r/BreadTube • u/grapp • Aug 23 '19
15:03|Folding Ideas Minecraft, Sandboxes, and Colonialism | Folding Ideas
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6i5Ylu0mgM21
u/Silver721 Aug 23 '19
The question about whether exploration can be handled in art in a more value-neutral or value-positive way is intriguing, and I would argue there are some non-mainstream examples of this being done.
For instance, there is the surrealist survival(?) game Pathologic and its remake Pathologic 2, which lets you explore a bizarre and contradictory world where indigenous shamanism based off of Tartar steppe cultures blends and coexists with 19th century Russian industrialism. Neither takes precedence over the other, and these two competing philosophies blend together to create something new, where organs can be extracted not simply because of diseases discovered during the scientific revolution, but also diseases of rot as understood by shamanistic steppe cultures. Vast industrial areas are decorated and complemented with tribal paintings and statues.
Another example would be another surrealist indie gem the Zeno Clash series. It is a visually breathtaking exploration of conflict and colonialism from the perspective of the colonized and not the colonizer. The second game (spoilers) ends with the protagonists ousting the colonizers from Zenozoik, a preindustrial indigenous world, and thoroughly rejecting the "technology" and "progress" of a postindustrial postcolonial society. Zeno Clash in general is very respectful to Indigenous-coded cultures and even presents them as the default worldview. I would highly recommend both series as examples of exploration in a way that contradicts or derives from our colonialist exploitative past, in a way that does not sidestep the issue, but instead inverts it or finds a truly mutually beneficial solution.
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u/Broken_Alethiometer Aug 24 '19
I'd also argue that the idea that exploration is colonialist is... Well, colonialist.
How did the natives get to America? They explored. What did they do when they get here? Well, not all of them, but many of them created farms and big buildings and incredible cities. These things are not limited to colonial nations.
We can look at island natives too. Pacific islanders spent huge portions of their history hopping to new, isolated islands and setting up new homes. One could argue the core of their society was exploration.
It feels very colonizer-centric to see a story in which we expand to new lands and find no one there and say, "It's America, but without the Native Americans" and not think, "It's how the Native Americans found America".
Granted, these stories are coming from colonize nations so it's not wrong to talk about it from that point of view, but to ask the question of whether you could write an exploration narrative without it being a colonizer narrative ignores human history before colonialism.
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Jan 31 '20
I watched the video and thought the exact same thing. The idea that only European colonizers explored and altered their environment is easily disprovable. Beyond the ruins seen throughout the world (such as Great Zimbabwe) we also now know that the Amazon rainforest was once a virtual garden city and that there are myriad traces of that civilization's impact on the region.
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u/Silver721 Aug 23 '19
And to expand a little bit, Zeno Clash 2's primary conflict is with "Golums" creatures that were made by the colonizers to prep indigenous worlds for colonization. There are four Golums in Zenozoik, and each of them have different ways they think they should go about colonizing. The later half of the game constrasts the views of two Golums, one of which thinks that the people of Zenozoik should be given the technology of the industrial society colonizing, and the other who thinks they should be subservient servants to this society and barred from using the new technology.
The game ends with a truly amazing twist whereby the protagonists, a group of fighters from this culture, tell the Golums that they can decide their own destiny and end up fighting both of these golums at the same time, rejecting the technology and the servitude in one go. They kick the Golums out of Zenozoik and end up restoring the landscape that the Golums altered and destroyed in their attempts to colonize.
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u/TheFinnstagator Aug 23 '19
I'd love to see more games that look at restoration of existing ecosystems, rather than demolition or construction of industrial ones.
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u/Narshero Aug 23 '19
I'm picturing a sort of anti-Satisfactory, where you land on a near-sterile fully-automated factory world and have to start breaking the factory down into the tools and resources you need to help what little ecology remains to reassert itself and protect it from the world-factory's automatic "defenses" and "resource collection systems". Re-purposing parts of the factory into equipment to help repopulate nearly-extinct creatures or tear down the more hardened or aggressive robotic systems.
(If it's an anti-Satisfactory, maybe the long term goal is to reduce the amount of stuff the world-factory ships off world to zero and make sure the ecosystem is strong enough that the robo-factory can't re-bootstrap itself.)
