Minecraft, and the stories we choose to tell.

Discussion in 'General Minecraft Discussion' started by Egeau, Apr 3, 2020.

  1. I am no stranger to the game we are collectively playing. I have played it more than any other game, and, honestly, I love it.
    I have, though, had a lot of time to think about its many aspects and what they have to say about the culture it exists within. It, after all, does not exist in a vacuum. Minecraft, though open world, tells some stories as explicitly as it doesn’t tell others.

    This is an essay I originally wrote as a think-piece for another server, but, alas, the rules disallow me to link that here :p
    It talks about some sociology and cultural history. If you think this type of analysis is “ruining the fun,” don’t read it: I am going to ruin the fun :)

    Let’s start with some gameplay.
    I have recently, among other projects, been working on an iron farm. In case you don’t know: making an iron farm consists of exploring the world looking for villagers in villages, then trying to capture the villagers in boats or mine carts, from which they cannot escape. After that you have to take those villagers and relocate them to the area where you want your farm to be. This is the moment you might want to squint your eyes and look at that phrasing again. Anyway, after that you have to sail that boat across the world and push them out so you can exploit them, forcing them to gather recourses for you.
    After you’ve finished you also have done a small colonialism in Minecraft. Great :)
    I do not think this is deliberately put into the game by the developers. Rather, it’s simply the result of systems interacting. I mean, I hope no one in the development team looked at the game and said “Yeah, Human trafficking, pushing people into a boat and sailing them away? I love it.”
    But, it is a great way to look at how game systems create metaphor and to see that even if no one intended to make a game where your systems incentivise the player to do a kidnapping. The result still is a game where the player is encouraged to do a kidnapping, or maybe a few kidnappings.
    This whole uncomfortable metaphor is exaggerated by some of the smaller details. The villagers look different from the player, and talk in gibberish. Villagers and the player are, though both humanoid, distinct groups. This creates a world in which the player can easily otherise the group without agency, and see them as “just villagers” instead of as other people within the world of the game, which would be what they are.

    This, I feel like I should note, is not just Minecraft. Many other open-world games are plagued with these kinds of uncomfortable metaphors. Not just Minecraft, but also Factorio, Satisfactory, Dwarf Fortress, Towns, No Man’s Sky, and even the more restricted Sardew Valley all are enamoured with the romance of taming the wilderness.
    In the words of Jules Skotnes-Brown: (From his essay series Video Games and the Global South)
    “In an era when physical space has been thoroughly explored, virtual spaces harken back to the romance of the colonial frontier – as new regions to discover and conquer. Such conquest is not just psycho-symbolic, but also sensitive to the legacies of colonialism and underdevelopment. Since most mainstream video games are produces and disseminated in the ‘developed’ world, they are spaces in which primarily ex-colonial nations and continue to ‘conquer’ the ‘other,’ even in post-colonial periods.
    […]
    In sandbox-building gams such as Minecraft, the player arrives, like Robinson Crusoe, into a ‘terra nullius’ and is encouraged to ‘improve’ this land – by clearing jungles, draining marches, building infrastructure and mining minerals. Its inhabitants – hostile monsters or local villagers – appear simply as obstacles in the path to development, or as resources to exploit.

