Spawn This: Minecraft as a Virtual World (presented at Society for Cinema and Media Studies Conference in Montreal, March 2015 and part of a longer essay) Lori Landay, Berklee College of Music à advance in Prezi http://prezi.com/41ifd5nd_erz/?utm_campaign=share&utm_medium=copy&rc=ex0share

*à*In 2006, cover stories in Wired and Business Week hyped virtual worlds, speculating that “Virtual worlds may end up playing an even more sweeping role -- as far more intuitive portals into the vast resources of the entire Internet than today's World Wide Web.”1 Second Life and Open Sim grids still have a dedicated user base, as do habbo and Disney’s Club Penguin, but there.com, Google’s lively, facebook’s Cloud Party, and LEGO Universe are all defunct. The promise glimpsed in those virtual worlds has not materialized—or virtualized—in a mainstream way. Until now, with Minecraft. Although it does not look or at first seem like what proponents of virtual worlds have been waiting for, Minecraft is the breakthrough success for virtual worlds. To be sure, there are other transmedial imaginary worlds that are participatory and brimming with user-generated content. There have been player-created servers that mod a game in new narrative, gameplay, and social directions, and create vibrant communities. But no game or other transmedial IP has approached the size or the scope of Minecraft, and its players use Minecraft as a portal into disparate media experiences, including other franchises, to an unprecedented degree. In thinking through how what has emerged through the Minecraft phenomenon has redefined what a virtual world is, this presentation explores three interrelated questions: *à*What does it mean to consider Minecraft as a virtual world? Why has it succeeded as the breakthrough virtual world? How does transmedial experience factor into Minecraft as a virtual world? First, some information about Minecraft that helps us understand how a low-res looking video game spawned a virtual world. Minecraft has become more than a game, but it began as a game, coded by Markus Persson, known as Notch, in 2009. *à* Today, in March 2015, Minecraft is a global transmedial phenomenon, becoming the best-selling PC game ever on September 20, 2014 (http://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Minecraft_Wiki), and holding the record for the most concurrent players on Steam, with 1 million people playing at the same time (http://www.vg247.com/2015/01/11/minecraft-1-million-concurrent-players/). There are over 200,000 Minecraft servers, and countless mods adding new objects and gameplay to the Minecraft interface. Players can access practically any theme, style, or imaginary world through Minecraft

1 Hof, Robert D. "My virtual life: A journey into a place in cyberspace where thousands of people have imaginary lives." 2 mods, maps, and texture packs. This alone distinguishes what players do with Minecraft from other transmedial worlds, and because children can do so much of this on their own, they have a high degree of agency to explore and experience the media that interests them, through the lens of Minecraft. Minecraft has some other staggering numbers that suggest its immense scope, including 19,265,652 purchased copies of the PC/Mac version of the game as of April 18, 2015 (https://minecraft.net/stats), and a 2.5 billion US $ purchase price for Mojang and all of its assets, including Minecraft, by Microsoft in September 2015, (http://www.planetminecraft.com/blog/how-many-servers-are-there-in-minecraft-multiplayer/). Minecraft players tend to keep playing the game, with 36% having played for more than 12 months in a 2014 poll.2 Minecraft was the second most searched term on YouTube as of January 2015 (“music” was the first), http://www.vg247.com/2015/01/07/minecraft-is-a-massive-deal-on- youtube/) . There have been over 156 million views on YouTube of Captain Sparklez “Revenge” a Minecraft parody song and animation [PLAY] (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cPJUBQd- PNM ), and almost 3 million views of the behind the scenes video in which Captain Sparklez shows how he used the program Maya for the animation3 . *à* The official Minecraft handbook Collection published by Scholastic is the #1 bestseller in Children's Video & Electronic Games Books and #123 overall on amazon’s bestseller list. People have also used Minecraft for serious games purposes, including educators around the world through minecraft.edu and on their own. *à* In the art field, even the prestigious British Tate museum is using Minecraft. *à* There are currently three Tate Worlds, special maps that “present virtual environments inspired by artworks from Tate’s collection”, with four more planned (http://www.tate.org.uk/about/projects/tate-worlds-art-reimagined-minecraft). Minecraft is so popular because it is open and flexible. *à* Using a version of my Transmedial Imaginary Worlds Experience Model built in Minecraft to illustrate, [PLAY] within the game, a player can move easily along the structure spectrum between the rule-based play of ludus, choosing survival mode and perhaps pursuing the Ender Dragon and the open play of paidia (in creative mode). Minecraft also affords a range of engagement with the game, and players can also move freely along the affordance axis, to interpret, explore, combine, remix, transform, and invent, experiencing different kinds of agency.

