Minecraft is one of the most popular video games of all-time. With a blocky, pixelated aesthetic and no clear goal, the world-building pastime holds players captive to their own creativity. But Minecraft is much more than a game. Within the virtual space, real life problems are addressed, and solutions are crafted, block by block, by players around the world. In this week’s episode, Christine and JJ discuss the visuals and surprises found in this international video game phenomenon.
For links to content discussed in this episode, please visit the Talk Description To Me blog.
Minecraft is one of the most popular video games of all-time. With a blocky, pixelated aesthetic and no clear goal, the world-building pastime holds players captive to their own creativity. But Minecraft is much more than a game. Within the virtual space, real life problems are addressed, and solutions are crafted, block by block, by players around the world. In this week’s episode, Christine and JJ discuss the visuals and surprises found in this international video game phenomenon.
For links to content discussed in this episode, please visit the Talk Description To Me blog.
Talk description to me with Christine Malec and JJ Hunt.
Christine Malec:Hi, I'm Christine Malec.
JJ Hunt:And I'm JJ Hunt. This is talk description to Me where the visuals of current events and the world around us get hashtag in description rich conversations.
Christine Malec:Today we are diving into a realm of a deep mystery for me, which is video games and specifically Minecraft. And there's there's way more to talk about here than I had thought. And some of it is quite surprising. So for those of you like me still sort of crawling out of the ooze when it comes to this stuff, we're going to start with a very basic sense of what Minecraft is. So JJ, can you give us an overview?
JJ Hunt:Yeah, Minecraft is what they call a sandbox video game. Essentially, a sandbox game is a game that allows a high degree of creativity, for completing tasks and building worlds and so forth. So it's a it's about play in, in creation, that's a huge part of a sandbox game. Minecraft itself was launched in 2011, and has since become the best selling game of all time. They have currently sold over 200 million copies of the game, and there are 126 million active users per month. So it's just enormous. Minecraft essentially is a world that players explore and build using 3D blocks. It's a very blocky world. And what players do is they gather and use tools to extract raw materials. That's why it's called Minecraft, you're mining raw materials. And then you use those materials, to build items to build structures, and really to build landscapes. And you can like you can fight computer controlled mobs, or like enemies. Or you can cooperate or compete with other players, depending on the game mode that you've selected. There are lots of kind of game modes within the game. And there really aren't specific goals laid out by the game makers. It's not the kind of game where you need to track down these clues and get these gems and then you win. It's not about that. It's about world building, I really do mean world, you build the land, you can build water, you can build, you know buildings, structures, grand structures, small structures, you can build, like agriculture societies, it is it is actually endless, endless It is, it is a genuinely infinite game. And I needed help. Like if I was going to dive into this world, I can and I obviously will be describing the visuals of it. I can do that on my own, but to actually navigate the world. You know, I needed to enter some of this, I needed to enter the social element of it because it's so important I needed I needed guides. And so I talked to a few. I talked to a few different people I found a guy on Twitter named Chris aka Logic Pro X Gaming or Logic Pro 10 Gaming. And Chris is a vision impaired gamer who has created a server that is a place for blind and low vision Minecraft players. And he's got a YouTube channel you can go to. Chris was really helpful, he gave me some tips and explained how the game works for him. And I'm also very lucky, I have an in-house expert on Minecraft. Both of my kids play and my 14 year old is currently obsessed with Minecraft. He spends a huge percentage of his days online on the server and interacting socially and building dynamic worlds and it's it's a huge part of his life. And so he was kind enough to walk me through and show me the ropes and answer my questions. So that you know, as I move forward with these descriptions, I have a little bit more information about frankly what I'm describing because because I had help from, you know, people on the inside. So visually, Minecraft is it's a pixelated world built around blocks. So there's color, there's visual texture. There are details, but it's all pixels. So the smallest base element, the pixel is a square. And it's a solid color. And these squares are placed together side by side and an intricate patterns, such that you can create some detail and approximate the look of any person or object with these pixels, these squares. But there are no round corners ever, ever. Apparently, my son was telling me that they recently released a new feature, which was a telescope so that you could zoom in on something. And the telescope that the game makers offered, it was round like it was around and people went nuts like No, you cannot have a round up this was the community like you cannot give us a round object, it must be square. So they, they took it out, they redesigned it, and they rereleased it as a blocky telescope lens. Because it just was not it was not on everything is blocky, it squares. And I should make sure that folks understand the difference between blocks and pixels. So you build the world with blocks. And the blocks are made of pixels. So for the most part, you don't actually build things pixel by pixel only your skin design. So the look of your character, you can get that fine grain that detail that pixel by pixel. But generally you build block by block. And a standard block in Minecraft is built to represent one cubic meter. And that cubic meter is split into pixels, 16 pixels cubed, so 16 pixels by 16 pixels by 16 pixels. And a player is two blocks tall. So that means a player is a little bit larger than life size, about seven foot
three. And a player's skin:so you come up with a character, like your avatar, and that character's look can be customized. That's your skin. And they're kind of like ... It's a boxy humanoid character. Imagine if you will, like a toy action figure, but boxy, and there are no knees, no elbows. So you've got hips, you've got shoulders, and you've got neck movement, but you've got no knee movement and no elbow movement. So your legs are two side by side rectangles. And the torso is a rectangle, it's the exact same width of the two legs side by side, your boxy arms, they're attached to the side of the sides of the body. So they're kind of just stuck on the sides. And each arm is, is about the same size as a leg because it's all cubes. It's all based on these cubes, right? And then your head is a big cube. It's a big cube that's the same width as your torso. And as your player moves throughout the world. The legs swing back and forth, no knees, so just the legs swinging back and forth, and your arms, they can pivot and rotate from the shoulders. But again, no elbows, right. So there's these long, straight rectangular arms and they can pivot from the shoulders, no elbows, and your head will tilt back and forth and rotate. There's a little bit of twisting movement at the waist. But otherwise, it's these blocky boxy movements.