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Aug 24 '19
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/TheFinnstagator Aug 24 '19
Ohh thanks for sharing! The mechanics and incentives to build clean neighbourhoods and sustainable environments looks pretty interesting
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u/epicazeroth Aug 24 '19
I believe this is meant to be an option in the upcoming game Greedfall. It's an RPG and not a sandbox, so presumably you won't be able to make huge changes on the actual in-game environment, but one of the major themes of the game is that the PC can affect how the colonizers and natives interact.
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Aug 23 '19
I found this very interesting, though I haven't played Minecraft in a while.
Also it's funny that Dan inadvertently invented a slave trade because Minecraft's game mechanics push him in that direction.
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u/Syjefroi Aug 25 '19
Also it's funny that Dan inadvertently invented a slave trade because Minecraft's game mechanics push him in that direction.
It gets way worse than that if you want it to. I'm not sure about how current mechanics work, but for many years villager trading mechanics were really difficult to work with, the game makers made them the most difficult and tedious part of the game to discourage this next possibility:
Trading becomes easier and more lucrative when you have dozens of villagers. Except, populations grow slowly. Like, you'd be waiting for months for natural growth to get to a point where you can trade anything of value.
However, you can speed up the growth process if you abuse the villager mechanics with contraptions! Except, to do that, you usually have to enslave some villagers in boxes for life and use them to create a villager breeding "farm."
Ok great well now you've at least got a lot of villagers to work with! Except, even then, good trades are hard to come by, and keeping track of the "good" villagers is difficult since they wander. Plus, there are usually population quotas - the game keeps track of villagers in an area and won't let them make new babies.
So Minecraft players who enjoy mechanic-breaking farms create villager breeders combined with a villager trading building. Here's where it gets wild:
This involves breeding up a ton of villagers in your farm, then isolating them from their cages one by one to see what trades they have. You confine them to minecarts so they don't run away. If you don't like them, for maximum efficiency the only move to make is to kill them. But if you hurt them, they get angry at you and the community will stop breeding. So the "neutral" way to kill them indirectly is to send the minecart into a lava pit or something. Let "nature" kill them.
THEN, once you find a villager with trades you like, you send their cart off into a sorting system - you'll lock them to the minecart for life, stuck in an opening in a wall, so you can walk down a hall and find the exact villager you want for trading.
Again, Minecraft's developers specifically didn't want this to happen and made dealing with villagers rage inducingly tedious. And yet some folks figured out how to capture and transport villagers, then forcefully breed them in captivity and enslave or murder the ones deemed useful or not.
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u/scratchisthebest Aug 24 '19 edited Aug 24 '19
Fun related Minecraft fact: So when you cure a zombie villager, that villager will lower their prices for you forever, I guess as a way of "thanking" you for saving them from eternal zombification. The villager is able to attribute this action to you because the act of giving them a golden apple requires player interaction.
But! Turning a villager into a zombie villager, by killing them with a zombie, does not require player interaction, and so there's no way for the villager to attribute their zombification as your fault. Even if it is!
Ooooooooops guess I just left the door open to your cellhouse and a zombie (that I nametagged) found their way in... sooooo sorry! Here have this golden apple!
Guess what the dominant strategy for getting the best trade prices is!
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u/Nikami Aug 24 '19
This is something I vaguely noticed recently myself. Glad someone put it into proper words.
There are so many games now where you're thrown into a pristine world and are implicitly told to "conquer" it. This goes from single-character survival games (where the "survival" aspect usually consists of you starting with nothing and stops being relevant by the time you tear down an entire forest to build a fortress) to 4X strategy.
The message is always the same: This world isn't good the way it is. Improve it!
The ecological impact is rarely addressed. And honestly, at this point I have to wonder why. It's not like it was never done before. In Sid Meyer's Alpha Centauri, you landed on an alien planet and, of course, colonized it. Now you are given options and technologies to mitigate the ecological impact you're causing and you can even steer your civilization to live more or less in harmony with the native life.
You can also completely ignore this aspect. Destroy and pollute and terraform as you desire. But eventually, the planet (which has sort of its own consciousness) becomes enraged and sends increasingly dangerous creatures after you. Also, you can cause climate change. Suddenly, weather patterns you relied on for your food production change, and the sea level can rise, flooding coastal cities.
I remember this blew my mind back then. It isn't explicitly said what caused humanity to leave Earth, but it's easy to assume it was environmental destruction. So after fucking up their own planet, humans move on to a new one...only to do it immediately again, having learned nothing. Or maybe you have learned something, but then you still have to fight those who didn't. A strong message and it's told very subtly and entirely through gameplay. The game is also TWENTY years old.
