Big Fried Chicken Post-Mortem
Note: A project post-mortem is a process through which a group (or in this case, an individual) reviews qualitative and quantitative data after the completion of a project. As the practical aspect of the Big Fried Chicken project is over, I would like to remark on its effects on the mLab server and note down some other observations for the benefit of the next generation of Minecraft projects, the one that focuses on the Hunger Games.
While some of this post-mortem collects my own thoughts and experiences chronicling the aftermath of BFC on the mLab, the last part of this post collects quotations from other players on the mLab and their thoughts on the experiment as a whole. This is my last blog post on #bigfriedchickencompany.
Current State of the BFC
It’s been several months since there’s been much of any activity on the mLab server’s Big Fried Chicken. The restaurant is a quiet, desolate landscape amongst other grand, but equally lonesome-seeming structures that have sprouted around Site Lambda. The machines in the factories that haven’t been cannibalized work without any supervision, powered by all sorts of machinations, and Site Lambda rests in silence on the coast, punctured rarely by the odd visit from the few players still using its steel furnaces or ore washing machines below.
View of the BFC restaurant and some other relics
Big Fried Chicken has decayed – through various acts of vandalism (mostly while roleplaying, but I can’t help but notice that many relatively precious decorative blocks have also been pilfered), the chicken cooking machine is broken, but more than any of this is a sense of loneliness walking around the site. Half-built, half-burned down BFC HQ, the restaurant itself, a burned down Windows logo, an empty railroad, something called EEPsite that sits gargantuan and unfinished on the hill in the background, and finally Site Lambda itself and it’s empty, cavernous, basement.
Some of the desolation around the Big Fried Chicken is because of the natural ebb and flow of players on the server – there aren’t quite as many active players as there was last year. And those players still online are occupied with projects far to the south of Site Lambda, or on the Moon.
The mod, called the Spice of Life, also adds lunch bags that help deal with food diversity and inventory space.
Gaming Hunger
Another possible reason BFC in particular feels so desolate may have to do with a few new modifications to the mLab server. BFC’s usefulness to players on the server relied on the fact that the original—vanilla—Minecraft game (1) rewards the player for consuming ungodly amounts of meat, and (2) does not care about a balanced diet. In the time since the completion of the BFC project, there has been the addition of a modification which changes that game mechanic fundamentally: food diversity is now a requirement for thriving on the server. In other words: you can’t eat fried chicken ad nauseum anymore. The game tracks the last 24 types of food your Minecraft avatar has consumed, and calculates how effective the food is based on how much of it was eaten. The more of a single type is consumed, the less effective that food becomes. This has put a large emphasis on the need for a great variety of food. It’s forced some players to invest in armour with food saturation enchantments (available as rare treasure in dungeons) – or it has put more of the player’s focus back on farming. In my case, I decided to focus on farming closer to my home base. It is interesting how, because of a mod that forces the player to eat a diverse range of foods, BFC’s usefulness may have been curbed.
Southern Expansion
While the server has been quiet, that doesn’t mean stagnation. The railway tracks have been upgraded and expanded – and several new train lines have been added, including a purple line that extends far to the south of Site Lamdba. Three cities have popped up in the south: Spectrapolis, Xochimilco, and Morbihan. The three cities follow three interesting themes : Spectrapolis is rainbow colored and protected by some of the most technologically-advanced machines available on the server (from mods such as Galacticraft and Factorization, and many others). Xochimilco is, amongst other things, a project of honouring some aspects of Mexican culture that her creator wanted to bring to the game. Morbihan, my own city-project, is an exercise in seeing how explicitly godlike I can become within the limits of the game. Side note: I really loved Peter Molyneux’s 2001 god simulator Black and White and may be trying to recreate some of that within the mLab server.
Spectrapolis! The massive over-spawning of Iron Golems is probably Spectrapolis’ most poignant mystery…
Xochimilco from above, connected via rail to Morbihan (south) and Spectrapolis (north)
Morbihan, far to the south
All three cities are refurbished NPC villages, which originally spring up here and there on Minecraft’s landscape. They are very imaginative and really beautiful. I bring your attention to them not only because I find it cool how several Minecraft players have all moved beyond home bases to home cities, but, also, because in Morbihan, BFC’s legacy continues.