Christine Malec:Okay, I'm preoccupied here because I thought the whole point of computers and technology was to sort of simulate reality not to live in a reality that looks like Lego. So is it? Yeah. Well, I guess I have several questions. But is the look particular to Minecraft? Like, do you see a screen go out? That's Minecraft, you know it right away?
JJ Hunt:Absolutely. It is. It is clear. I mean, it's based on early computer graphics.
Christine Malec:Yeah, it sounds like something from the early 90s or something? Why is it still a thing?
JJ Hunt:Ya, even earlier. Well, they kind of came back. I mean, I, I if I had to guess and I' not sure if this plays out i And the characters, are they individualized or gendered? Or the actual history of the com any, but because this world is ever expanding and never ending you can't have the Define d tail that you could have in a game that's, that's got more, mo e of a cinematic animation th t is brilliantly precise and is trying to replicate the exact look of the world. It's not photorealistic because you just don't have the computing power to do so. So I think the early version, probably there was an element of just, it's practical. You need it to be closer to ight bit technology. But then i's become the look. It is absolu ely clearly identifiable These pixels, these exagger ted square pixels, solid colors side by side. It's, I mean, it's a clear identifier. It's a d sign aesthetic at this point. how are they individuated? I mean, you can you can turn your character into anything. They are customizable in their look, but not so much in the design. So you can have like, there are a few things you can add. You can add armor, you can add wings, if you get a certain kind of technology within the game. But you are, I think, always the same size, you can just, you can just change your skin. And then when characters encounter each other, there's this crouching bow action that they do, which is assigned a friendly greeting. So like the, the character will kind of do this little bow and
Christine Malec:Do they look robotic?
JJ Hunt:Very. Yes, it's a stiff robotic movement.
Christine Malec:Ok. Ok.
JJ Hunt:That's a great word for it. Robotic is perfect. And then you move. This body moves. And you can, you can build or dig or fight or break things. And it's all with the same basic action, which is a swinging of the arm. And when you swing your arm, it all depends on what tool you're holding, or what resource you've selected. And that will determine what happens when you swing your arm. So if you swing a shovel or an axe at the ground, and it's dirt, a cube of dirt will disappear. You've just dug a small hole that just vanish. And if you swing your sword at an animal or an enemy enemies are called mobs that's short for mobile, then that enemy if you swing your sword at it, it'll flash red to indicate that you've hit it and it's in that animal or enemy is losing health. And then once you've kind of done enough damage, little hearts will float off of the animal or enemy and and then they'll vanish. And eventually that animal will tip over and will vanish in a small puff of gray smoke. And if it's an animal that you have just killed, you will get the raw elements. So a feather will appear, or a piece of meat will appear, or leather will appear. And then you collect them, and they get added to your inventory. And if it's an animal or if it's a mob or an enemy that you've killed, a little, like a small green orb will drop after the the enemy has disappeared. It'll bob along and you kind of have to get that orb, and then you gain experience points. And that's how you advance. That's how your character grows. And that's how you navigate this world.
Christine Malec:Is there stuff to be said about the landscape?
