There are so many different connections. Is the server connected to the battery? To the controller? To the panels? To the power supply? To the internet? Am I connected to the internet? Can I connect to the server? Are the Minecraft authentication servers down? Do I have the right password, the right IP address, the right port, the right account, the right profile, the right amperage, the right solder, the right room?
Sometimes, when I build, it’s because I want to share the space with someone else. A base becomes a space for friendship, and collaboration. A house serves as proof of my participation on the server, and where I locate myself according to the other players changes how they will interact with me online. Design becomes a negotiation when you decide to settle down with another player, especially when that means sharing a storage system. Your building becomes a space for shared memory, where someone other than yourself can move through it, notice it, and respond to it.
This idea of regrowth or reclamation had a singularly humanist pretension in that the game’s progression, especially in the solipsistic single player world of Minecraft, was all for my own benefit. I wasn’t greening the world; I was greening MY world and indeed I only needed to change the land as much as my eye could see (if that). So, this grand ecological gesture which seemed at first so poignant suddenly struck me as just an enthusiastic form of gardening.
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.
Where we as individuals and we as members of communities fit into environments and ecologies is crucial to what we’re exploring with this project. In fact, we’ve gone through quite a few different titles for our modpack, many of them touching on the relationship between the player and the trees or the forests that we hope will return to the landscape- “Forest Keepers”, “Forest Wardens”, etc. What kind of relationship to the forest does the tower represent? Is the tower occupant a sentry or a witness? Is it a position of authority or a position of supplication? How does that relationship change once the forest is gone? If the tower were a monument, what would it be for?
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?