Minecraft

This one was popularly demanded after my Vidya post!

Minecraft is, by many metrics, the greatest video game ever created, and I think it will most likely never lose this title. Minecraft is the most downloaded game in history by a long shot, despite Minecraft not being free-to-play. On top of making itself money, Minecraft was the game which rose many YouTubers and Twitch streamers to prominence, being the most watched video game in Youtube history. When I was growing up, Minecraft was omnipresent. When I see children today who probably were not even born when Minecraft came out, I still see Minecraft clothing on them. It’s hard to explain what makes Minecraft so endearing. It isn’t really a coding masterpiece as far as I know, it was an indie game at its birth.

The beauty of Minecraft clearly lies in its freedom. You can play the game basically however you want, but it isn’t like Roblox where it doesn’t feel like a single game anymore. Every Minecraft game still feels consistently “Minecraft”, even with mods installed. It’s a pleasant goldilocks zone. Minecraft was also one of the first popular open-world games, and it has spawned a new age of gaming which is basically centered on open-world environments. I personally have grown extremely tiresome of Open World games. It was cool at first, but then you realize that there is a whole lot of “nothing” in these worlds. In Minecraft, it works, because the whole world is at your disposal. In other games, the malleability of the open world only really extends to foraging stuff off the ground. In closed-world games with a set and bordered path the character is supposed to take, the developers can spend much more time making levels look good. They know exactly what path the user is going to take, so they can hone the aesthetics and game design of a level to that. Been experiencing this recently, playing Dark Souls it is more enjoyable than Elden Ring. The new Pokemon Games are also an example of lazy open-world.

But, sadly, Minecraft’s development team is also a tale of severe decadence and an example of why games go to shit under the control of industry titans. It is also a tale of betrayal, of the man who built Minecraft. Markus Persson, also known as Notch. Minecraft was the ultimate Faustian vision of what a game could be. Limitless, boundless, a tale of the expansion of the player’s will over the world. Steve is truly the Ubermensch… Also, I suspect that Notch was under the spell of blood memory when creating the game. Steve is clearly one of the last Western Hunter Gatherers living in an increasingly EEF-populated (Villager) world. Notch says they were inspired by Dungeon Master II Shopkeepers, but uhh… I don’t know… What do you guys think about those swarthy big-nosed greedy merchants who have Golems? Certainly it cannot be a real world group… Right?

Real Life Minecraft Steve

Also… Endermen? Tall skinny black guys who can’t swim, attack you if you look at them the wrong way, live in their own mysterious world far away, and steal your blocks?

Whether or not this is intentional, I’m not sure. By the time Villagers were being added into the game, Notch was stepping off of development anyways, but he would still own the rights to Minecraft until 2014. People use this now to retcon history and insist Notch didn’t make Minecraft, but rather Jeb did, but this is totally wrong. Notch was the lead developer of the game pretty much up until its release, and while Jeb did add a lot of the features we know and love today, it’s pretty clear that those features are not what made Minecraft… Well, Minecraft. And for all of the things Jeb did add, what are we to say for everything he didn’t add? What are we to say for the past decade of extremely far-apart, and usually trivial updates?

We have mostly been getting 1 update a year— a YEAR — since 2016, despite Minecraft being the most successful game of all time AND having the backing of Microsoft. There are plenty of things that could be added to Minecraft that literally would not be controversial at all. Mobs, foodstuffs, ores which someone in 2011 would have imagined would be added to the game because of how obvious they are. Instead, we get random mobs nobody cares about, and we get to vote for one mob instead of them adding all three. Compare this to Fortnite, constantly adding new features to their game every season. Yet Redditors hate on Fortnite endlessly and talk about how much better Minecraft is. At least Fortnite’s devs actually go to work.

