Recently I was on YouTube, looking for something to fill a space of 20 minutes or so, and because the YouTube algorithm gave up on showing me good videos several years ago, it suggested I watch something called “A Genuine Critique of Minecraft.” Now, 99% of the time the word “critique” in a YouTube title means you’re getting a rambling, structureless bit of nonsense by somebody who last “critiqued” something in a high school English class, but the other 1% of the time it might be attached to something genuinely thoughtful. Because I have some sort of brain disease, I will roll those dice every time.
This video was from a channel called ibxtoycat, who I name here not to put on blast (I promise I’m not trying to be mean to this guy, despite all the stuff I’m about to say. Not that I’m exactly capable of being mean in a way that matters, he has 1.9 million YouTube subscribers and I’m writing a blog post that I’m only really 100% sure will be read by my brother and my girlfriend), but to make it so that you, reader, can go watch this video, if you’re so inclined. The channel mostly covers Minecraft news. This would’ve been a red flag, had I looked at the channel before watching the video. The video’s creator is a Minecraft fan. Never trust a fan to deliver a “critique.” Nobody is less fair to a thing than a thing’s longtime fan. Yes: even a hater would have produced a better “critique” of Minecraft than this guy did. A hater probably would’ve just called the game boring and moved on, and, well, I like Minecraft, but I can’t really argue with that. Ibxtoycat’s “critique” was not so rooted in reality. It bore the distinct derangement of a fan who has cultivated expectations, a fan who has developed a pirate’s sense of ownership, a person who seriously, desperately needs to play another game.
In this, it reflected the way I’ve seen people talk about Minecraft online for years. Long-time Minecraft players approach the game with the sort of boredom and ennui usually reserved for characters cursed with immortality in speculative fiction. They go in with a speedrunner’s knowledge of the game’s content and systems, and then complain that it holds no more surprises for them. They use this knowledge to metagame Minecraft into Factorio, and then complain when they run out of grist for their mill. In short: they are playing the game wrong.
Before I elaborate on what I mean by “playing the game wrong,” I should clarify that there is nothing wrong with playing a game wrong, in and of itself. Speedrunning is playing games wrong, and we all love speedrunning. Competitive Pokemon is playing that game wrong, and it has officially sanctioned tournaments organized by the Pokemon Company. Anybody who has ever enjoyed a Boundary Break or Any Austin video can appreciate the fun of playing a game wrong. Problems only appear when one plays a game wrong, has a bad time, and then blames the game.
Ibxtoycat’s “critique” of Minecraft is divided into three sections: one on the game’s progression, one on the game’s biomes, and one on Mojang’s approach to updates. I’m not going to talk extensively about the third, other than to say: Minecraft has been, by all sensible metrics, a finished game for over a decade, and complaining about the particulars of its ongoing free content updates strikes me as incredibly silly. But, of course, if you’re a Minecraft news channel, talking about Minecraft updates is a siginificant part of your beat. Maybe there shouldn’t be Minecraft news channels; maybe these people should all play some other games. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
The section on progression is the one I’m the most interested in. I want to start with something he says about the game’s enchanting system. “You’re meant to enchant and slowly get better and better gear, but most people just trade with a guy they lock in a cage, and force him to give them the very best.” He’s referring to a common strategy among Minecraft power gamers, where you create horrifying-if-you-really-think-about-it villager farms, where you selectively breed the game’s villager NPCs to get enchanter villagers who will sell you the best enchantments. I take issue with his assertion that “most people” do this. It would only occur to you to do this if you had played the game for dozens or hundreds of hours and worked out the nuances of its many interlocking systems, or if you saw a guy online do it first. This is what I mean when I say he’s playing the game wrong: the game is not designed to accommodate this kind of behaviour. Of course the game’s progression falls apart if you contortionalize the villager trading system into a repulsive caricature of itself. The designers don’t expect that a first-time player is going to do that.