The sign above the jukebox reads “le client n’a jamais raison” – ie, the customer is always wrong
Poulet Frit Infernal
BFC owes its name to a popular fried chicken restaurant that already exists outside of Minecraft. In Québec, the translation of KFC to the French is PFK, as in Poulet Frit Kentucky. With a little twist, I present to you a version of the BFC which was built in Morbihan, called Poulet Frit Infernal.
It’s powered by a Thaumcraft multi-block structure called the Infernal Furnace. The furnace not only produces fried chicken, it also produces chicken nuggets, a food item added by the Thaumcraft mod.
The restaurant has lost only a fraction of its family friendly appeal.
Calcifer, the fire demon held inside the infernal furnace, spits out cooked chicken and chicken nuggets at a leisurely pace. Thank you Thaumcraft or this would never have been possible.
Poulet Frit Infernal is not only BFC’s legacy, it can also function as parody. The machinery is literally infernal, with lava bubbling up through the paved floor, and what the player eats has literally been digested and then spat out by a demon. The decor is dark and there are chains on the windows – though the open terrasse setup with a stunning view of the harbour downplays the macabre nicely. The terrasse also a beautiful view of the moonrise, and there are off-putting signs everywhere reminding the patrons to tip the caged demon, forever locked into a hellish incarnation of a fast food franchise.
Notes
- Other than the video game-specific rules inherent to Minecraft, the mLab server has socially-enforced rules, also called “local rules”, rules that players create within their own social groups, or by the server’s host. BFC’s interactions (as a project and as a digital structure) with some of these local rules was sometimes a bit rocky.
- It is interesting to see how players take to industrialization and automation. Some players shy away from it, perhaps because it makes the game too easy too fast (as if playing on “godmode”/creative mode). Other players spend all their time creating machines that never stop working. There are also ideological reasons against industrialization that have been carried over from the non-digital world.
- For more conclusive conclusions about the BFC and how it was built, you can also check out my slides here from a presentation on the topic last spring.
Bonus Section! Quotes from various mLab Players about BFC:
These quotes are from mLab players not attached to the project. I asked them if they would be willing to share a sentence (or more) on what they thought of the BFC on their server. These quotes are presented in no particular order, anonymously, and with some editing to preserve clarity. I thought it would be useful to catalogue these responses for posterity.
- I was personally disturbed by the ownership of the server that was displayed, and wanted nothing to do with the project.
- I think it’s an interesting idea. it fits with the spirit of factorization (making players’ life easier) on the server, however it never became part of the ecosystem. I think it’s partially because we [the server’s players] didn’t build it. Hired workforces built it and that didn’t blend organically with the “society” on the server. The group of people that play on the server are a liberal bunch who frown upon big corporations in real life and that translates to the game. This server is peculiar because we tried to take into account the NPC (non playable characters) and in that context, having a fast food restaurant mercilessly massacring chickens by the thousands is not something people will support.
- I saw it as literally nothing more than a slightly eyesoreish source of free murder-flavoured nutrition.
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[On the subject of] the actual building and machine itself I don’t have much to say really. It’s kind of nice but also it’s really weird how it’s just an exact copy of an existing design. It ignores all the ways in which the mods on the server could make accomplishing the task easier or more interesting. What I thought was kind of weird was mainly these things: because the server was the site of this research project it raised some issues about where the ownership of the server rested and who was working for who, which only got more confusing as time went on as new people were hired and the server was taken out of the mLab, without the knowledge of the players or the original maintainer of the server. Because the server was moved to a new locked location, the server’s performance dropped, players stopped going online. Eventually the server was returned, but the entire ordeal seems illustrative of the way academia appropriates students’ work. [Because of all the issues with regards to the ownership of the server] I didn’t keep a super close eye on the project itself but it seems that undergrads were basically hired to build the fried chicken thing after a detailed blueprint [and] some of them hadn’t even played minecraft before? I’m not sure what the goal of the study was really, but I hope it wasn’t to study anything representative of typical minecraft play. You had people playing on the server not because they enjoy it but because it’s a job, and instructions can restrict the creative freedom that is kind of a big part of Minecraft. This is a super obvious example of alienation in the Marxist sense.
- I have only known the BFC as a ruin which makes it seem kind of legendary. I’ve been pillaging it for building supplies.
