What kind of play is it when it’s not your move, your desire, your goals that are front and centre? Its interesting I think that we have less of an issue deferring to other humans… like in chess. We must wait for the opposing player to make a move and chess etiquette demands patience, but I don’t think we feel the same about an AI chess player for instance. If its slow, we wonder if its broken.
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.
What we want is a client system that can facilitate players’ reflexive practice with respect to the energy infrastructures and carbon footprint of their own gaming habits, and of digital culture in general. We firmly believe that game culture remains an important pivot point for rethinking, reimagining and remaking our relationship to the planet but our focus is on maximizing the agency of players by extending the boundaries of gameplay to include the energy infrastructures that make their games possible.
In For The Trees, real-time energy data from our solar server appears on a HUD in-game, and players have access to a variety of solar powered tools and items to play in a bleak empty world devastated by ecocatastrophe. Using a variety of popular mods with our own custom progression, structures and quests, players will help regenerate the land with the goal of restoring the world’s biomes and regenerating the vast forests on the seemingly lifeless earth.
It is important to remember that Minecraft worldgen is not natural it is procedural. The natural world is a fiction of computation, and the real agency of the world is the agency of computation. This is why we prefer to work with Minecraft as a platform – one cannot mistake computer generated nature for real nature no matter how photorealistic the textures and shaders might be. I love modded Minecraft for this reason… especially for worldgen. Its sublime and imperfect at the same time.
What if Minecraft could be played for less energy cost than it is today? Could we imagine net-zero Minecraft? And even if we could, why should we care? We don’t NEED to play Minecraft. Will this project be a kind of green-washing distracting us from more pressing concerns in the climate crisis?
A major theme of the Gaia’s Riddle SMP is energy transition and sustainability. We are running the SMP on our custom solar powered server after all. Vanilla Minecraft has no energy system as such. Yes, redstone has always figured as a kind of energy source… perhaps like electricity or magnetism. In vanilla we use redstone…
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Sunblock One is a prototype solar powered Minecraft server. There is nothing exceptional about this technologically; we can manage this with inexpensive consumer grade DIY components. We have a 100watt solar panel, a MPPT solar controller, a 12V50ah Lithium battery connected to a miniPC with a 10th gen i7, integrated graphics and 32GB of RAM…
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