2 http://www.newzoo.com/insights/analyzing-game-franchises-gamers-love-minecraft/ 3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Aj_eaclFPWE 3

Yet Minecraft as a virtual world only originates with the game. *à* In this [PLAY] animation of my Transmedial Imaginary Worlds Experience Model, we can see how Minecraft begins on the interface platform as the official game known as the “vanilla” version and spreads across the interface platform in the maps, mods and servers that proliferate from it. Minecraft emerges as a virtual world as it bursts in all directions from the interface platform to the physical, screen, and page platforms, with players experiencing multiple ways of engaging with Minecraft and various degrees of structure. From when Persson started coding Minecraft in 2009 onward, he integrated community input, incorporating the players as co-creators in the spirit of the indie game developer online community TIGSource, of which he was a member. Instead of a single author, or a team of designers, programmers, and artists organized in a company, Minecraft has a community of creators, and the process of creating content is what grew Minecraft from a game into a virtual world. No other game is characterized to the same degree by what scholar Dennis Redmond terms *à* “audience-led production,” in which a digitally networked community of internet users in a technologically and transnationally diverse digital eco-system engaged in co-creating Minecraft. Redmond proposes, *à* “Minecraft is a commercial franchise wrapped around a core non- commercial fan community. While the fan community does not legally own the franchise, this lack of formal ownership is also irrelevant. The reason is that fans co-produce, co-regulate, and co- distribute the videogame in close concert with the commercial franchise.”4 Redmond analyzes Notch’s blog to show how he used social media, YouTube videos, email, chats, online polls, and message boards to seek out player feedback, to which he listened and often deferred. The player community does more than provide feedback, though, because Mojang crafted policy that allows users to modify the game code, and make and share mods, tools, and plugins, but only for non-commercial use. *à* The EULA is clearly written, and summarizes Mojang’s approach: Essentially the simple rule is do not make commercial use of anything we‘ve made unless specifically agreed by us, either in our brand and asset usage guidelines or under this EULA.

4 “The Videogame Commons Remakes the Transnational Studio” in Understanding Minecraft: Essays on Play, Community and Possibilities, Nate Garrelts, ed (2014-09-25). (Minedraft) (Kindle Locations 179-181). McFarland. Kindle Edition.

4

. . . Otherwise we are quite relaxed about what you do - in fact we really encourage you to do cool stuff - but just don‘t do those things that we say you can‘t. (https://account.mojang.com/documents/minecraft_eula) One of the results of this open approach to modding is that, beyond the Game player’s purchase, the wider phenomenon of Minecraft is not consistent, and the hundreds of thousands of servers and individual mods are not only often incompatible with each other, but do not constitute a coherent virtual world in the way that EVE Online, Second Life, Star Trek Online, or other MMOs do. As a player logs into different servers, installs mods, or uploads maps or texture packs, he or she can bring their name and customized skin if they have one, but that’s it.5 If the multitude of servers and single-player client-side games are not all part of one big networked, unified entity, then *à* how is Minecraft a virtual world? My answer lies in redefining what a virtual world has become in practice, and what it means to consider Minecraft as one. Mark Bell defines a virtual world as “A synchronous, persistent network of people, represented as avatars, facilitated by networked computers.”6 Minecraft, if we are talking about the game that is purchased, is not necessarily persistent or synchronous. There is Edward Castronova’s wider term, synthetic worlds, which he defines as “crafted places inside computers that are designed to accommodate large numbers of people.” Minecraft still doesn’t fit that term, either. Minecraft is not one unified world, but a confederation of single player and multiplayer experiences, some of which are persistent because they are hosted on servers, and some of which are client-side. Combining elements from those two definitions, we could say that there is a network of people represented by avatars, participating in the wider Minecraft phenomenon, that is synchronous and persistent, albeit outside the game worlds generated when they login. Minecraft as a virtual world takes place in the imaginary manifestation of Minecraft as a place that is constituted by people’s varied experiences in the crafted spaces inside computers. The game sold by Mojang might not be a virtual world, but the wider transmedial imaginary world constructed through audience-led production is. *à* Virtual truly is the right word for what Minecraft has become, in the sense that it encompasses the imaginary, or more accurately, the possible. The term “virtual” as