JJ Hunt:Yeah, it's, it's extraordinary. These landscapes, because they're, I mean, you can build anything! You you've got wood blocks and soil blocks, and cobblestone and slate, and in all I think there are, I've read there are more than 400 different kinds of base elements. There's water! And so people build just incredible landscapes of waterfalls, and trees and streams and fields and, and the scale! It really is endless. It's endless. There are auto generated worlds, and then people adjust and adapt those to their own desires. The thing about building with dots or pixels is that when you only use a few to create something on a small scale, it looks really boxy. Very simple, right? So say you got... there's a character called a Creeper. It's one of the one of the bad guys one of the enemies that you're going to face is a Creeper. It's a green kind of camouflage looking thing because it's got, the pixels in the in its cubes are different greens, some browns and some grays. It's kind of got a camouflage looking green. It's got a cube head. And the eyes are these black squares, two by two. So you know two black squares by two black squares, those are the eyes. There's no detail involved in that, right because it's just too small. But when you use that same technique of building with blocks and pixels on a bigger scale, and then you zoom out to look at that thing from a distance, now you get to see more detail because these things are closer together and you're farther away. So if you're building something like a little cabin, well then you can maybe build some things into into your windows where you can have window panes and maybe there's, you know, there's a little flower box under your window in your cabin. What if you build a castle and you zoom out even further? Well, now you've got room you can create gargoyles. Because you're further, you're far enough away you can see some of those things. You're building bigger and bigger. By the time you build something like a mountain you've gotten incredibly detailed. You've got an opportunity for detail that you didn't have when you were building small.
Christine Malec:Was there anything striking in terms of creations or content that you came across?
JJ Hunt:Oh yeah. I mean, one of the reasons I originally wanted to do this, and this is something you and I had talked about when I first learned about this, was the Uncensored Library. And I read about I read an article about this. And I was just fascinated. So the uncensored library is an actual place that you can visit. But you can only do so as a guest, you cannot build it, you cannot destroy it, you can visit other people can visit there too. And there are multiple copies of this library spread around the world, so no one can shut it down. If it gets such shut down, if one gets shut down, there are dozens more just like it, they house the same information. And what this library is, is a place where articles where pieces of journalism that have been banned in various places around the world can be found online in the Minecraft world. And again, this is one of the it's a brilliant example of this where theoretically, if what you wanted to do is create a create a digital way to get around censorship, laws and rules in various places around the world. You could create a server and have one simply designed book, and any character could walk up to it, click on that one simply designed book and you have access to these articles, which is that technically how that works in this uncensored library. But what they did was they created a structure a virtual digital structure that was as grand and lofty as the ideals of this concept, right? Like instead of making it small, they made it massive. Instead of making it simple, they made it incredibly ornate and I mean, extraordinarily ornate. It is huge! This library is, okay, first of all, you enter it. It's an island. It's a roughly square Island and the library occupies the entire island. It's roughly square shape with their craggly shorelines of gray, rocky cliffs, and the island is dotted with trees. And then the grounds of the library are a grassy, they have manicured lawns, and it's like in a symmetrical pattern. So there's like a symmetrical grid of formal gardens that surround this building. And some of these gardens have found in some have footpads. The building itself is a built in a neoclassical style. And it's a it's got a massive domed rotunda at its core, and then two parallel wings leading off of both sides, and the back, and each of these wings has vaulted ceilings with a strip of skylights down the center. The front of the library, the entrance is like a classical columned portico with a piqued pediment. And in front of the library down a formal footpath, there's a statue, a statue of a hand gripping a fountain pen. So this is depicted from the wrist up. It's like a fist in the air, very similar. We've talked about like the Black Power salute, very similar to that.
Christine Malec:Hm hm.
JJ Hunt:And there's a pen, a fountain pen gripped in this fist, the pen is parallel to the ground, the nib is sticking out the thumb side, the base of the pen out the other, and the library is. I mean, it's enormous, I have no idea if you if you actually took this from the Minecraft world, given the dimensions, we've already talked about that one meter cube for each block. I'm not sure how big it would be in real life, but it's enormous. This thing took two months to plan, three months to build. And they had 24 builders from 16 countries who were creating this, there are 12.5 million blocks that create this building. It's enormous. And it houses 200 books, virtual books, and each book, you walk up to a pedestal, you open a digital looking book. And what appears on your screen is this brown frame that looks like the page of a book opens and there is digital, pixelated writing on it, and you can flip through pages. You can download those into your inventory, those books, and each book is a banned article written by an at risk journalists. It's so huge and so ornate and so involved that when you're navigating the building from the inside, your computer can't load all of the information at once. So as you enter a new space, it builds up around you block by block that all of the details start pouring in. It's Extraordinary. I've never been in a virtual space like this before, it was incredible.
Christine Malec:I want to just take a step back and do the big picture so that everyone's clear, including me, on what's going on. So Minecraft is a game. But the the Uncensored Library is a construct people have made within the game to circumvent governments that censor journalists. And in the construct which exists in Minecraft, there, you can find articles that people are unable to publish in their home country. So this is really subversive. Have I got the framework right?
