Going into this new project, I’m excited about a number of things: having a chance to flex my creative and critical thinking skills, to dip my feet into the familiar worlds of ideological frameworks and implicit rules of play, and to undoubtedly have my mind blown by the most rudimentary of Minecraft mechanics that no one will find quite as amazing because they actually know what they’re doing because they’ve long since lost the child-like wonder with which I view the world.

For example: learning that people used Minecraft to stage simulated Hunger Games in a literally limitless variety of maps both astounded me and made perfect sense. It was a new way of playing Minecraft that did away with the overwhelming freedom and daunting openness with which I had so strongly come to associate the game, replaced instead with short bursts of play that rarely lasted beyond twenty minutes, clear objectives, and an understandably addictive premise: outlive everyone, through any means necessary.

Well, not any means – let’s talk about that.

Brent mentioned at our last meeting that in a server he played on, his choice to hide underwater until he was the last player alive got him expelled from the game. I’m assuming this was not an explicitly given rule, and in fact, one can assume that in an actual Hunger Game it’d be an entirely legitimate tactic (barring our species’ unfortunate tendency to, well, drown). This speaks to the gradual metamorphosis of the term ‘Hunger Games’ as it is used within the Minecraft community, an idea discussed between Marie-Christine and Nic, as mentioned in his weeknote, a metamorphosis that sees the term being used to describe any kind of PVP/Battle Royale/Arena match being held between players, with a sprinkling of Hunger Games iconography.

To break things down into some rudimentary literary elements (can you guess what my Major is yet?) the narrative structure of a Hunger Game is heavily reliant on the conflicts of ‘man vs. man’, and ‘man vs. nature’ (which also bleeds back into ‘man vs. man’, if only because nature, in the case of the arenas, is often manipulated and controlled by the overseers of the games – but even so). The narrative structure of a Hungercraft match largely does away with ‘man vs. nature’, or at least employs it in a different manner: the landscape may serve as a general obstacle between you and whatever implement you’re about to use to kill some guy, but killing some guy is still your number one priority. The arena is no longer one you have to survive, and I think it’s apparent that our team wants to bring that back into focus.

I don’t know why he’s not wearing a shirt either, but I think it’s completely fair to guess that it serves as a stylistic choice made to further illustrate my point: who needs clothing to survive the elements when you have a sword with which to stab them? I think I’m on to something.

Which then begs the question: why was man’s tireless conflict with nature phased out of the Hungercraft phenomenon? Was it too troublesome to implement? (My aforementioned child-like worldview insists that, no, anything and everything is possible in Minecraft because it was created to sate our innermost cravings for godhood). Did it lead to an inevitable stalemate, in which everyone took to the seas, buckets in hand, to live there for eternity? Was it simply deemed uninteresting to watch, as an e-sports-like viewing culture became a thriving part of Hungercraft? If the answers to any or all of these questions is ‘yes’, what can we do for them to change?

We have some ideas cooking.

Some stray thoughts, to possibly grow up into full-fledged weeknotes of their own some day:

• I don’t need to convince anyone of Minecraft’s flexibility, but the phenomenon of creating games within games – of creating play within play – has always interested me. I can think of a handful of instances of this – even something as simple as playing hide & seek with friends in an MMO.
• To tie this project into our last, I wonder here how the presence of a BFC location might affect a Hungercraft match. It would only truly be useful if starvation was a real threat, in which case placing it an open or dangerous location could lead to interesting results. How would it fit into the ideology of The Hunger Games’ narrative?
• Also relevant to the BFC project: I’m curious to see how construction will go once we start building our own arena. Will the concept of carpentry still apply as we build in creative mode?
• At what point in a piece of pop culture’s dissemination does it become so ubiquitous that its name alone evokes a ritualized series of events that can be re-enacted by those who never engaged with the original literature itself?
• On that note, what can be said about the ritualistic nature of Hunger Games/Hungercraft matches? What of the themes of human sacrifice so overtly at play?