If we continue imagining the first time player who does not do that, we can see the larger problem with ibxtoycat’s argument. “You start in the overworld, and then you go to the nether, and then you go to the End, but after that, that’s kind of the entire progression of the game done,” he says. This would be like summarizing Final Fantasy VII by saying “You start in Midgar, then you wander around an overworld for a while, then you fight Sephiroth, then it’s over.” Our new player would spend hours and hours on each step of the process ibxtoycat describes. To solve each step of that progression without external help would involve at least a AAA RPG’s worth of exploration and discovery. The speed with which an optimal player can in theory accomplish these objectives is only a problem for an optimal player. An optimal player is a player who should be off finding new worlds to conquer. An optimal player is playing the game wrong.
The larger supposed problem ibxtoycat ends up pointing to is the lack of linearity in Minecraft’s progression. He points out how all of the supposedly endgame objectives can be reached from the start of the game, and conquered fairly quickly. This is, again, a complaint that could only come from a seasoned metagamer. You’re only going to deflate your Minecraft experience by immediately going and taking on a Woodland Mansion if you know exactly what a Woodland Mansion is, where to find one, and how to deal with it. Our new player might stumble on one early in their playthrough, get themselves killed, and not return until many hours later when they’ve scrounged up better gear. Finding something new then spending time figuring out what to do with it is Minecraft’s core gameplay loop. If you already know about everything in the game, you’re skipping half of that loop.
Furthermore, lack of linearity isn’t a problem: it’s a core feature. Ibxtoycat proposes a system where the game’s difficulty increases the farther out one explores from spawn. That certainly sounds like an interesting mechanic, but it doesn’t sound like Minecraft. Minecraft isn’t an RPG or a linear action game; it’s a sandbox. The detached neutrality with which it presents you a world to explore is the entire point. It’s a game about leisurely exploration and creative expression through building. Most players will never see the Ender Dragon -- progression, in so far as it exists in Minecraft, is there for the diehard fans. It isn’t the point of the game; the point of the game is finding a nice spot to build a house and building one.
In a sense, Minecraft invites you to play it wrong. The point of a sandbox is that you can do whatever you want. In order to remain a sandbox, Minecraft’s systems are implemented with a light touch. They are scant, flexible, and non-linear -- they lend themselves to being broken. The problem comes when one breaks those systems -- builds a villager farm or speedruns to the End -- and then complains that the systems are broken. If you want Minecraft to be a game with lengthy progression, try playing it without using tricks you found online to circumvent all its intended friction. Sit in its slow, meandering loop of exploration and building for a while. If you want a long, linear game with extensive progression mechanics, play an RPG. Only a fool would walk into a Burger King and demand a burrito.
Much of what I’m describing here is symptomatic of the fan mindset. Fans of a thing develop a sense of ownership over the thing. They develop expectations for the thing, and then blame the thing when those expectations go unmet. The most foolish among them come to believe that they, as admirers of the thing, know better about the thing than the creator of the thing.
I’d like to further illustrate the nature of this mindset by pointing to the section of ibxtoycat’s video dedicated to biomes. I could spend a long time talking about why it’s actually great that Minecraft’s biomes are so random, and why I love that its world generation is as likely to trap you in an endless boring taiga as it is to plant you in between a mesa, a dark oak forest, and a plains village, but since this section is already sort of tangential I’m just going to focus on one point ibxtoycat makes. Ibxtoycat does not like how much of Minecraft’s world is occupied by variants of the forest biome. He complains about their lack of useful resources beyond wood, the inconvenience they create for travel, and their lack of interesting structures. This is like wanting to eat candy for dinner. Dessert is only good because you ate your vegetables. Imagine how boring Minecraft would be if the entire game was a quick and easy jaunt between abundant resource deposits and treasure piles. This is the kind of complaint you make about a thing if you’ve grown jaded in only the way a fan can -- if you’ve let the expectations for a thing you’ve spent so long cultivating cloud over the qualities that drew you to the thing in the first place. Minecraft pulls us in because of the sense of discovery that strikes us when we crawl out of a sprawling, lonely forest and find a village full of life. If you can’t see that fundamental tension, you’ve spent too long playing the game in your head instead of the one on the screen.
The secret to enjoying art -- any art -- is to kill the part of your brain that develops expectations. Seek out new experiences and let yourself delight in being surprised. And if you find yourself wishing Minecraft had linear progression and more in depth RPG mechanics, play a different game.