    He is not wrong and, honestly, I don’t think I like Minecraft despite of these aspects: I like it exactly because of them. I like exploring, I like building things, I like terraforming and I like making infrastructure, but those interests do not exist in a vacuum either; they speak to the cultural values that I have inherited. I like these thing at least partially because I was raised in a culture that values these things. A culture that looks at the New York skyline and sees, first and foremost, progress, instead of a destroying of nature or the product of killing thousands of indigenous people, both also a fundamental part of New York.
    It strikes me that there are many games in which you are stranded on a remote place and are incentivised to extract resources, but not one where you are incentivised to reconquer a remote place from the extractors. Is the food chain of Amarsh any less complex than making red chips in Factorio? The game-play could be the same, jet the context is different.
    I do also know that most of the games I listed give an excuse to why it is morally correct in their universe to do what you’re doing. In No Man’s Sky, there are no villages to conquer, the planets are all empty and, in Factorio, you’re given the implicit goal of leaving.
    Jet, this is, I would argue, not more than an attempt at engaging in a clean version of history. Their attempts at polishing the tales that they are retelling makes the underlying stories all the more noticeable.
    My point is not ‘thing bad’ but, rather a more nuanced ‘Thing exists, and we might want to look into what it means that it does.’ It is possible to look at our collective past and the world that we have inherited and determine that making infrastructure is good and that altering the environment can also be good and that it is possible to explore in a way that is better than it has been done in history. Maybe all these systems are value-neutral, and it is up to us to engage with them morally. Is it possible to tell a story of exploring the unknown without creating a fantasised version of our own colonial history? I don’t know.
    I could bring up more strange parallels, but, instead, I would like to look at the underlying structure.Is sociology there is this concept named ‘frame analysis,’ where you look at a given culture of work of a culture, and try to understand what its base assumptions are, how it looks at the world, what its frame is, so to speak.
    In Minecraft, the world is inherently indifferent to the player. It exists to be manipulated and changed, and it does not give any feedback on that change. It’s like Legos, you can do what you want. I am not talking about the type of morality or respect systems some games have, but about something deeper. You can choose to drain a swamp, without affecting the growth of trees. You can completely deforest a jungle, without any consequences. The world is completely indifferent on an ontological level.This makes that the world can be treated as instrumental. You can see the world as a place to extract resources from, as a thing to use and manipulate indefinitely, without your actions effecting it in any other way than you planned. If you’ve read Heidegger, the world of Minecraft is designed to be a Ter-Hande-Sein, it’s an orderable being. You are meant to relate to it as someone with the agency to manipulate it.In the world of Sociology, this is frame is known as the ‘neoliberal frame’ It is the way the industrial 50s looked at the world. It is how the world was seen during the time we thought we could all freely extract resources, expand, and build.
    This is not the only frame that is possible to create for a sandbox, but it is the one sandboxes collectively choose to use.You might argue that the real world is not inherently indifferent to the actions of humanity. When a river gets dammed off, a forest might die. When you introduce a new type of tree in a forest, it might not grow, or it might overcrowd the native trees as it does not have the bugs usually keeping it in check. It is a way Minecraft could have been, but isn’t. It is a story we choose not to tell.
    Anyway, I thought that was interesting… I don’t really feel like writing a conclusion of this, so, here you go :p
  2. Interesting indeed! And very well written, my compliments.
    I especially like this bit:

    That's quite something to consider.
    Some thoughts that came up for me:
    Isn't the appeal of a sandbox game (or a real sandbox, to a degree) that you can manipulate the environment without real consequences?
    What does it say that for many people, especially kids, one of the most fun things to do in Minecraft is creating a world and blowing it up with tnt? I even remember building houses for villagers, waiting until it turned night, and setting them aflame. :confused:
    How does such an analysis apply to other games? I know there are games that tell stories much more explicitly, like The Last of Us, but do these also have different sociologies under the hood? How about the games I most prefer to play myself, 2D platformers? They seem too simple to tell much of a story at all, but maybe something interesting could be said anyway.
    Thanks for writing this so well, and I don't mind the absence of a conclusion, as it leaves more for us to think about, perhaps. :)
  3. So, *someone* has just liked my post; put its existence back in my mind and showed me that I didn’t reply to the one comment… Let me fix that :p

    I think you’re right in saying that one of the appeals of sandbox games is that there are no real consequences. I guess you could even go as far as to say that that is the entire point of childhood and adolescence: insisting on your rights whilst ignoring your responsibilities and the consequences of your actions. If there is a phrase that accurately describes teenage me, it’s that one.
    I guess that it says something about colonial Europe that creating a world which is a lot like ours, in which you are encouraged to behave in such a way, creates an uneasy metaphor for colonialism, namely that the British empire was just an edgy teenager. (That’s a monster sentence…)


    (Honestly, go watch that video for a possible explanation of the behaviour you’re describing. It’s really quite good)

    I know some games (Like that Pathologic one I keep talking about) are very specifically about that sociological subtext, they are about the cultural place they exist within, which is interesting on its own, and creates a lot of interesting situations. For more info on that game, here is a two hour video on it.

