4 ms·

I wonder if other societies would play Minecraft differently. Would people coming from a more egalitarian background do things like this?

by tw1010 9y ago

KirinDave 9y ago
Probably not. The realty is everything is free, infinite, and it's fairly straightforward to nether-tunnel to a fresh site to get tons of stuff. Many things are totally renewable AND automatable even n vanilla, including all the metals ((A famous youtuber Tango Tek shows how to make infinite iron; it's involved but cool: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STs4wDJewNw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STs4wDJewNw), flowers, wood, dirt, and sand. Economies form around packed ice and diamonds, but even these are eventually destroyed as fortune 3 picks become easy to manufacture. It's all about timesavings.
vidarh 9y ago
Depends what you mean by "egalitarian" for starters. E.g. socialists come in many shades - some want redistribution for the sake of some measure or other of fairness, while some see redistribution as a means for the poorer in society to demand a better deal. Assuming that people actually bring their ideals to a game - which is by no means certain (my Civilization-style games tends to end with total war because it's fun when nobody gets hurt for real), the two (and numerous variations) would lead to very different results, and such results would also depend greatly on ability of in-game enforcement. E.g. you can't have a revolution and change the mode of production if the mode of production is hardcoded into the server (property right enforcement; protecting capital; inability for the in-game community to set and enforce their own law rather than rely on the mods) - unless of course the mods are in on it. The latter, I think highlight a lot of the difficulty in getting such societies to be good simulations rather than "good enough" simulations for specific types of games: they tend to take a lot of shortcuts in enforcing certain rules "out of game" because having malleable but reliable in-game government and law enforcement is really hard to do with NPC's and requires a fairly big and dedicated user base to make viable with human players, and a lot of the potential strife it would lead to may not fit most games. When the worst case consequence of a failed attempt at in-game revolution, coups or large scale war is that you "burn" an account, and empathy can be expected to be stunted by lack of perceived real world consequences for your victims, it's much harder to expect people to behave.
- tialaramex 9y ago
  The obscure MMORPG A Tale In The Desert has (had?) a mechanic to fix this stuff. Players have a mechanism to feed their desires into the actual game rules. They also had some sort of indirect democratic control which enabled them to give characters a death sentence, ceding all their property. I think they elect a "Demi-Pharaoh", and the DP gets to give out one death sentence during their "reign", something like that. So it was possible to _really_ screw somebody who caused trouble. However, Vanilla Minecraft has some labour-saving devices, where you invent some resources to make more without proportional effort, e.g. using stone, and metal from a furnace you can hook up a simple machine that turns wood into charcoal and feeds the furnace, so compared to a beginner you are now using much less wood to make the same resources, and no extra effort. ATITD mostly avoids this, it has a strong click economy, a serious player must spend hours every day clicking on things, machines that reduce the amount of clicking are almost unheard of while of course clients that automate clicking _outside_ the game are common. This can't help but tilt the way the game is played. ATITD when I played it (many years ago now) was already a very niche game, and I believe it now has even fewer players than it did then and is maintained entirely by fans rather than a third party developer, but the reddit still seems to exist, as does the game's web site.

I wonder if other societies would play Minecraft differently. Would people coming from a more egalitarian background do things like this?

by tw1010 9y ago

I wonder if other societies would play Minecraft differently. Would people coming from a more egalitarian background do things like this?

KirinDave 9y ago

Probably not. The realty is everything is free, infinite, and it's fairly straightforward to nether-tunnel to a fresh site to get tons of stuff. Many things are totally renewable AND automatable even n vanilla, including all the metals ((A famous youtuber Tango Tek shows how to make infinite iron; it's involved but cool: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STs4wDJewNw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=STs4wDJewNw), flowers, wood, dirt, and sand. Economies form around packed ice and diamonds, but even these are eventually destroyed as fortune 3 picks become easy to manufacture. It's all about timesavings.

vidarh 9y ago

Depends what you mean by "egalitarian" for starters. E.g. socialists come in many shades - some want redistribution for the sake of some measure or other of fairness, while some see redistribution as a means for the poorer in society to demand a better deal. Assuming that people actually bring their ideals to a game - which is by no means certain (my Civilization-style games tends to end with total war because it's fun when nobody gets hurt for real), the two (and numerous variations) would lead to very different results, and such results would also depend greatly on ability of in-game enforcement. E.g. you can't have a revolution and change the mode of production if the mode of production is hardcoded into the server (property right enforcement; protecting capital; inability for the in-game community to set and enforce their own law rather than rely on the mods) - unless of course the mods are in on it. The latter, I think highlight a lot of the difficulty in getting such societies to be good simulations rather than "good enough" simulations for specific types of games: they tend to take a lot of shortcuts in enforcing certain rules "out of game" because having malleable but reliable in-game government and law enforcement is really hard to do with NPC's and requires a fairly big and dedicated user base to make viable with human players, and a lot of the potential strife it would lead to may not fit most games. When the worst case consequence of a failed attempt at in-game revolution, coups or large scale war is that you "burn" an account, and empathy can be expected to be stunted by lack of perceived real world consequences for your victims, it's much harder to expect people to behave.

tialaramex 9y ago
The obscure MMORPG A Tale In The Desert has (had?) a mechanic to fix this stuff. Players have a mechanism to feed their desires into the actual game rules. They also had some sort of indirect democratic control which enabled them to give characters a death sentence, ceding all their property. I think they elect a "Demi-Pharaoh", and the DP gets to give out one death sentence during their "reign", something like that. So it was possible to _really_ screw somebody who caused trouble. However, Vanilla Minecraft has some labour-saving devices, where you invent some resources to make more without proportional effort, e.g. using stone, and metal from a furnace you can hook up a simple machine that turns wood into charcoal and feeds the furnace, so compared to a beginner you are now using much less wood to make the same resources, and no extra effort. ATITD mostly avoids this, it has a strong click economy, a serious player must spend hours every day clicking on things, machines that reduce the amount of clicking are almost unheard of while of course clients that automate clicking _outside_ the game are common. This can't help but tilt the way the game is played. ATITD when I played it (many years ago now) was already a very niche game, and I believe it now has even fewer players than it did then and is maintained entirely by fans rather than a third party developer, but the reddit still seems to exist, as does the game's web site.