Ethnographic Blog Entry Four



To my utter dismay, the world “Guest101” had already been locked in just a week after my last played session (refer to Ethnographic Blog Entry Three). In other words, there goes my house with its awesome rooftop garden! According to Team9000 website’s definition of the Guest world:

“Anyone can build in these worlds. They attract many griefers, so please report these baddies as soon as you see them destroying something. Everyone has to start somewhere! BEWARE! Every couple days, a new main Guest world is created, and the old Guest world is renamed to the next in the sequence (such as Guest29). Guest worlds more than two revisions old are locked, and can not be built on or updated.”

The latest sequence so far is Guest106. This means that Guest101 is more than two revisions old and can’t be visited anymore. As a result, there is no way I could fully develop and expand upon my “house” project without completing it on a single seating (in a span of few days). Instead, I have decided to explore the many worlds the server has provided (can be viewed at http://wiki.team9000.net/Minecraft_Classic).

Before embarking on the worlds, do note that Team9000’s server employs a hierarchical ranking system in order to maintain a more structured, less chaotic gamespace (thereby more ludus) to manage a larger player population.

Ranks

1. guest is a brand new player
2. cool is slightly trusted, has access to the cool worlds
3. builder works in the zone worlds + can use the tp command
4. engineer has access to the kick command
5. awesome has their own house in Main + extended ban permissions and cuboid command
6. pro builds in ProHills, admins the server, and makes promotions
7. owner is the who’s all knows all (Don’t ask them for help – they’re always busy)

Evidently, the rank increases as one scroll down the list, granting more functionalities and higher level of access to the respective worlds. Keep in mind that I’m visiting these worlds as a guest.

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• Rank for Building: Everyone!

• Description: This world isn’t ever reset, and isn’t policed as much. Griefers are still banned, but this map is definitely a mess. Come here to build random junk.

Just like what the description has said, Fun world appears to be more haphazard and unstructured than the Guest world.

Most of the stuff  that are built in this world seem incomprehensible.  This could be a good example of what a very paidia world would look like.

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• World Name: Cool (with many sequences e.g. Cool1, Cool2, Cool3…)

• Rank for Building: Cool and above

• Description: These worlds are basically FreeBuild for everyone who isn’t a guest. No griefing happens here. OR ELSE.

In the Cool world, players are entrusted with more building space, even allowing structures to be built on sea (which is limited in the guest world). Also, the player population is noticeably lower in Cool world as compared to Guest world, resulting in a more sparse distribution of players’ structures here.

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• World Name: SpriteBuilder

• Rank for Building: Cool and above

• Description: This world is dedicated to sprite building. All builders should use only their OWN scaffolding, unless otherwise instructed. If you need a scaffolding installed for yourself, please ask an admin. Only sprites and other reproductions belong in here.

This world allows players to practise and build 2D sprites (like Harley Quinn and 300 as shown above).

Scaffolding provides a systematic and spatial way of filling up the individual grids/pixels to form the eventual sprites that the player desires.

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So excluding these three worlds, I had been to the Guest & Museum worlds in my previous visits. I’ll probably be exploring the remaining worlds in my final blog entry.

As mentioned in my Ethnographic Blog Post Two, Minecraft‘s play material are valued by players (as they allow personalisation and self-identification) but has yet to be commodified. So far, the only real cash for virtual goods transactions involves selling of existing Minecraft‘s account — not being any different from selling pre-owned games — to other players. The online exchange of game artifacts involves custom skins and textures made by the community which are free and open-source. If they are not free and open-source, there exists a possibility for the company to make and sell Minecraft‘s custom skins and textures as micro-transactions.

One interesting thing to note about the single player mode of Minecraft is its material dimension of play requires players to harvest the resources first before crafting of any object can begin (which is apparently missing in the multiplayer mode).

The video above shows how lumber is gathered from trees, by repeatedly punching on “lumber” textured cubes. This uncannily resembles the ‘grinding’ process that was mentioned in the reading.

These lumber resources can then be combined to create a workbench and subsequently a pick. Thus, these raw resources are of value since better items can later be crafted out of them, like in most MMORPGs.

Above, we withness the extent a player went to build the first few stages of this game called Amnesia: The Dark Descent in the single player mode.

“The mapmaker, the user GamerDuality on YouTube, says it took roughly 20 hours to build. Half of that was spent in resource extraction to build the thing. “I had to level half a hill, mine copious amounts of cobblestone, cut down dozens of trees, and punch many a sheep and pick many a rose to complete this,” he writes.” (via Kotaku.com)

If the resource-gathering and the trading of such resources are brought to the multiplayer component of Minecraft, it could spark the same phenomenon where virtual loot is acquired with real money. Real money can be spent to buy time needed to gather these resources. There are indeed many potentials for Minecraft‘s game artifacts to have an economical value but as of now, the government (Mojang Team) has chose to keep them free and open source.

Julian Dibbell’s “The Life of a Chinese Gold Farmer” fails to talk about the manipulation of the auction house (that was mentioned in Edward Castronova’s “Synthetic Worlds”) as an example of the range of virtual income-generating activities to choose from. This can involve the player choosing a particular game artifact/item and buying all of them from the auction house, and re-selling them at a higher price, thereby granting the player monopoly over the sales of that game artifact/item. Earning money through the auction house gives the most profit over time even though there is a threshold in terms of the players’ demand for a certain item. As such manipulation of the auction house entails a certain risk just like playing in the stock market, which is probably why the Chinese gold farmers prefer the traditional, less-risky and stable form of virtual income generation through pure grinding/resource-gathering.

I have also experienced the difficulty of distinguishing “where the line between work and play falls” during my stint as a Quality Assurance lead in a game company. While the Chinese gold farmers are farming for gold, I was farming for bugs. Playing the same game over and over again became repetitive and monotonous but, thankfully, each new developmental update of content/build always trilled me much like how the new end game raiding content had excite the gold farmers. An evidence of how new challenges help to maintain the flow in games (Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi).

McKenzie Wark claims that given how post-modern society is increasingly game-like through digitalisation and competitive by separating into agon of winners and losers, digital games are utopian or ideal state of the world, as they fulfill “the principles of the level playing field and rewards based on merit” which the real world, being an imperfect game, cannot promise or deliver. This probably explains why some people play games as a form of escapism from the real world, which can lead to game addiction if their play hours are not moderated, leading them to treat the virtual world as the real world.

In 1:18, an owner of this Chinese gold farming workshop mentioned about an almost unfair economic competition when comparing services and goods in China to America’s. The virtual world opened up an equal level playing field, a fair fight, and free competition. It allowed him to “transmit Chinese labour” to America through exporting the virtual goods that would otherwise be impossible in the real world.

But really, how utopian can games get? It seems to me that, inevitably, elements from our imperfect world seep into games. Equal level playing field is destroyed in an online competitive game when players find ways to tweak, hack and creatively break and bend the rules, subverting the system from the inside.

And what does true play really mean? Is true play about playing to win as in “gamers confront each other in games of skill which reveal who has been chosen by the game as the one who has most fully internalized its algorithm”? Or is true play about playing to explore the full creative potential of the gamespace (sharing the same view with a book titled “Cheating: Gaining Advantage in Videogames” by Mia Consalvo), and working against its algorithm?