A Love Letter to Minecraft
Hi there. Slowly emerging from the cocoon of a presumed case of COVID-19, I bring you a newsletter.
Personal COVID-19 Update
For your interest, some news on my personal probably-COVID front. Today marking 20 days after the onset of symptoms, I’ve recovered from the delirium and am now able to stand, focus on relatively straightforward tasks, and stay awake for more than 10 hours. I got tested twice, the first time I presume was a false negative (there is up to a 38% likelihood of a false negative depending on when you take it) and the second time (~17 days after symptoms start) I presume the virus has passed.
While it’s always possible I have something else, that, for me, would be a more confounding and worrying alternative considering my mother’s parallel symptoms and timeline and general consistency with a “mild” case of COVID-19.
Mild, of course, means only a little bit of delirium and cognitive impairment, which has been a strange and novel experience. In the beginning, I could only consume information. Engaging with any kind of interactive media like a game was entirely too much to handle. Then, I could process very minimal games; mindless smash-em-ups like Dying Light or idle games, but second-order, creative thinking (besides top-of-mind mumble-rambling) was a no-go. I tried to do some programming and got as far as rearranging code. Logical conclusions seemed perilously difficult. Engaging with social media and getting my emotions riled up was deleteriously exhausting.
One thing I could handle, though, was turning to my favorite mindlessly-mine-and-craft game that also let me spend virtual time with my lovely fiance, Minecraft.
And so, I present to you (as well as a new reward for Glitchet patrons at the end):
A Love Letter to Minecraft
Minecraft Glitch Art, 2011, from /r/glitch_art
A song for you to listen to while I ramble.
I remember when I first fell in love with Minecraft.
I was playing a very early version, around 2012, when Minecraft was barely more than an experiment in procedural generated cubes and had basic environmental biomes and a few monsters. Starting my first world, I settled onto a small, snowy mountaintop and used simple cobblestone to construct a tower and a bridge that reached to a higher level of the mountain.
Rippling hills dotted the horizon, and since my tower was in a snow biome, the cobblestone blocks soon became capped with a thin layer of square white. As I beheld my simple creation, a beautiful, contemplative dirge began to play and it started to snow.
I didn’t know it could snow.
In that moment, for me Minecraft changed from a mindless exercise in digging and placing blocks into a game that could spontaneously reveal beauty.
Mellifluos Memories - Beautiful Minecraft (more images inside)
Minecraft can take a few pieces of something you put into a humblingly vast generated world and contextualize it for you. You found this mountain, crevice, dense forest, vast plains. (Plains are my favorite with their wide open building space and rolling land filled with horses, fit for a lonely farmhouse-style construction begging for a barn and a distant, thoughtful windmill.) You envisioned something to put into it and you made it, nestling into the environment like it belongs or conquering it and subjugating it for you to look over. The game rewards the work you put in, accumulating resources, spending time digging out cliffsides and laying foundations with sights that, once-created, seem wholly yours.
The beginning of our plains build, based on a house plans we found online
After you’re finished, playing alone, you may move on to another project, leaving behind ghost-towns of your work. Until you find a server you love.
Oh, Minecraft with others. The unique thing about Minecraft is that it is a game of persistence. A single world can last for years, accumulating the combined effort of potentially thousands of users into a map that sprawls almost endlessly. People create things together and they create memories. Geographies in Minecraft become mental landscapes as real as a physical one as you run over them over and over, carrying wood, smelting stone for the next build, shaping the world with other people. The world that people created together often kept them together; some people from the Minecraft server I ran in college are now Twitter friends or Glitchet readers (hey Deman :) ). The power of a digital space that you can fully form is immense. I know of no other digital space that works so well as a physical stand-in to make people feel… close. I used Minecraft to build something with my girlfriend of the time, and we learned how to collaborate, how each other thinks, and what sort of aesthetic visions we personally embrace.
Minecraft has a unique way about it that both provokes and rewards creativity and careful thinking. You can think about the fundamentals of building: architecture, planning, resource management, survival preparation. Or you can dig into the deep esoterics of the game. Redstone, a simple in-game powered electrical circuit that can be used to create vast contraptions from simple traps to literal multi-core CPUs with RAM and display, is a way into computational thinking. Mods can unlock entirely new Minecraft experiences, like morbidly contemplative vast empty cities or mechanical, logistics problem-solving. Or you can go the opposite direction, into the adrenaline-fueled worlds of high-difficulty hardcore worlds where if you die you’re banned from the server forever, intense PvP servers, or the inexplicably antithetical world of prison servers.
A map of my multiverse Minecraft, Marvin Online, circa 2012
Personally, Minecraft unlocked everything for me, from the opposite direction. In wanting to create my own server, I had to teach myself how to administrate virtual private servers, learn the basics of Linux, simple networking, and tons of configuration. I taught myself Java programming so I could create simple plugins for my server, such as one that would award you experience for mining ore before it was officially implemented in the game. (It even still exists as source code, called the GenerallyPleasingPlugin.) I learned web development solely so I could promote my Minecraft server, which is what I do now as a career.
I also learned what it meant to foster communities, to resolve conflicts, to encourage group building projects, and to summarily isolate and ban (occasionally torture) griefers and trolls. I thought it would be fun to create a lore behind the world populated by gods and demons portrayed through the visage of in-game shrines, backed by a wiki (archive.org link)–in retrospect, Minecraft’s vast creative flexibility gave me a way to reach for the stars without realizing it.
I could write pages more about Minecraft, honestly. It’s played a pivotal role in my life, and it’s difficult to distill my feelings for such a vast game into even these thousand words.
But no need for words, because I’m running a server again. No better time than the present quarantine.
The Glitch, a Glitchet patron-exclusive Minecraft server
So hi! As a little something for my kind Patreon patrons, I’m opening up the server that my fiance and I play on. If you happen to be a Glitchet Patreon patron and a Minecraft player, you can join right away. Details are in this Patreon post. I sent you a message on Patreon that you can respond to with your username to be added to the allowlist.
If you’re not a patron (warning: upsell incoming) but desperately want to play with me, you can subscribe to my Patreon for access (minimum: $1 a month), which comes with a free +1 for anyone you want to invite per dollar you pledge.
If you don’t have Minecraft but you feel compelled to check it out, you can purchase it on Mojang’s site (note: you want the Java edition).
Here’s an imgur album with some teaser images of the server.
Thanks for reading.
Thanks for reading. I’m experimenting with longer, out-of-the-blue whatever topics because, well, fuck it. I hope you enjoyed it. If not, something different next week!
Mathieu St-Pierre in Glitch Artists Collective
Some links and such
2b2t, a decade-old anarchy Minecraft server’s world file (terabytes large!) is starting to corrupt, resulting in some insane glitch aesthetic. It’s also an interesting look into a niche Minecraft subculture of a server with literally 0 rules.
https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/article/minecrafts-top-10-bugs
YouTuber Builds Entire Minecraft Earth to Scale | HYPEBEAST
A cubed option for armchair travelers.
I Can’t Believe I’m Addicted to Minecraft | WIRED
My niece showed me how to play Minecraft, and now I’m hooked. How did this happen?
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