Like most friend groups my age, I’m in My friends and I have a Minecraft server. We reset it every so often, so our imaginations can run wild anew. We mine, we lay out bases, we build grand locations. I find it interesting how our castles and forts and homesteads tend to be wildly different. {NAME REDACTED 1} tends to build castles, blow them up, and leave them to rot and haunt like a ghost in the Scottish Highlands. {NAME REDACTED 2} builds large fortifications that rest on big fuck-off-hole-in-the-ground-mines that he’s dug. My imagination tends to run to the... modern.
This is my current home base, a modernist structure straight out of Ikea.
Here’s another structure I’m building.
A brutalist inspired library.
Clearly, I have a style of Architecture that I like. And It isn’t just because I think it’s easier to build in modern / postmodern styles. I kinda like the juxtaposition of the giant, looming structures bursting out of the naturalism in the forest.
And for reference, here’s what the typical Minecraft world generates as homes and villages.
Notice the paths in these two pictures. They’re dirt passageways, only existing between houses in these villages. For comparison, the rest of the world that is generated in our server exists without connections.
Oh wait. You can see one of my bridges over there.
I have been building a lot of bridges and walkways... I’m kind of obsessed with them. They look neat, don’t they?
Cutting through a lot of ground to build them.
Almost like an industrial strip mine...
And this got me thinking. Specifically it got me thinking about Robert Moses. While most people might be familiar with the epic Robert Caro biography The Power Broker, but that’s not what I’m thinking about. I’m thinking of a 2022 play about Robert Moses by David Hare called Straight Line Crazy. I haven’t seen it (read the script) but it’s title refers to Moses’ tendency to bulldoze existing properties and natural areas to build his bridges. Of course, it only makes sense that I connect each of my friend’s islands.
Part of the fun of Minecraft is in the exploration, and the moment we start mapping out the world we’re in, that element of fun starts to wane. I wonder - and I haven’t heard otherwise from my friends, if while these bridges make traveling easier, they still ruin the fun of the exploration. Of course the other part of the fun of Minecraft is in the building.
Now I’m not calling myself Robert Moses here. I’m just saying that noticed some similarities while I was working in this server. I’m tying together a world, taking it from a naturalistic paradise to an explicitly modernist world, regardless of the cost to the biome. I’ve even named parts of the world, officially declaring my ownership over it with complete disregard of what the land might already be called.
But of course... That’s what you’re supposed to *do* in Minecraft. That’s the game’s purpose, stripping the earth of resources and building a fantasy land to the best of your imagination and skill. I guess it’s better than hurting the real world... but I wonder what ecological impact me playing Minecraft actually has, just in energy usage. Is it worth worrying about? I don’t know. Is it worth considering? Sure.
In closing, I want to point to one of my favorite building projects from this server. This time, it’s a tunnel on the neutral island seen in the above picture.
It’s meant to be a nice little refuge for all of us, someplace where we go back to nature and have a rest. That’s what the server is in real life, a nice little retreat from the real world. I think it’s funny that I needed to build a retreat inside the game.
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