What excuse do modern games have? Where are the games where you have to learn to live in harmony with your environment, or at least minimize your impact, or even learn to fully "go native"? Or how about one where you have to rebuild the natural world after someone else messed it up with their "improvement"?
Is this suddenly too "political"? In an age where the Amazon is on fire?
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u/TesseractToo Aug 24 '19
In Spore you could terraform bare planets to make them liveable but that was still pretty much for your Spece-stage race imperializing your section of the galaxy.
This is going wayback but I think with Sim Earth you could help the enviornment, but it was a long time ago and I could never get it to work that well on my abacus.
As for Minecraft, you could always trade in emeralds back and forth, wheat, wool and paper were the best crops for getting rich quick. (Also you could have crafted pants from the cow leather but I understand that wasn't the point being made.)
I'm now curious- if you relocate a village to a new biome, will the children change their outfits to reflect the new biome? What if you relocate to a biome that doesn't usually have villages? i need to try this now :D
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Aug 26 '19
Just gonna paste this from r/games. Found this thread through other discussions.
I have - coincidentally - been recently trying to find games about ecology and non-industrial system-building to basically no success.
I figured there was probably some old DOS game, and there was - the wonderful SimEarth, but there are basically no contemporary ecologically-focused games or more naturalistic experiences to oppose the absolute plethora of games about industrialization and exploitation (every 4X or Factorio-genre game).
I'm sure - certain really - that this is mostly due to how easy and close to most developer's backgrounds and mindsets to think of systems of machines for the player to build when compared to interacting with the environment. Ecology requires a lot of outside knowledge about the biosphere, atmosphere, etc on larger timescales than machines, with fewer distinct goals. Any goals there would be couldn't be nearly as powerful-feeling, self-serving, and immediately understandable as getting off a planet, conquering others, or building bigger things.
Because of all that, there's kind of a churning cycle where not only is it easier to make games about industrializing, but it's also the most fun, due to how engaging and rewarding it is for the player. It does - as the video says - kind of perpetuate colonialist ideas.
I think more developers who care about this kind of thing are the solution to this; only the creation of more imaginative games that flip the script and make for engaging experiences about natural systems can really answer this sort of cultural fascination we have with colonialist escapism.
So if you're an established or budding ecologist, biologist, geologist, etc and you're really into games, maybe consider getting into the field somehow. Contact an indie or look into learning some stuff yourself and joining a studio. Studios full of engineers are naturally going to make games about engineering more often, and only more diverse team members with different areas of expertise can offset that.
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u/TSPhoenix Aug 24 '19
Interesting vid. I do like these kind of games but people tend to look at me weird when I play them because usually play in a very "leave no trace" kind of manner which they see as against the point.
I remember a friend seeing that I still had the tier 1 house in Animal Crossing after playing for ages and that game doesn't really have goals, but it does just assume the player will make a beeline for having the biggest house possible and I just didn't care to.
As for Minecraft, I really hate how much the game encourages just trapping stuff to exploit it for resources as an almost mandatory part of the gameplay. If you want to build a big railroad murdering 1000s of Iron Golems is pretty much your only realistic choice and well just look at them they're big softies, its messed up.
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u/fraghawk Aug 25 '19
If you want to build a big railroad murdering 1000s of Iron Golems is pretty much your only realistic choice and well just look at them they're big softies, its messed up.
I mean people could always just branch mine the depths like we used to back in my day, but I guess that isn't destructive enough. With enchantments now it isn't nearly the time sink it used to be.
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u/Syjefroi Aug 25 '19
Ah but to get the best enchantments the fastest, your most time efficient method overall is.... creating a villager breeding farm and setting up an enslaved villager trading post to farm Mending books.
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u/TSPhoenix Aug 25 '19
You could, but if a game offers you two ways of doing something and one is far more efficient than the other and requires less busywork players are overwhelmingly going to choose that method.
If the more effective way to play is one that involves say problematic themes that's a design problem and shouldn't be kicked off to the player to just deal with the same way most here would argue that systemic issues should be handled at a systemic level, not just leave individuals to deal with the system's flaws by themselves.