    Jet, for all games, talking about the sociological story of the game, as I called it, is a very common part of media criticism, and can be done from a lot of different perspectives. For video games, Anita Sarkeesian is probably most famous for her dissection of games through the perspective of an academic feminist in her video series Tropes vs Women in Video Games There is also this extremely good video essay by Ian Dawnskin aka Innuendo Studeos, talking about the way we look at violence in games, and the way it is advertised and there is an extremely good series of video essays by Jacob Geller about worker's rights issues and the way they are shown in games, Exsestentialism and Space Engine, How violence in noumerous games might have changed our picture of it, and A full moral analysis of Call of Duty, among others.
    So, yeah, there is definitely more to say here: This is just media criticism, and the essay I wrote here is just another one of them. If you’re interested in the video essay side of it (Which is a side I usually prefer to reading, because easier and because it makes me feel less alone) Like Stories of Old has written a beautiful three-part series on the ways in which stories are shaped differently than normal lives, which you might also find interesting :)

    Anyway, that’s it :p
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  4. With a sandbox game, you get to make your own fun and interpret things however you want, as there are almost no rules! :D
  5. I wasn’t going to respond to this, but now I have nothing better to do, so I am...

    Though what you’re saying technically is true, what those words seem to mean in the context of this thread, is debatable.
    Vanilla minecraft is technically a sandbox game, but, like any other sandbox game, it is not a true sandbox (a space that is truly and fully formable to someone’s idea): not even a real sand box is. You see, even in a creative void world, certain blocks have the potential to exist, whilst others (blocks that aren’t in the game) don’t. Apart from that, certain systems exist: like grass spreading, or trees growing, and other don’t: like grass dying and trees spreading.
    The choices made to include certain systems and exclude others can be analysed, and so can the choice to incentivise the player to otherise the villagers, for example, as all this is a part of the text of Minecraft.
    This analysis gets even more interesting once you see that the world of Minecraft spawns as a world: with villages mountains and oceans. The ways in which that world is both similar to and different from the real world can also tell a story.

    What isn’t a part of the text is that Marcus “Notch” Persson has recently been completely removed from Minecraft: he isn’t allowed entrance anymore to Minecraft events, and all title-screen splash texts that reference him have been removed. “His comments and opinions do not reflect those of Microsoft or Mojang and are not representative of Minecraft,” a Microsoft spokesperson told newspaper Variety. This is because of subtly racist and homophobic and outright transphobic comments he has made in the past years. The belief system he seems to have would probably be called alt-right.
    This belief system can be seen in how Minecraft is constructed, as its view on the world is noticeably 1950s neoliberal. (Which, frame-wise, is really close to the present alt-right.)

    That is what this thread is about: the stories Minecraft tells in these ways.
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  6. So in your view, Notch's comments are representative of Minecraft?
    I'm not sure... I mean, gender doesn't exist in Minecraft. ;)
    Egeau likes this.
  7. It sort of does: Steve and Alex!
  8. I’m not necessarily talking about his comments on gender :p
    What I mean, more than that, is that I, someone quite concerned with the environment, would have never made a game where you can grow an enormous tree in a few seconds by adding some fertiliser; that I, someone read up on social issues, would have never made a game where you are confronted with a village of a culture that is not yours, which cannot care for itself, and which you are incentivised to improve. Basically, I am talking about the same neoliberal-frame stuff as in the original post.
    What I meant by adding that part on Notch is that, though the game may seem so simple, it is still clearly made by someone with a peculiar view of the world; that my analysis isn’t just there for fun, but has something to say as well.

    I do feel like this analysis falls flat on one point though: through Minecraft is, by far, the worst and the least self-conscious it isn’t the only game that has these issues. I listed quite a list in the OP, which comes directly from the same book as I quote later in the thread. That essay isn’t about Minecraft: it’s about sandbox games in general.

