Carrying Water

Last night I was hard at work in our playtest. I was configuring my Theurgy mod setup to make much needed quartz as part of the progression in our new upcoming modpack and SMP called For The Trees.  In the basement of my ecomodernist base (modeled on the gorgeous Casa Copas in the Valle de Bravo in Mexico) I have my alchemy machines. These require copious amounts of water to run. 

In Minecraft water is not a finite resource and while there are plentiful lakes, rivers and oceans (even in desiccated world of For The Trees) you really don’t have to go collect from these sources.  Two buckets of water are all you need for an infinite source (either in a row of three blocks making the middle block infinite or 2×2 making all blocks infinite).

That’s all fine and well when you are building stuff “outside” your house because these little infinite water sources are suggestive of ponds or wells, but when you are building an “inside” there is nothing more jarring that finding a pond in your well-appointed terracotta floor.  Of course, the savvy builder can imagine the indoor swimming pools, hot tubs and water features that also signify the ideals of upper middle-class wealth because who else can afford to put stuff that should be outside the home on the inside!

Despite all this, builders respond to the aesthetic challenge by hiding their water sources. Like clever plumbers, they use the waterlogging mechanic to hide water below slabs or in stairs and voila indoor plumbing!  There are also many mods to for dealing with this that either help to hide the infrastructure (in walls or floors) or else bring it more into the foreground like the fluid pipes of the Create mod because who doesn’t love the look of pristine copper pipes without any corrosion or dirt caked on.

So, as I am building my Theurgy setup I noticed something strange about myself…  I did not make an infinite water source next to my machines and instead I found myself running outside to the river gathering a bucket and running back to the machine – 10 buckets to fill each machine… 3 different machines. What a waste of time!

Waste. Of. Time.    

With two buckets and some slabs I could hide an infinite source under the floor in the basement and magically dip my bucket into the floor and pull as much water as I want without moving. I become a cog in my machine system this way… much more efficient given the immediate task at hand.  With a bit of planning and time invested up front I could also run a pump with pipes from a water source straight into my machines which would liberate me completely to go do other things. Maybe later I say…

So, I mindlessly run back and forth with buckets… but then I noticed something. To get outside I move though my basement door and outside beside the river. Across the river is the desolate dried earth of our gameworld and on my side of the river is my nascent forest with freshly made podzol, spruce and birch trees near to my small automated Cuprosia (a modded crop that produces copper nuggets) farm.  The Create harvester turns, the light moves across the land as the sun passes, I notice this or that… as I run back and forth with my buckets.  More than this… I find myself thinking as a mindlessly do my bucket runs. Thinking about how to setup my Theurgy machines, what mods might be better, how I want to landscape the river, where I should put a bridge…

Could I do this standing inside with buckets from indoor plumbing?  Maybe but time is compressed and my attention must focus on the hand-eye coordination of bucketing because I am working fast. Or if I automate, I just don’t have to be there, and I can go off and kill mobs or whatever.

This wasted time in running for buckets is a kind of sequestered time within the game which is already by definition a waste of time because I shouldn’t be playing Minecraft when I could be working… earning a living, doing something useful and so on. Perhaps running for buckets is a reflection on the very act of play itself. Much in line with Bernard Suits who defines play as a practice of finding the most inefficient means to an end… when I run for buckets I am playing more than if I stand there with my infinite source.  Well, this is all play but there are different modulations of time.

In the context of the allegorical method which informs our approach running for buckets is doing some critical work by allowing or facilitating a reflection on insides and outsides and the taken-for-grantedness of water infrastructures.  In industrialized societies with ubiquitous indoor plumbing, standing at the sink in your kitchen is very much like having an infinite water source in Minecraft and the closest you might get to the outside is looking through the window.  Running for buckets could be a poor analogy for thinking about water scarcity (because Minecraft water is not actually scarce at all) but it is also very effective for thinking about the material ideologies of insides and outsides, culture and nature, and a mindfulness about infrastructure.

This last aspect is what the SunBlock project is all about. Whether it’s the water grid or the energy grid – none of it can be taken for granted and all of it can offer possibilities of reflexive play.