5 There is a move that might bring more consistency across servers: As of 2013 Mojang provides servers on which to host permanent, persistent multiplayer worlds through Minecraft Realms for a monthly fee, but the servers are primarily under the control of the non-commercial player community. As of February 2015, Realms does not support modding, but players can upload their own maps to Realms. Realms is one of the many aspects of Microsoft’s purchase of Mojang that the community is watching to see how Microsoft will change, or maintain, Minecraft.

6 Bell, Mark W. "Toward a definition of “virtual worlds”." Journal For Virtual Worlds Research 1, no. 1 (2008), 2. 5 articulated by turn of the twentieth-century philosopher Henri Bergson predates its conflation with digitization. As in other virtual worlds like Second Life with a high degree of agency and user generated content, Minecraft affords the player an environment in which to make metaphors manifest, to explore possibility. I see Minecraft as the first of a new kind of *à* virtual world, one that emerged from the game into a transmedial imaginary world, with the bulk of the infrastructures of the imaginary world the result of audience-led production. Imaginary worlds are shaped by several infrastructures, categorized by Mark J.P. Wolf in his outstanding book, Building Imaginary Worlds: The Theory and History of Subcreation as: maps, timelines, genealogies, nature, culture, language, mythology and philosophy. In Minecraft, some of the infrastructures are part of the purchased game, such as elements of nature and culture, and minimal aspects of language and mythology, but all of the infrastructures have developed through the audience-led production, and some are completely user- generated. Despite the dearth of story or instructions, Minecraft has evolved into a virtual world full of narrative. Perhaps it is the lack of formal narrative that provided the space for user generated content to rise to the level it has, as is demonstrated with the example of the mythology of *à*Herobrine. Herobrine, the product of a hoax, is a scary character, the ghost of creator Notch’s dead brother, except Markus Persson does not have a dead brother. In Minecraft mythology he is the ghost in the machine, the spirit that can call out to you from within the game. *à* The Herobrine meme began in August 2010 with a “creepypasta” story post on Minecraft Forums with a screenshot of a figure in the fog who the poster said had built strange things in their world, even though it was single-player mode. In late August 2010, the Herobrine character was used in a faked live video stream, a ghost story, and was integrated into mods by late 2010. *à* As a character, Herobrine is interesting, because he provides a villain, sometimes portrayed like a devil, as in the *à*first of these two Minecraft comic books or as a misunderstood Frankenstein’s creature type, as in the second.

*à*The spawning of Herobrine occurred outside the game Minecraft, yet it is a component of the Minecraft phenomenon. The transformations of Herobrine show how Minecraft has profoundly changed video game culture with its openness to modification and sharing derivative works transmedially, creating more space for narrative within the game platform. Players learn about Minecraft through wikis, discussion forums, and nonfiction and fiction machinima videos on 6

