Is this Massively Multiplayer Reality TV? A bunch of 20-something Minecraft roleplayers are inventing a novel form of entertainment, and tens of millions are watching.
Great reporting, Ryan. As someone who missed the Minecraft train for a very long time, I've been blown away by the quantity of high quality role playing content coming to YouTube. "Massively multiplayer reality show" is a great way to describe it. Genuinely looking forward to the Purge video, as I'm a huge fan of the films.
But in a forward-looking sense, as someone with one foot in gaming and one foot in film, I see content like this as a genuine threat to Hollywood and premium streaming, too.
I don't know if I agree that Minecraft has "evolved into something else." I think it always was the thing it is now; it just took time to realize that. Though, perhaps, that's the fundamental meaning of evolution.
The thing that I like best about Minecraft is how well it undercuts the narrative about "visual fidelity." Minecraft is not great in spite of its blockiness but because of it. The idea that 4K (or 5K or even 8K) will make a game "better" or that ray-tracing is somehow going to fundamentally improve a game (kudos the the BF6 team here...) is just wrong. 1080P is fine. 1440 is more than fine. 4K is excessive. And I think the success of something like this helps to prove that. The story here wouldn't be more compelling if the characters looked "more real." They are real because of how they *behave*, not because of how they look.
In his seminal work "The Art of Computer Video Game Design," Chris Crawford writes of art, that it is “something designed to evoke emotion through fantasy. The artist presents his audience with a set of sensory experiences that stimulates commonly shared fantasies, and so generates emotion.”
And then, of games as a specific genre of art, that games “create not the experience itself but the conditions and rules under which the audience will create its own individualized experience.” And that's what Ish is doing here at a scale perhaps unimagined by Notch, but also not in any way precluded by his original design.
Minecraft - and "projects" such as this - are magical because of the experience they create. In that way, they game is what it's always been. The trouble I have with the equating to "reality" TV is that "Reality" TV is *not* real; it *is* scripted. But this is not. Whether that's because the cameras are not visible or because Ish is able to be more hands off or some combination of other things entirely I cannot say. But this is just reality - within the confines of an alternate universe/world/etc - rather than "Reality TV." Perhaps a better word is ... genuine.
Crawford spends a lot of his book railing against "transplanted" games - games which are digital "recreations" that are necessarily inferior to the original; think the movie-version-of-the-book type of thing. That's what Reality TV is. It's transplanted Reality that necessarily becomes cheapened and distorted in the process. In their tiny blocky avatar form, these role players are more real than the flesh and blood characters of some TV show.
Ah yes... The emergence of a Minecraft metaverse .....
I just think that this is kinda voice and power from genz
Great reporting, Ryan. As someone who missed the Minecraft train for a very long time, I've been blown away by the quantity of high quality role playing content coming to YouTube. "Massively multiplayer reality show" is a great way to describe it. Genuinely looking forward to the Purge video, as I'm a huge fan of the films.
But in a forward-looking sense, as someone with one foot in gaming and one foot in film, I see content like this as a genuine threat to Hollywood and premium streaming, too.
Ryan, have you seen About Oliver's blind minecraft playthrough? https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLfaRVe43qAyXDQC3ejX6ZL6y0ugTV1KPK
These supercuts have been peak minecraft content for me. Not quite the same amount of effort, but also hundreds of hours condensed into a ~2h video
I don't know if I agree that Minecraft has "evolved into something else." I think it always was the thing it is now; it just took time to realize that. Though, perhaps, that's the fundamental meaning of evolution.
The thing that I like best about Minecraft is how well it undercuts the narrative about "visual fidelity." Minecraft is not great in spite of its blockiness but because of it. The idea that 4K (or 5K or even 8K) will make a game "better" or that ray-tracing is somehow going to fundamentally improve a game (kudos the the BF6 team here...) is just wrong. 1080P is fine. 1440 is more than fine. 4K is excessive. And I think the success of something like this helps to prove that. The story here wouldn't be more compelling if the characters looked "more real." They are real because of how they *behave*, not because of how they look.
In his seminal work "The Art of Computer Video Game Design," Chris Crawford writes of art, that it is “something designed to evoke emotion through fantasy. The artist presents his audience with a set of sensory experiences that stimulates commonly shared fantasies, and so generates emotion.”
And then, of games as a specific genre of art, that games “create not the experience itself but the conditions and rules under which the audience will create its own individualized experience.” And that's what Ish is doing here at a scale perhaps unimagined by Notch, but also not in any way precluded by his original design.
Minecraft - and "projects" such as this - are magical because of the experience they create. In that way, they game is what it's always been. The trouble I have with the equating to "reality" TV is that "Reality" TV is *not* real; it *is* scripted. But this is not. Whether that's because the cameras are not visible or because Ish is able to be more hands off or some combination of other things entirely I cannot say. But this is just reality - within the confines of an alternate universe/world/etc - rather than "Reality TV." Perhaps a better word is ... genuine.
Crawford spends a lot of his book railing against "transplanted" games - games which are digital "recreations" that are necessarily inferior to the original; think the movie-version-of-the-book type of thing. That's what Reality TV is. It's transplanted Reality that necessarily becomes cheapened and distorted in the process. In their tiny blocky avatar form, these role players are more real than the flesh and blood characters of some TV show.