This week, instead of a weeknote focused on #BigFriedChickenCompany and the work my comrades Marie Christine, Sean and Saeed have been contributing to, I’d like to devote some thought to a greater picture with regards to Minecraft.

Minecraft is somewhat singular. It’s a computer program which can be run individually by one person, or on a server as a space that can be shared by a myriad of different communities. “Minecraft the Phenomenon” is the runaway success of a lone 30 something high school drop-out programmer nicknamed Notch. The indie developer’s dream is to build another Minecraft – where the programming can be shoddy, the execution hit or miss, but the community rock solid. Multiplayer games are very fashionable lately, but whether one is part of the big bucks AAA industry or the indies starving in the garage community, everybody wants what Minecraft has: the sheer volume of people who love Minecraft, mod Minecraft, and build on Minecraft.

Microsoft this month put a price tag on the Minecraft Phenomenon – 2.5 billion dollars US.

Minecraft to join Microsoft http://t.co/ebAuoNC7mO pic.twitter.com/LePrYjCysC

— Microsoft (@Microsoft) September 15, 2014

This week, I’d hoped to write a little more on the communities of Minecraft I’ve experienced, but my attention was pulled away from this topic by the real world. I’ll be touching on my own experiences, but within a much larger context than my experiences either on the TAG minecraft server from last spring, or on the mLab server in which the #BigFriedChickenCompany is now being built anew.

A few weeks ago, I caught wind on twitter of a then-unconfirmed rumour that Mojang, the studio behind Minecraft, was being purchased by Microsoft. While the ideology behind the purchase did not really perturb me (“oh noes! my favourite billion-dollar indie videogame is going to become billion-dollar corporate sludge!”) I was intrigued to hear about what was going on with Minecraft’s renowned creator Notch.

The reaction on twitter against Notch was, at first, overwhelmingly negative while a certain core of gamers complained that Notch was “selling out.” Major news outlets even picked up on some of the negativity circulated by fans of the game. Notch wrote a blog post about his exit strategy – the blog post, written in the form of a letter to the Minecraft fans, reads like the writing of someone on the edge of burnout and emotional collapse. Notch writes that he doesn’t have the connection with the fans that he thought he did, he can no longer accept the mental and emotional strain of heading Minecraft (the program, the community and the phenomenon now indistinguishable) any longer.

The reason I’m focusing so much on Notch’s goodbye letter is because of the following paragraph:

I was at home with a bad cold a couple of weeks ago when the internet exploded with hate against me over some kind of EULA situation that I had nothing to do with. I was confused. I didn’t understand. I tweeted this in frustration. Later on, I watched the This is Phil Fish video on YouTube and started to realize I didn’t have the connection to my fans I thought I had. I’ve become a symbol. I don’t want to be a symbol, responsible for something huge that I don’t understand, that I don’t want to work on, that keeps coming back to me. I’m not an entrepreneur. I’m not a CEO. I’m a nerdy computer programmer who likes to have opinions on Twitter.

If you haven’t seen that Phil Fish documentary, please do. To talk about Phil Fish has nothing to do with Phil Fish but everything to do with fame, audience, the internet, and indie videogames.

It dawned on me then, that Notch leaving games is an event that cannot be unpacked without also addressing the extremely broken state of videogames (the programs, the community, the industry). The community, hobbled around an identity generated by corporations and viciously attacking those that don’t belong, is rabid. This concept of a removed, anonymous, money-throwing glob called “audience”, in the age of independent video game developers sharing on Twitter and the internet, is revealed to be a toxic place. Traditionally, the storyteller sitting around a campfire used the rhythms and whims of the audience to the story’s advantage. Where videogames are concerned, and game makers and story tellers are separated by a thin veneer of… something … the discontented audience glob continues to act like a pack of rabid dogs.

Of course, I’m talking about #GamerGate. (To bring you up to speed, I do believe the best article on the subject so far is this article on Cracked. Yes, the listicles of clickbait website.)

The sheer vitriol thrown at Anita Sarkeesian and Zoe Quinn in the past year by the amorphous glob known on Twitter as #GamerGate is terrifying. Offline and online, people are rallying together and asking themselves what on earth is going on. I’ve attended formal meetings at my university with fellow game makers, writers and researchers wondering what can be done to make video games a better place. Women especially are worried of having their real names on their projects. People are attacked online constantly, but there’s a concentration of inane, repetitive cruelty in the GamerGlob that’s making women question their decision to work in video games. Many have left in the past few months. Even Notch, a freshly-minted billionaire and infinitely more privileged than most targets of harassment and ire, writes that he afraid of losing his sanity over Minecraft and its relationship with the amorphous “audience” glob.

There is something wrong with the community that Microsoft just paid 2.5 billion dollars for. When I first began playing Minecraft for university, I was enchanted by the nature of the online community which was so different from my experiences playing Guild Wars and World of Warcraft. Six months later, the honeymoon’s over, I’ve seen the good, the worst and the ugly. I’ve seen communities built on Minecraft and wane on Minecraft, reflecting real world and in game rhythms. I’m still reflecting about what it means to build a community of modders and builders – as well as thoughtful gamers. That community cannot be built, on the TAG or mLab Minecraft servers or anywhere else, without a good hard look at the larger contexts in which these communal spaces exist.

Update

A really amazing game developer who on twitter goes by @mcclure111 astutely observes that this post outlines a problem but really doesn’t offer anything concrete as a solution.

I offer this post as a piece of the process of recognizing how deeply felt the warping of “audience” and “creator” is, how far removed videogames are from “story” and “storyteller” (was there ever a link at all?) and how poisoned the “gamer” identity is/always was. I am still reflecting on a solution. I hope you will too.

Further Reading

Carolyn Jong at TAG has compiled a very good list of resources here.