With construction on the BFC coming to a close, an eerie silence has fallen over the construction site, punctuated only by the chirping of tiny modded crickets intent on permeating the perimeter. We’ve got a prime location, ease of access thanks to the server’s teleportation system, and enough fried chicken to cause a significant spike in obesity. All we’re missing – and this is important, of course, for any franchise that hopes to thrive – are the customers.

In this weekpost (and I use the term loosely, since it’s been a little more than a week on which I’m reflecting), there  are a few things to discuss: Who are our customers? What does it mean to even be a customer? What’s next for BFC, the server, and the chickens? (Well, okay, we know the fate of the latter: delicious, fiery doom). My colleague Marie-Christine and I spoke to Dr. Wershler in a decidedly non-virtual setting, and we discussed the progression of the research.

(First of all – and this is vital – there is something novel (and awesome?) about making use of a professor’s office hours to talk, at length, about a video game; “Void Chests are easy to make; just get an Ender Pearl from an Enderman and eight pieces of obsidian” is, I imagine, not the kind of advice often uttered in the halls of the English Department – I can only hope that that is slowly changing.  Secondly, we touched on some of the very questions I posed above.)

Truthfully, on the Vanilla server, I had no idea the BFC existed. We, at Team Rocket, were kept well-fed by our own chicken cooker constructed by Marie (Arkel_Angel) and Winterchill, and I never really questioned how other groups were surviving. Of course, the immediate proximity and availability of food was important for our construction; I’d imagine it was the same case for the other teams as well, but I was never wholly concerned with how they were keeping themselves nourished. Both projects – certainly an experience of learning through building – have at least succeeded in shedding light on the human condition, in a fairly basic way. ‘People need food to nourish themselves and use that energy to further innovate’ isn’t the most mind-shattering epiphany, but it does raise some interesting questions about Minecraft and its relation to food: What ideology is the game making when the most efficient diet is meat-only? In a game so loosely tethered to a definitive genre, what does the inclusion of a ‘Hunger Bar’ say about it? What ideology is the game making by including only that one human need in the game, when others (some intrinsically tied to the act of eating!) were excluded?

Which brings me back to the idea of customers. Dr. Wershler mentioned creating a schematic for the BFC building for use in future projects – namely, for ENGL 398D’s Vanilla server to be reused in an upcoming semester. Does this mean that, by extension, our customers are going to be future students who need this food-source to facilitate their academic pursuits? I think the nature of the server, come next semester, is going to be very different – students will be roaming the digital ruins of our class’s work, for one thing, and will now have immediate access to a never-ending supply of food. This will, in theory, expedite work as, again, that basic human need for food will be more-or-less taken care of. This, I think, is an example of Raymond’s idea of the “open-source commons” that I touched upon in my last weeknote. Our contribution here isn’t just facilitating the work of TAG members, but will soon, hopefully, aid an entire classroom.

BFC’s products are served exclusively to-go, just the way our busy clientele of miners, undead-slayers, and witches like it.

I find it fascinating that the TAG server makes use of the Hunger Bar at all, and I’m curious as to when and how that decision was made. On a server where you can mitigate falling damage with modded equipment, lessen travel time with flying or teleportation, and access an in-game library of recipes and formulas, what was keeping the administrators from doing away with this one particular hindrance? A quick Google search tells me that mods do exist to remove the Hunger Bar entirely, yet it was intentionally retained. Was this to encourage innovation, such as in the form of the BFC? Was it to keep the original sense of challenge and survival found on a vanilla server? Was it to maintain a shred of humanity in our player avatars?

Or do we just find some strange, vicarious gratification from messily ingesting pixellated chicken?