YouTube. Some gameplay and mod reviews videos feature very popular YouTube personalities who have millions of subscribers and are the most important celebrities among some school children alongside sports stars. Moreover, Minecraft Animation by TheDiamondMinecart or Element Animation, which tell stories set in the game world, not only entertain as standalone videos, but also extend the player’s experience in the game with narrative elements. TheDiamondMinecart’s videos spawn a set of characters that populate the narrator’s Minecraft life, blending fiction with the overlay of the real person Dan, who reviews mods. It is in examples like these that we see the process of players building the virtual world. *à* The animations take place in an imaginary extension of the gameworld of Minecraft, which plays a role in creating Minecraft as a virtual world. 7 8In Captain Sparklez’s story-based animated music videos, for example, a narrative sequence across the videos contributes to the imaginary world infrastructures. In “Fallen Kingdom,” the king loses his kingdom to the creepers and skeletons, setting up the situation for the next video, “Take Back the Night”, in which the king’s son, raised by villagers, discovers that Herobrine was behind all the misery, [PLAY] and vanquishes him. *à* Again, we see the virulence of traditional dramatic structure, with conflict between a protagonist and antagonist, externalized, and Herobrine has moved from the trickster to the villain the hero can overcome. 9 One of the fascinating aspects of the most popular animations is that they do not use machinima captured in the game, but instead model, rig, and animate characters in programs like Maya so there is a greater range of characters’ movements and expressions. 10

7 When we place the game aesthetic alongside the proliferation of other visual styles, such as in the comics, and in the animations, we see a range of visualizations In this example, “Dr. Trayaurus’ Time Machine,”in contrast to Captain Sparklez, Diamond Minecart shows his user interface, uses the ingame camera, mostly the first-person view, but sometimes cutting to the third-person. Even this user-generated video, which has 8,906,098 views as of April 18, 2015 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bJO3vmW5iTE), is audience-led production, inspired by the comment DiamondMinecart shows at the end.

8 Because players have access to the different media platforms via the same computer on which they play Minecraft, without having to buy additional items (although many choose to do so, as shown by book sales (Minecraft: The Complete Handbook Collection boxed set of 4 handbooks ranked #131 on amazon.com’s list of book sales on 4/18/15), and Minecraft items as six out of the top one hundred selling toys on amazon.com (2/28/15).

9 It’s an interesting if not surprising choice for the community to have chosen, and if we look across the proliferation of Minecraft narratives in words, images, video, and song, we see the virtual world peopled with characters on a spectrum between the mythological Herobrine, available for everyone’s individual interpretation even as an insistence on his actual presence in the game persists, to the semi-fictionalized player celebrities like Diamond Minecart, to YouTubers who also become behind the scenes content producers like Captain Sparklez, learning animation. 10 In her essay on YouTube fan producers, Esther Mac-Callus Stewart explains, “Storytellers can make narratives, and coders can use the source code to implement functional changes in the game, and both can draw equally usefully from the other to fill in any gaps . The vast amount of modification and experimentation that allows the game to proceed far 7

*à* Therefore, it is not in spite of the lack of a unified synthetic world but because of it that Minecraft has become the global phenomenon that spans transmedial platforms. Although other virtual worlds centered on emergent gameplay and narrative, such as EVE Online, and depend on player-generated content and creativity like Star Trek Online, Minecraft has developed to include narrative as it grew from a game to a synthetic world to an imaginary transmedial virtual world. Narrative creates the context in which the experience of the virtual can occur. In examples like Herobrine, we can see the cultural process of audience-led world-making, through -- to use Mark Wolf’s terms, *à*the five windows through which people can enter an imaginary world[PLAY] (words, images, sounds, interactions, and objects) and the processes of transformation from one medium to another (description, visualization, auralization, interactivation, and deinteractivation). *à* Minecraft redefines what a virtual world can and will be, retaining the crucial properties of persistence, a network of participants represented by avatars, a shared sense of place, synchronous experience and communication made possible by networked computers, but also expanding to encompass participatory and transmedial affordances of an imaginary world.