The best update Minecraft got recently was Caves & Cliffs, and even then I’m not really a huge fan of the new cave systems. They’re so large that they are actually quite annoying to access. You basically drop into an open expanse of mobs, and you need way more torches to light this area up. There are also more and more useless, inventory-stuffing blocks to find in these caves than ever before. Bees were an OK addition but honey is mostly useful for redstone stuff and if they’re gonna add bees they should add a bunch of other rudimentary survival game stuff.

Now, we have to talk about the elephant in the room. Notch left Minecraft for personal reasons, he was depressed. A few years after he had sold it to Microsoft, he voiced some rather keyed political opinions on feminists, homosexuals, and transgenders. He was very vocally anti-feminist, albeit I wouldn’t be surprised if some of these tweets were written under the influence. Notch was sort of a mess around this time. his controversy climaxed in this statement on Twitter:

Now, I don’t know if you guys remember, but back in 2017 there was a huge attack on this phrase. There were MSM outlets accusing it of being “Nazi”, which was obviously the point of the phrase, to demonstrate that Progressives believe it is *not* ok to be white. Notch would go on to tacitly endorse racial IQ differences, and call Transsexuals “delusional” shortly after which Notch would be removed from the credits of Minecraft, as well as all splash text on the home screen. Microsoft would announce that they have no connection to Notch, and Notch would be blacklisted from all forthcoming Minecons. Instead, they have added new splash texts which basically confirm how pozzed the Minecraft team has become:

And yes, in the same year (2019) that Notch was barred from any interaction with Minecraft, Minecraft started working with transgender musician Leif “Lena” Raine, who produced some music for the game. It’s no surprise, Microsoft is very pozzed as is pretty much every major gaming company. Notch doesn’t rock the boat anymore, he doesn’t tweet about such things but I don’t doubt he still believes in them. The team even darkened Steve’s skin color in 1.20.

Steve’s race has always been sort of ambiguous, and that was probably intentional. Promotional artwork tended to depict a lighter-skinned Steve than what we see in the game, although the darkness of his lower face could also be interpreted as stubble. He has blue eyes and brown hair, obviously European traits, but swarthy skin. Hence why I call him a “Western Hunter Gatherer”.

In the end, there is nothing the nu-devs will do to stop Notch from forever being the face of Minecraft. Endless animations and videos have established him as the literal god of minecraft, the force of good and creation as opposed to the evil of Herobrine, who is essentially Lucifer. And this is pretty cool.

Oh, and yes, as all of my iFunny refugees will know, Minecraft rigs its polls when it gets results it doesn’t like. We all remember the Hoglin incident… When Minecraft was adding Hoglins to the game, they gave the community a choice to decide its name. We iFunniers decided to do some mischief and updoot the name “Braphog”, where we justified it as “Brap” being the sound the Hoglin made. In reality, “Brap” is a term used in fart fetish erotica to describe the sound of farts.

Well, Braphog was actually winning for a while, believe it or not. But then Mojang deleted the entry, along with some ever more trolley entries like “Pigger” (justified as combination of “Pig” and “Bigger”). There is a whole KYM Article on this.

With all of this in mind it was only a matter of time before Minecraft’s community became a den of child molesters and exploiters. Nowadays, it’s just that they also want to cut their willies off. Also, women sometimes like Minecraft for the same reason they like animal crossing. Troons are this way as well some times but a lot of Troons also like male-dominated hobbies and that includes male-dominated MC hobbies like speedrunning. But, again, everyone plays Minecraft, and many true bona fide chuds still play it even in this dark age of Minecraft.

I think, at the end of the day, Minecraft has probably not had a great impact on the gaming industry and has continually disappointed, but it is a great game for the young mind. It teaches creativity, perseverance, exploration, and gives them a nigh-limitless expanse for them to conquer… Life, is like Minecraft… You don’t kill your dog in Minecraft, because that’s wrong. Even though the dog isn’t real and its death isn’t real. It’s just wrong. That’s like real life… Yeah, Utilitarians can go fuck themselves…