    My point in adding Notch was: “Look, this isn’t all just a random way to justify reading a book on sociology, it says something,” and, maybe, it doesn’t proof that point when properly examined. Though some of the systems in the game are enigmatic of his more problematic views of the world, that doesn’t need to be a causative relation.
    I do still find it interesting though… Though it may not actually say something, it feels like it says something, which is more than you can say about most of what I write :p
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  9. I've been playing Story of Seasons lately, the series that is called 牧場物語 in Japanese and used to be called Harvest Moon in English. What I find interesting about these games is that to woo a girl (or a boy, in the newer releases, which is also interesting!), you just talk to them a lot and give them presents she likes. It took me a while to figure this out as a kid: it didn't seem natural to me that I could get my favourite girl to love me by giving her a spa-boiled egg every single day. I got used to it, though, and in high school sadly reflected that it didn't work in real life.
    But does this suggest that the game designer(s) think(s) that you can marry anyone you like, as long as you are persistent? Probably not, right? It would be more realistic, I suppose, if at the start of the game it would be randomly decided which girls could potentially fall in love with you, and maybe even make it possible to have a game in which it is impossible to marry. :p But that doesn't seem fair to the player, they should be able to choose from all available bachelorettes.
    It gets even stranger, though. :p One of the things the Switch game I'm playing adds to the original is achievements, called trophies. In the Trophy List, the first trophy listed is:
    Happiness is Eternal
    Get married.
    Well, makes sense, right? Both from a game perspective and an IRL (sociological?) perspective: most people pursue a wish for marriage (so do I, at least), and in the game the credits are rolled after marrying. However, the last trophy listed is as follows:
    I Choose You!
    Successfully confess to every romance option before marriage.
    What?!? xD I don't even want to get that trophy! After confessing I love a girl, surely I'm not going to confess to other girls as well, and all the boys too, for good measure? :confused: I do wonder how the game handles the player doing this: will you be punished for it at all (girls losing faith in you or similar), or does it act like it's completely normal?
    But again, you could theorise about the views on love and marriage of the person who made up this trophy, but I bet that they were just looking for a challenging and unique trophy to end off the list.
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  10. For trophies I would have a very simple answer to that: At some point, you’ve played the game so much that every single system becomes an instrument. You know exactly what it does and maybe even know some details of the code. At this point, you’re not looking at the representation of a human on a screen: you’re looking at code you can interact with in certain ways. Analysing this as a story quickly gets confusing.
    Indeed, Minecraft, especially technical Minecraft, can also operate on that level, which is why I kind of didn’t talk about it.
    This is actually one of the main criticisms I have of Jules Skotnes-Brown’s Video Games And The Global South. He does not consider that, at some point, the representation element of a game is entirely disregarded by the player, who then only plays the underlying systems. The fact that game makers make sure that there also is content at this stage is not, I would argue, a part of the text of the game as analysed, as most people don’t get there, and the story of it is often disregarded by both player and developer.
    One example is the fact that, in (I think) Skyrim, you can chose to kill all NPCs. This has no value, and is quite a tedious task, as they have quite a lot of hp, but doable end-game when you’ve maxed out all your weapons and nothing else is a challenge anymore. There is an achievement for doing this. I would not consider “Skyrim incentivises the player to kill all NPCs” a part of the text, but, instead, write: “Skyrim incentivises the player to try to max out damage on weapons, to do something meaningless end-game.”

    The other part though, well, that’s a very common feminist criticism of the gaming industry in general. It’s known as the “women as reward” trope. Basically, the affection or the body of a women is used as a reward for completing a certain aspect of the game. Though it, of course, does not mean that the creators think real life to be (as things usually aren’t that straightforward,) it does show how the women in that game are supposed to be looked at: not as complex characters, but as reward. The additional criticism you give “shouldn’t ‘confessing’ feelings to everyone result in girls looking faith or similar,” is completely right. Yes, in a game system with marriage options (that is complicated enough to handle it,) that, or something similar, definitely should be something that is added in order not to fall into the problematic “women as reward” trope.

    About that trope in general, by the way: I don’t want to explain it here, at least partially because it’s getting late, but here is a great video essay on it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QC6oxBLXtkU
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  11. I will not add the video to Watch Later, because of the warning in the description, and me not being able to handle 'game footage of a graphic sexual nature' at the moment. I read through the list of games in there, though, and see the Metroid games. Yeah, I was thinking of those! The faster you complete the game, the more skin Samus shows at the end.
    I also thought of VB Wario Land, where you get a Playboy bunny if you do it particularly well, and of Wario Land 4, where you always get a girl at the end, but depending on how well you do she's slightly different. :p
    I sloppily threw them together from a YouTube video, just for fun.
    From worst to best:

    Personally, I've always preferred the second best ending. :p
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  12. Warning i have read most of it like up to the last 2 posts 😂 that took me 1h to read up to there sooo yea

    Cant sandbox games be a way of avoiding the problems of today? I dont mean to be contavershal (rip spelling ik) but cant games be played with out the meaning of everything being not critasised but taken multiple ways?