*à* Because the average player age of Minecraft skews younger than previous virtual worlds like Second Life,11 the future for virtual worlds is changed by Minecraft’s breakthrough success. A new generation is accustomed to playing, creating, communicating, watching, listening, and reading via Minecraft. That children and teens are having formative encounters with games, online social experiences, and user generated content across media platforms through Minecraft suggests that the future for virtual worlds is robust. As youth grow accustomed to participatory imaginary worlds in which they can communicate with friends, customize avatars, create, play, share information, have fan experiences, follow characters and stories, compete in games, and strengthen media and computer skills in order to show off to and compete with their peers, they bring the elements of virtual world participation into everyday life. Since Minecraft emerged organically from

beyond its rather basic initial appearance is generated almost entirely around the need to give this world not only a voice, but to force it to adhere to more traditional modes of gameplay and storytelling.” “Someone off the YouTubez” The Yogscast as Fan Producers “Esther MacCallum-Stewart Garrelts, Nate (2014-09-25). Understanding Minecraft: Essays on Play, Community and Possibilities (Minedraft) (Kindle Locations 2798-2799). McFarland. Kindle Edition. Garrelts, Nate (2014-09-25). Understanding Minecraft: Essays on Play, Community and Possibilities (Minedraft) (Kindle Locations 2852-2855). McFarland. Kindle Edition. 11 A poll on one popular Minecraft server, Hypixel, indicated the majority of player were in the 13-17 bracket, as opposed to 33 as the average age of Second Life users in 2010) “Advertising in Virtual Worlds”, Paul R. Messinger and Xin Ge, in Eastin, Matthew S., Terry Daugherty, and Neal M. Burns. Handbook of Research on Digital Media and Advertising: User Generated Content Consumption. Hershey, PA: Information Science Reference, 2011, p. 90 8

single-player games into user-generated multiplayer synthetic worlds and a community-created virtual world, the experience of Minecraft is an experience of agency and empowerment. In an article in Forbes magazine, one of the multitude of articles in the popular media explaining young people’s love of Minecraft to old fogies, Jordan Shapiro concludes, “Minecraft’s success tells us that the future generation of grown-ups understand that there is only iteration. We constantly reframe. We perpetually redefine. We try on new categories and always see that there is room for improvement. Everything is dynamic and flexible. Nothing is fixed; neither in time, nor space.”12 Minecraft is like the “Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire” in Jorge Luis Borges’s one paragraph story, “On Exactitude in Science,” except that it is not a simulation trying to become simulacra, but a blocky abstraction sliding up and down Scott McCloud’s picture plane. It does not overlay a physical geography, but a virtual one, shaped as much by cultural imagination as geographical reality. Rather than a model of augmented reality, with digital content layered over the physical world, perhaps the Minecraft generation is creating a perception of the world through the virtual, but an imaginative one, not a photorealistic version. *à* The Minecraft metaverse not only includes re-creations of actual world places and buildings, but also mods based on every kids’ culture supersystem I can think of, and quite a few adult imaginary worlds like Game of Thrones and Battlestar Galactica. It can even be a portal to Portal. An example: when I asked my sons, now almost 10, if they wanted to play a game with Batman in it (meaning the Wii game I was ready to produce dramatically from my bag), they said, yes, there’s a mod for that. To them, Minecraft is the go to portal through which they can, mostly on their own, access and acquire elements of the imaginary worlds that interest them, and do with them what they want. Perhaps this paper is really about Minecraft’s emergence as the first viable metaverse, the virtual universe in which virtual worlds exist and are connected. Seen in this light, Minecraft is the “consensual hallucination” William Gibson imagined in Neuromancer. It is constituted by collective imagination, and made real by people’s actions. In conclusion, Minecraft is an emergent virtual world, created from a ludic and creative spirit similar to improvisation, in which performers build on each other’s contributions, saying “yes, and” in an ever- expanding validation and encouragement of inspiration. Minecraft is a new kind of virtual world

12 Shapiro, Jordan. “Generation Blockhead: How Minecraft Mods The Grown-Ups Of Tomorrow.” Forbes, July 22, 2014. http://www.forbes.com/sites/jordanshapiro/2014/07/22/generation-blockhead-how-minecraft-mods-the-grown-ups- of-tomorrow/.

9 that is a transmedial portal experienced seamlessly across computers, consoles, and mobile devices. *à* Who expected it to look like this? [video of first multiplayer test of multiple Steves jumping]