JJ Hunt:You've got it. That's exactly right. When I first went in, when I first saw this building, I literally gasped. Ah! I couldn't believe it. It was so huge. It's so ornate.
Christine Malec:Was it hard to get a sense of scale? Because it's building itself slowly? Like how did you understand the the scale involved?
JJ Hunt:So when you first arrive, you enter the world, and you enter on the ground. And, you know, looking at, I think it's the statue? One of the first things that you see this hand gripping the pen, and you can see the building in the background. But it's like... being too close to anything that grand you can't get a sense of it. Now luckily, it's Minecraft, you can fly! So what we did was, my son floated us up. And as we were going up, he was like,"Geez, we're above the clouds."
Christine Malec:Oh! Oh wow.
JJ Hunt:There's a level of clouds and the building is higher than the clouds. And he said "I think that they must
Christine Malec:Ha ha! have gotten permission to extend the height, because there is a height maximum when you're building in this world." He thought it was above what what you would normally encounter
JJ Hunt:It would just take too long. So they have, you can when you're building trees or mountains or whatever. We just kept going up and up. We had to pull out in order to see the whole thing. And it was only then when we had seen the whole
thing that I realized:it's eno mous. It's just so big. And then we went back down into the worl. And instead of walking rom that statue to the building we teleported. There's are lit le teleportation pads t at you can jump on because it's so big. Like, to get your li tle character to tuk tu tuk tuk tuk, walk it all. teleport. So we teleported inside. And we got into the center into this dome. And you look up from the inside, you'd like literally tip your head back and you look up in from the center of this main dome in the ceiling assist the this domed glass skylight above you, and all the way around the this, you know, this rotunda are flags of the world. And then you turn you look down and there's a glass floor. And underneath the glass floor there's an inlaid map of the world. And because you're on a glass floor that's on a higher level then then the inlaid map, as you move, the perspective shifts a little bit because you're not walking right on it. There's distance between the two, so you get a sense of depth and size and scale.
Christine Malec:Woah!
JJ Hunt:Oh, it's super trippy. And again, there's like, there are paintings that are in hanging like in a museum that have been done in pixels. There are stained glass windows, these ornate what you know, inlaid floors. I'm calling them inlaid because they're, I mean, they look marbleized, they're like marble floors with intricate patterns. It's just extraordinary. And then to move around the space it takes, it takes forever. And I've actually lost your question because I'm just I get so swept up in describing the experience!
Christine Malec:Me too!
JJ Hunt:It was just incredible.
Christine Malec:I've lost my question too. Your son who is steeped in it, it sounds like he was even impressed.
JJ Hunt:He was. He understood how to navigate it, but you know, it took him time to do so because it's all so big. You would go to one room, and you'd teleport in, and then you'd want to, like say "I want to go all the way up to the top!" And so you float to the ceiling and then you look down. "Oh, there's a labyrinth on the ground in front of us!" There's a labyrinth in one room I think it's , I'm not sure if it's in the Vietnamese room, but there's a labyrinth in order to get to the the pedestal which opens up and gives you access to the books in the in the room. And you can just float to it or teleport to it, but you can also access it through this labyrinth. The labyrinth is there to represent the governmental red tape that is put in front of people who are trying to access it.
Christine Malec:Hmmmm.
JJ Hunt:So even if this journalism is not full banned it's hidden in a labyrinth. So they create a physical Labyrinth, right? And this is what, this is what it does. When you create a visual manifestation of these ideas, of these struggles, of the importance of these things, you feel it. It has an impact. And I had an absolutely emotional response to being in this space. Absolutely.
Christine Malec:How so?
JJ Hunt:Well, it's like... I enjoy traveling and going to the grand municipal buildings, civic institutions. And, you know, sometimes when you walk into these spaces, you get the sense that the people who created them, they wanted you to understand that you are small and the world is big. That the ideals that the building represents are bigger than you. And when I was in this library, and when I say "In" I mean I was watching a screen and my son's avatar was physically in that space.
Christine Malec:Gasp! Yeah.
JJ Hunt:I was still having that emotional response. I was, I was gasping. I was like, "Oh, can you look over there? What's that over there." And you know, we were exploring the nooks and crannies. Looking at the books. They've created the look of books all along the walls. And so you feel, even if you can't access each one of those books, individually, you can only do it through the books on the pedestal, being surrounded by all of these virtual books, and tapestries, and flags of the world. I literally choked up. There were several times when I was choked up by the effort, the idea, the need for this. It was... it was a response that was as legitimate and real as the response I have physically when I'm in a grand Cathedral, when I'm traveling around the world.
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