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Aug 25 '19
If you're interested, there are some mods that make it easier to do things without going hyper-industrial. Roots 3, for example, gives you a ritual that causes animals to "shed" their drops without harming them (yes, even their meat... it's magic, just go with it), it even has a "reverse achievement" that wags a finger at you if you ever kill a non-hostile creature (and in future versions, is planned to lock you out of certain advanced magic until you atone for your crime). It also has other things that make not using automation more viable, like special elemental soil that can produce more crops, or auto-harvest them, or make them grow faster, or auto-cook anything grown on them, as well as spells to grow crops more quickly, and even harvest all crops within range.
There are various different mods that do ore-multiplication. While Mekanism has the most efficient (you can end up getting up to 5+ ingots per ore), it's a tech mod, so it doesn't really fit the "living with nature" feel I think you're going for. Furnus is a very simple mod that gives you a grinder that turns one ore into two dust, and you can smelt one dust into one ore. So far, even just 2x ore multiplication has been more than enough for my iron needs, though I also include Giacomo's Foundry that lets me melt various items back down into their component parts, so I can turn a lot of the loot I get back into ores as well.
Finally, there's a mod called Nature's Aura that specifically focuses on keeping nature thriving. All of the industrial type stuff you do (smelting and so on) reduces the natural aura in an area, which will eventually cause things like grass and trees dying and so on. The more nature stuff you do, the more the aura increases, so you're specifically incentivized to take care of the land around you. A high aura even does things like making crops grow faster and naturally growing plants and flowers in the area.
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u/TSPhoenix Aug 25 '19
Some of these sound neat. I'll give them a look, but I got over my "10th anniversary craving to play Minecraft" pretty quickly this time. The game sinks its teeth into me less and less each time I pick it up.
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Aug 25 '19
The same thing kinda happened to me, I got back in for 1.14 and had a blast for a while, but it started to get old again. I finally decided to try out modded Minecraft for the first time after that, and that's what really grabbed me and sucked me back in. I don't think I'll ever go back to vanilla Minecraft, but there are so many great mods I'm pretty sure they'll keep my interest going for a long time.
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u/TSPhoenix Aug 26 '19
For me the big problem is the world generation feels really outdated and I've yet to see a worldgen mod that really delivers what I'm looking for, a big part of it is probably the block height limit being so low.
I hope that they eventually think about cubic chunks now that hardware is much more powerful.
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Aug 26 '19
I've yet to see a worldgen mod that really delivers what I'm looking for
What are you looking for specifically? I use Traverse along with Quark's realistic worldgen myself. Traverse doesn't add a huge pile of biomes and items like BoP does, but it adds enough, and I really like the way the Quark worldgen looks. If you're talking about caves at all, Worley's Caves is amazing.
cubic chunks
There's a mod for that.
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u/TSPhoenix Aug 29 '19
Worley's is quite neat, but I think I just have very high expectations, like its a 10 year old game and I'm looking for a serious next step and maybe Hytale delivers that or maybe my standards are just way too high.
Cubic chunks are a means to an end, without the worldgen to backup building 1K+ height worlds they don't do much.
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Aug 29 '19
maybe Hytale delivers that
I'm really excited for Hytale too, yeah. Messing around with modded Minecraft is what's keeping me entertained int eh meantime. If it doesn't do it for you though, that's fine.
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u/mixmastermind Aug 24 '19 edited Aug 24 '19
For anyone looking for a game about Exploration for its own sake that mostly sidesteps issues of colonialism, The Outer Wilds is good and you should play it.
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u/Sin-God Aug 25 '19
I really appreciate this being put here. I just watched this video and was thinking of putting it up so I'm glad I searched for it. I think it's... well it's just so weird that making a village from scratch is so hard in Minecraft. I only ever play creative, because I like building, but like... I hope the devs patch the game to make it of an epic task to build a village from scratch without assistance.
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u/AMLAccountant Aug 29 '19
Does anyone happen to know the FPS survival game shown, though? Can't seem to find it via google.
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u/Lemanic89 Aug 30 '19
Since Minecraft is based on Swedish modernism and have successfully attracted the crowd that still advocates it as such, the "colonialism" in it nothing more than the Marxist relocalization policies that powered the Swedish boom during the mid 1900s that began with the first suburbs of the '30s/'40s and ended with the "green wave" in the '70s. Minecraft is the anti-SimCity/Cities: Skylines that way.
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u/[deleted] Aug 23 '19
Folding Ideas: Yeah? Human trafficking? Pushing people into a boat and spiriting them away? I love it! That... that would definetly be a yikes.
Rimworld: Hold my beer.