Accounted Entropy

It’s only in an occult way that the fantasy of Minecraft is as it might appear from the outset, as being that of power. Minecraft provides certainly, a space where the often unimportant and alienated demographics playing it can make themselves important by carving the world in their image. If this were true however, this would be applied to countless other games which allow for the same sort of creativity, and the diminished popularity of games such as Second Life in comparison shine a difficult light on this interpretation.

The creativity offered by Minecraft has to be taken into account as being, in most cases, a creativity fully accounted for. While there is a contingent of pure sandbox players using creative mode as one would an SDK or architectural program, the vast majority of gameplay communities revolve around the shared experience of survival mode. The purpose behind this is the additional restrictions survival places and in doing so, the additional narrative weight placed by survival mode on each creation. Survival mode creations carry behind them a text intimately interwoven with the rest of the world. Each block of stone carries with it the weight of its extraction, the narrative of exploring and using that method of extraction, the construction of that mine or farm, its place in the world, the natural world’s give-and-take with that location…

All of this provides an experience only games have the capability to provide, but often never do, that of being a truly Confucian-text, by being a text-generation work. Minecraft takes strong inspiration from Dwarf Fortress and that game’s creator explored the same concept in much greater depth. Both games however, have the same functional basis. The creation not of a predefined world, but of a set of rules as being the entirety of the text. The text then is used to generate a world of all those systems interacting and interlocking within each other. It’s the constant reading and writing-within of this that provides the fantasy, by providing the return to an older form of thought and experience.

The modern world is alienating in many parts for its overt hostility to individual meaning. Internationalism has ended with all its goal succesful and now the individual person finds themselves often without a place relatable to them. They work in an anonymous office tower, for a company owned by a grab-bag of over a hundred private equity firms and investment groups, with profits going in occulted directions from a business of which only the barest minimum can be experienced by the individual. Minecraft provides a return to an older, smaller way of living in its fantasy. A world self-enclosed, where all things exist looping into each other, a world of interacting strains and tensions.