After completing my thesis, the academic portion of my brain shut down for a long time. It has been almost a year now since I have seriously written an essay or even read an academic text. A part of me (mainly the brain) feels very guilty about this, but the more physical portions of my body sigh relief every day. The work of creating an essay is long and thankless. It is hard on the body too, like inverse exercise. When seriously writing, I become nocturnal, I eat very little, and I jerk off constantly to the point of exhaustion. It isn’t a pretty sight.
Well, the old itch is starting to act up again. Now that my Minecraft mod is complete, memories of writing projects and ideas are starting to trickle back into my shower thoughts. Now that I am not shackled to a University, I can focus on exploring ideas that really speak to my interests. Of course, a lot of it surrounds video games. Now that I am not explicitly studying English, I can remove the explicit literary basis of my work and focus specifically on video games and gaming culture. I would like to attempt a true video game essay, and this time I want to do it write. No deadlines, no nocturnal cycles–writing for myself! And if it is good enough, perhaps I can share it with the world. I am old enough now to realize that greatness in writing takes endurance.
So, what have I been thinking about? My thesis focused on Robinsonades and ends with an analysis of “Robinsonade Games,” pretty much only talking about Minecraft. A Robinsonade, if you don’t know, is a genre of survival stories that begins with a shipwreck/planecrash/whatever and follows the adventures of trials of a protagonist surviving and thriving in the wild. “Robinsonade Games” is a term I have coined to describe video games that use this premise as a basis for open-ended gameplay loops. The popular but less descriptive term is “open world” games. As I detail briefly in my thesis, these kinds of games have dominated the popular market. From Minecraft to Breath of the Wild to the new and fantastic Elden Ring, open world exploration coupled with crafting and unscripted engagement with game objects has absolutely captivated the world.
These kinds of games are captivating because they cast aside traditional media tropes like linear plot and dialogue in favor of a more intuitive approach to play. They do not bog players down with tutorials or rules because there is intrinsic fun in discovering the game for oneself. Open world games often resemble toys (or a SANDBOX) more than traditional, story driven games. Like a bag of blocks or a forest trail, the game world provides players everything they need to make their own fun. What REALLY captivates me about these kinds of games how, in the absence of prescribed gameplay, players and communities of players invent their own styles of play. THAT is what my essays will seek to explore.
One of the few good parts of my thesis are the segments in which I attempt to describe how the popular approaches to playing Minecraft have changed over the course of a decade. I cite early survival tutorials and Lets Plays from 2011 and compare them to Dream’s Manhunts (if you don’t know what those are, watch this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y7t5B69G0Dw — A+ Minecraft content!!!). The popular Minecraft content from 2011-2012 presents the game as a kind of Crusoe-esque roleplay. The modern speedrunning tradition spearheaded by the likes of Dream, or the esport-ish Hypixel minigame servers, use Minecraft in a totally new way that redefine how the game is perceived. In my view, the power of these video games is that they provide a means for transforming gameplay into narrative. Really great games offer an unlimited potential for narrative building. I want to dig into this diversity of gameplay and explore how communities of players can influence popular modes of play, or innovate play, or create new and unintended experiences in the virtual world.
This is all pretty rough, as you can tell. I think I want to start with Factorio, a brilliant Robinsonade Game about an industrialist crash landing on an alien planet and exploiting the land to build automated factories and kill natives. Sci-fi Hatchet! Until then, thanks for reading.
OR… I could just work on Super Better Than Wolves version 2.0… 😛
Not a commercially viable product, but it sure is fun.