A Pattern Language

Minecraft building practice is often surreal and uncomfortable to look at. The game works in 3D space, with the smallest unit available to all construction being a cube. The basic unit of sight is always divided likewise into this individual cubes, which then project their being in six directions from each face. As such, Minecraft constructions cannot have meaningful connections along anything beyond a two dimensional axis. For instance, a single block floating in a void at 0,0,0 can be connected to via adding one to any two of these coordinates. An addition at three creates a strangely jarring effect, where the block is both paired and unpaired, the connection to it is a three step process to add an additional pair of blocks between to connect 0,0,0 with 1,1,1, yet the human eye perceives some vague connection at the same time as the mind interprets a disjunction.

It’s these two factors which create the first jarring element of Minecraft building. Many major projects, the top rated on sites like Planet Minecraft, “epic” castles and the like, suffer from a strange effect where even close up, they look more like magic eye puzzles than buildings, a jarring visual noise of differently colored cubes all arranged in a chaotic soup of shape and color. These buildings form into this way by building backwards. Many of them attempt to imitate real-life styles, which are typically not suited to a world where the smallest practical unit of measure are cubes half the height of a human being, and thus are forced to perform strange operations that result in an unpleasant noise that looks like nothing at all, where every last block of a wall has some addition or subtraction, different blocks are used in conjunction, every single line is some form of a diagonal, items like stairs or pressure plates cover the landscape like a visual vomit...

From this emerges another strangeness, where the buildings become totally divorced from the meaning of their structures. Walking around many of these structures, one sees anvils as fences, pressure pads as tables, etc. Very few of these techniques create the desired effect, where again, the builder has worked backwards to fit the square peg of their intended design into the round hole of the world of Minecraft.

Few structures break this mold, the ones that do being instructive. 2B2T bases as they’re called carry this torch, one seen in singleplayer creations only a rare few times in projects such as Lumina Nocturnale. The game builds itself more akin to real architecture here, where the formations of the game inform the buildings created - notice the simplicity of lines, and the at least basis in economic utility of the layouts. All 2B2T bases are built at the very least with often clumsy to use dupes, if not through brute force collection of masses of resources.

Architecture is never rootless, as these examples show. Minecraft buildings either form out of the game or are an attempt to form a structure into the game, but either way, are processes of emergence from within the game’s systems. Architecture always works by this negative process of formation, where strands are drawn together by subtle hands.

Every style shows this, with the style of practice emerging over time as the manifestation of the needs, akin to the unconscious formation that any other organic structure, such as a tree, river, or ant colony takes. The motte & bailey emerged in a society built in the ruins of an empire, where the old roads still connected but there was no central hegemon or a throne of a hegemon to vie for, leading to disparate settlements with horizontal relations to each and thus always at the risk of banditry and war. Contemporary glass & steel rectangles came about as cities grew in density of capital, transportation by train and car allowed for urban density to become vasty wider, leading to more horizontal segregation among activities. Office towers were born, in neighborhoods that became single-purpose destinations for work in things which exist in the cloud - literally in the sense of modern computerized work, or figuratively, in the nearly identical tasks performed on typewriters before the internet.

A game’s architecture similarly will show everything there is to know about its mechanics. Minecraft is a game of manipulating the world and a lot can be known about a person by the nature of their base, from the utilitarian complexes of Feed the Beast players, to the isolated projects of builders, to the vast grinding-hubs, all of it shows particular ways the individual chooses to impress upon the world. Other games work similarly. Shooter games like Quake and Counter-Strike are worlds of hallways, corridors divided by doors and corners, a theatre of experimentation on sightlines. Mario 64 levels are wide flat planes with a series of playground like simple machines on them, for the player to use the simple movements and run and jump upon them. Examples could be made going on and on, in how this reading-backwards can be used to divine the mechanical foundation of what created a static structure.

Architecture exists here - not in the experiments and grand designs of individual architects, the privately commissioned mansions of the wealthy, cutting edge experiments of artists, but in what emerges. What practically forms the common home, workplace, farm, etc, the layouts that emerge from society. Artistically constructed architecture always has a problem of being more like statues that human beings happen to exist in, much in contrast to the world of architecture that emerges from the process of living itself. It’s in examining this, the character of architecture as the emergent language of a society imagined as an organic being, that architecture begins to reveal its power to teach about the hands that made it.