    As for gender in minecraft alex ans Steve don't have to be male of female they can be anything they want to be.

    Basicly as we get older we loose our imagination and become more sceptical of items and words and things and we wish for a more simple world where all we have is imagination.

    Sorry if this makes u angry or upset or offended or anything in anyway
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  13. I think I get what you mean. However, I feel like the part quoted below addresses this point, if I do indeed get what you mean. :)
    Yes, games are used as a temporary escape from reality, but what's possible in these games is still designed by someone. If you grab paper and pencil to escape from reality, your options for what to do are restricted by the medium of paper and pencil, but not by someone deciding what should be possible and what shouldn't. In games, certain things are possible, and others aren't, and the possibilities differ from game to game. In Minecraft, for example, you can kill villagers, even though you aren't incentivised too. In many other games, you cannot kill villagers but you can kill monsters.
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  14. I just thought of another factor to consider: when a game allows you to do a certain thing, it can
    • Discourage you from doing so
    • Let yourself be the judge on whether to do it
    • Encourage you to do so
    • Require you to do so in order to complete the game
    I think which of these options is the case also has to do with which stories we choose to tell. It is most apparent when looking at instances of violence in video games, perhaps. I do not play violent video games myself (that is, I draw a line somewhere; I do play Minecraft, for instance), but I've heard of some I can use as examples:
    In Grand Theft Auto, you are required to kill players to complete the game.
    In Carmageddon, you can win by simply winning the race, but you get time bonuses for wrecking other cars and running over pedestrians, and you can even win the 'race' by wrecking all other cars or running over all pedestrians.
    In Postal 2, you can use cats as shotgun silencers or urinate over dismembered body parts, but this is not incentivised in any way: the tasks in the game are things like "Get milk" or "Get an autograph", and can be completed without any use of violence.
    I wish I could think of a game that allows violence but discourages it, but I cannot. If someone else knows one, let me know. :)
    I am once again not sure if you could gather anything from this, but I thought of it and found it interesting in relation to the topic. :p
    Oh! I just realised that I could apply this analysis to Minecraft!
    Normally, when you kill a mob, it drops something. There are exceptions, though! The aforementioned villagers, for example, do not drop anything. Nor do bees and bats. I thought this might be because Mojang wants these species to be protected, but then I saw just now that dolphins do have a drop. However, they don't drop experience. Villagers and bats don't either, but bees do. :p I feel like there is something in this, though, although it's a bit messy. In general though, it seems like you are incentivised to kill even protected species, like the panda. I didn't think this was the case! (I haven't played enough since these new mobs were added :p)

    PS: Yes, all my time between posting the previous post and posting this one was spent writing this one. :rolleyes:
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  15. In assassin’s creed syndicate, for certain missions, you have to bring 'criminals' to the police. They accept them when you bring them dead, (1860s London - quite unrealistic indeed) but you get a higher reward when you manage to bring them alive.
    I feel like that, if anything, is the right way to do what I call "skill tree violence:" the systems where the game are about violence and you are asked to become more skilful at it within the environment. Syndicate, instead of asking the player to become increasingly lethal, makes it a skilled thing to not be violent. It, in real life too, is far more difficult to bring someone to the police than to snipe them dead.
    It is only a few missions though: you are required to kill loads of people to win, as it sometimes just is the objective you need to complete. (Same as with Mario Bros: you have to kill Browser) It is, though, completely gamified. Yes, you are engaging in a story that glorifies violence as a one-size-fits-all solution to world problems, but that is, I think, all you can say about it. It's not any less moral than the average James Bond movie.

    There are a lot more questions you can ask on video game violence, but it's a whole different can of worms.

    As for Minecraft… I guess that (general) frame of analysis can be kind of interesting, but, looking through it, I don’t feel like it would add anything of a scale that is interesting, anyway not for kind of tiered me :p
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