Weeknote 1: Since we are in an early phase of our endeavor, I want to work on ideas, brainstorming on the essence.

Introductive Parenthesis: Survival games are relying on empathy and identification.

It is most often ‘I’ that must survive. In Minecraft especially ‘I’ want to survive and collect resource in order to be able to explore, build and do whatever a lifesize lego world could allow ‘me’ to. Steve, avatar, is an empty shell that I put on. The constraints of the virtual world are directly applied on me, the subject. Studying social behaviours in Minecraft is therefore especially interesting because we are focusing on subjects more than roles. Constraints are applied on personal will, not storylines.

Idea 1: Hunger Games, or the study of tuneling behaviours.

Yes, we want players to act a certain way. Or rather we want through this experiment to study constraints (exlicit and implicit) and resulting (or alternatively emerging) behaviours. Within a group of subjects. It’s interesting because game studies is relatively new within the field. Yet it is still very abstract and swimming in the dense field of behavourial studies, which may explain indecision (at least mine) in terms of what we seek to observe.

But let’s reverse my reflection. What is there in Hunger Games modes, in Battle Royals, in Royal Rumbles that creates players, viewers and fans, as well as sholarly interest? I personally think it comes down to an itensified and theatralized cooperation/defection dilemma. I believe it is this pivotal behaviour, this tension between the individual and the group that interest us in these simulated pre-societal environment.

The thing is that these simulations are not neutral and the interest lays on how to orient constraints, how to create conventions and thus how to tunnel behaviours. The idea behind Battle Royal and the Hunger Games as fiction is that there is an actual agent tunelling behaviour into raw animal struggle, and that the protagonists choose to rebel against it. One could argue this agency is a direct embodiement of capitalist ideology of competition, but in a broader scale, any ideology tunnels behaviour. Since players won’t come at us with the guillotine, what we might seek then and what the genre aims at in general is the reflection of both subjects and observers on the dynamics of this tunelling.

Idea 2: Hitting two birds in one block.

Where is hunger in the Hunger Games? Well at least it is in Minecraft. And let’s properly balance what we have in hands, Hunger Games and Minecraft. If Hunger Games brings us what I discussed above, what about Minecraft?

I think we should not forget Minecraft’s intransic rhetoric, the world is yours. The obstacles to what you want to make of it are the survival constraints. Minecraft is never won entirely but increasingly controlled through knowledge. Therefore Minecraft, can come down to the idea of resource management. Especially if spatially limited. Which we can do.

Remember the ‘resource war’ hoax. (http://www.pcgamer.com/minecraft-experiment-devolves-into-devastating-resource-war/). The idea relied on an intense and lengthy play creating extreme conditions and behaviours. It lead to a fun fiction. Nevertheless the key idea behind this hoax and resource-management within a community comes down once again to what I discussed above: defection/cooperation.

So what if we did not demake the game but on the contrary took full advantage of it as a platform. What use could we make of both the resource management and the behaviour tunelling?

Conclusion: Survival and Collective Action Problems

What if we orientated the project towards Collective Action Problems? CAP is a term that encompasses the facing of problems that, by their scale and complexity, can only be resolved collectively: global warming, global capitalism, global financial empires or basically ”our joyous self-destruction”. CAPs depend as well the same old cooperation\defection dilemma, individual interest VS common good. Therefore, I propose that (one of) the constraint(s) is one that can only be survived collectively in the long-term.

What if we made a Game of Hunger which induces to survive without precising alone or together. What if we made resource-management the pressure that impedes this survival. What if lava was slowly going up but could be levelled down by a collective action of some sort? How to make this choice implicit? Or what if the individual action was the one making the lava go up (as burning coal making the lava go increasingly up)?

To sum up, I think it would be particularly interesting to have a spatially restricted map that is short-term if players choose to defect (with a Hunger Games winner) but could go endlessly if players choose to play cooperatively.