conversation topic on this site, on my yt channel, and elsewhere
i was thinking more about what my friend had been saying about how game design can be something where the internal systems maybe incentivize problematic behavior, so this could be something where it causes ppl to reflect on systems that play into or enable nazi etc. ideologies. ive been thinking in this way back to folding idea's video essay about Minecraft from back whenever that came out, about how he realized how, in trying to reduce friction with playing the game, he ended up reproducing practices of colonialism within the game's fiction. i forget what conclusion he came to but i feel like this is a ∞ conversation. cuz i think efficiency and these things are not inherently wrong to strive for. the problematic part is when there are very particular bounds for what efficiency means and when this logic is trafficking in other dangerous ideologies. it makes sense, in other words, to try to find a better way to do things -- a better way to raise crops, a better way to get to work, a better way to care for people in your life. a problem i suppose can be when there is an imagination that there is A _best_ way to do things>>that everything will eventually congregate into one possibility and that all however many resources should be mobilized to make that happen.
i think there is a real and legitimate frustration when you're engaging with a fiction like Minecraft where you are being told that u can do what u want to do yet certain parts of the game's internal systems produce extreme friction around trying to pursue certain actions over certain others. i only have so much time in my day and in my life, and if the systems of the game repeatedly intervene in my ability to, say, plant wheat everywhere on my island, and i end up getting burnt out and quitting -- this is an embodied experience and a real frustration that the game causes for a player when it fails to allow for them to produce their fantasy as it seemed to promise it would be able to.
i think a question then, though, turns to what people are owed by their worlds and spaces. Minecraft is a cozy game, and insobeing it promises certain fantasies and fictions. what people seem to be more and more bumping up against, though, is that these fictions are limited and they are frictional and they can incur real costs on people trying to use them or otherwise move through them. it can be important to recognize these frictions and to recognize what fantasies these games are suited to realizing and which ones they are suited to frictionalizing. at the same time, i think it makes sense to want for things to be different -- to want for there to be a gameplay space that can be tailored to your fantasies etc. it is truly upsetting that the highest selling game in the world is better at facilitating fantasies of slavery and industrial farming than it is fantasies of ecological coexistence or mutual interdependence. this is a harsh reality, of course, and it is worth confronting in real ways, but i feel like it's not necessarily wrong to try to change it or to work toward a different reality where this is not the most streamlined way of being. again, though, i think this would require working outside of the systems that Minecraft provides. Minecraft wont be the savior that we need or want. it cant be. that is a fiction it wants to sell us on and one it is more than happy to have people burn themselves up in trying to realize as they bump into again and again the base frictions that the game provides. that is, people aren't owed things by capitalism. capitalism just tries to take as much from the as many people as it can, to be honest. (Minecraft isn't *Just* capitalism; but it sure slots into it pretty nicely).
i think the phenomena of people trying to solve Minecraft's shortcomings can be interesting to think about, though -- the vast history of modpacks, datapacks, reddit posts, youtube videos, spinoff games, etc.** Minecraft offers specific terms for people to engage with its games and systems through. and these are oppressive in many ways. but people have also consistently been working to resist this top down oppression by generating their own possibilities and systems and goals and objectives and injecting those into their personal port of Minecraft. there is a want in some of these spaces (e.g., Minecraft suggestion videos, where people talk about things they think should be added to Minecraft that would solve some of its core problems) to have their labor captured and integrated into the broader systems of Minecraft -- there is sometimes a belief that this peer-to-peer (ish) work can somehow help everyone all at once. i think this is a little bit misguided, though. the times when Minecraft has historically captured or coopted (or "implemented") these changes -- e.g., slime blocks, horses, etc. -- have sometimes been met well, but often times just result in the initial push and effort and attentional vectors of these smaller scale projects being assimilated and canceled out and all of the revolutionary potential redirected into whatever is bland mid-faire for Minecraft's general audience. this is not necessarily a travesty, but something im trying to observe. im not trying to say that if Minecraft never added slime blocks to the game that the game would be so much better or that slime block mods would be so much better, but i believe that things would be different. however, we cant access this difference for sure, so we must work with what we have and move accordingly. people continue to push the boundaries on what Minecraft can do for them and their peers and their circles (personally-ish) more and more every day, and i think it is important to acknowledge this because this is where the true radical potential of Minecraft lies (imo). we can be skeptical of when these things become popular or when their intentions shift to align with more mainstream objectives, but that one person sells out doesn't indict the valence of these smaller scale movements in general. panacaea is not necessarily the solution, actually. i think people have individual issues in all different ways that maybe Minecraft can meet and maybe it cant (and maybe it can be made to meet and maybe it cant).
**some examples of what i mean:
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for modpacks, Cosmonautic has been a channel I've found interesting recently in what he's been doing with regard to spotlighting and exploring what's happening on the smaller scale of mudpack-level interventions
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& then also on modpacks, the estrogen stuff is always a classic
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this video by nekoma highlights the phenomena of reddit posts and yt videos trying to offer fixes to minecraft
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for mod-level interventions, flashback and replay mod are huge ways that people have made minecraft work to them; this video by frostbyte freeman speaks to some of what that has looked like
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and then i guess i'll mention vintage story as something that exists, even though i'm a little side eyeing the types of people ive been seeing running defense and advocating for it (what seem to be a type of 4chan-type white supremacist dog whistling autistic TME person; but that's a convo for another day)
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lastly, i feel i ought to mention my GOAT EthosLab and his endeavors in using modded mineraft as a way to make minecraft work for him; worth noting, though, that it ended up running into debilitating frictions as modded minecraft tends to do to so many disparate things and desire being wrangled into each other in attempted cohesion