Barrier Blocks: on Minecraft Roleplay and the Fourth Wall
Part One: Introduction
5 November, 2023 / 7904 words
Setting the stage
Minecraft has 26 paintings. They’re a unique part of the game’s character, one of those things like C418 (and now Lena Raine)’s music, or Julian Gough’s End Poem, that add personal touches over what is essentially a sandbox; the kind of game designed from square one as a blank slate, an empty world meant to be filled, and a tool for further creation as much as a creation in its own right.
Unlike the End Poem (which is now in the public domain, by the way), or the soundtrack, both of which were commissioned specifically for the game, the majority of Minecraft’s paintings were modifications of existing work by the artist Kristoffer Zetterstrand.
Zetterstrand is a classically trained painter and it shows. If you look through the full archive of work on his website, you can catch the moment his early stuff (mainly still life and portraiture) takes a hard left turn toward the surreal. In 2002, Zetterstrand begins painting scenes based on Counter-Strike maps. Not just Counter-Strike maps as you’re intended to see them during a match, but scenes based on the game’s free look mode, enabled after you die in order to spectate, giving you the ability to fly around untethered from the movement constraints dictated by your “body,” with no regard for things like walls. We were just pretending those were walls in the first place anyway, when we were making your “body” collide with them.
As Zetterstrand describes in a 2010 interview with Gamescenes:
The moment I realized I had to paint scenes based on Counter-Strike was when once I got killed in the game, and suddenly found myself partly outside the graphics, being able to see both the realistic 3D world I was bound to a second ago, as well as the black void outside the game, the graphic card's rendering of nothingness. I had some sort of an epiphany... It was very beautiful, and I felt the urge to paint it.
So, an immediate interest is formed in this moment, during Zetterstrand’s first experience with free look mode in Counter-Strike. In the moment that the illusion (so called immersion) is broken, the artifice of the game becomes impossible to ignore. The revelation is that every wall is only a front-face, constructed to place you within a space that ceases to exist if viewed from a wrong angle. More than anything, what this moment reveals is that someone made the thing you’re seeing, and it’s imperfect. It’s optimized for its purpose because it takes resources to run and time to create. And it’s beautiful.
Spectator mode
In 2014 a spectator mode was added to Minecraft itself, producing imagery not dissimilar to Zetterstrand’s original paintings:
Entering spectator mode reveals something about the game, the fact that blocks only render a texture if you, the player, need to see that texture. The world is not, as you might imagine, stone all the way down. Instead, it’s blank space. It’s void.
Though, Minecraft embraces this in a way: a Minecraft level can reach more or less infinitely on the flat plane—the Y axis, if you will, but not the X. You can’t dig forever, you hit the bottom of the world, marked with an impossible, unbreakable, unplaceable block as a quick excuse for why you can’t keep going down. Except, the first thing any player wants to know is what’s beneath it, and the answer to that question is readily available whether you’re willing to painstakingly glitch tnt until you break a hole in the foundation of your little blocky universe, or just open up a single player world on creative mode. If you visit the end dimension, the void isn’t even hidden under bedrock anymore; instead it’s right there to meet you.
In the same interview, Zetterstrand goes on to talk about exactly that: the relationship between the artist or creator, and the art or creation (also known as “content” by some metrics):
In order not to break the illusion in a game, the game designer needs to stay out of the picture, but I sometimes find the traces of the creation of the game to be an interesting addition to the experience, like in a Brechtian Verfremdung effect. Encountering bugs in a game is an example of such a moment, when your immersion in the game is shattered, and instead of being scared of the monster, you laugh at it being stuck halfway through the ceiling. The imperfections remind us of the creator, the artist or the game designer, and sometimes brings us closer to the intentions of the artwork.
So, something that happens in the translation between Zetterstrand’s original oil paintings and their one-to-four block pixel-art counterparts (also done by Zetterstrand himself, to be clear) is that part of their nature has been obscured from you if you’ve only ever seen them in-game. In the evolution of his work in the years after that initial stylistic epiphany, Zetterstrand’s paintings would continue to draw heavily on that relationship between creator and creation, as well as spatiality, stepping out of bounds, stages and back-stages. He pairs traditional landscapes and anatomical detail with flat planes and pixelated characters. This stylistic trick, of course, relies on the contrast between the two styles. What happens when you remove that contrast?
Take my favorite of the paintings present in Minecraft: a real hand lights a pixelated fire. Compared with the version we see in-game, what do we lose? The fire retains its original arrangement of pixels exactly, but you’d never know because the hand is reduced to its same resolution. The shadow behind the fire, revealing it as a flat object in 3-dimensional space, cannot exist without 3-dimensional space. The match vanishes almost entirely; we no longer know immediately whether the hand is lighting the fire or reaching to touch it. Clarity is literally reduced, along with the resolution of the image.
In order to restore the painting’s original meaning, you have to step out of the game and back into reality.
I am both here and there.
While watching Minecraft roleplay, it is impossible to forget that you’re watching people play a game. You’re sitting at your computer, and so are they, or were they once upon a time, hands on the keyboard. I don’t mean to say that immersion doesn’t exist here, it does. For example, the first time I watched through 3rd Life with friends we started with Grian’s pov, which includes no facecam, just in-game footage; after they got used to Grian’s narration style, which involves speaking directly to the audience, they had no issue getting genuinely invested in the story. Later, we switched to one of Martyn InTheLittleWood’s videos, and everyone found his use of a facecam comparatively off-putting and harder to get invested in. Creators who choose not to use a facecam often cite immersion as a primary reason, even specifically stating that it “takes away from the fact that you’re supposed to be a character.”
Of course, if a facecam was only ever taking something away, instead of adding something, people wouldn’t use it—you’re making a trade off by introducing a second visual language. Instead of being limited to Minecraft’s simple, abstracted movements, where the limitations of in-game body language add a level of constant uncertainty and interpretation, your real, physical reactions and expressions can now inform the fiction. Still, you’re pulling down the curtain, reminding everyone that you’re sitting in front of a screen talking into a microphone right now. Though, the curtain was never very secure to begin with. Remember what I said about Grian’s narration style? Watch any episode of 3rd Life or Hermitcraft and he’ll never let you forget that this is a Youtube video and you are its audience.
Viewers who are familiar with the Minecraft "let’s play" format, established within the Minecraft Youtube genre as soon as the game itself was, are not approaching something like a Hermitcraft video expecting to read it as fiction. The convention of the genre has no fourth wall to begin with; you aren’t expected to suspend your disbelief, or immerse yourself with the character’s fictional life in-game. Instead, your focus is on the player as a living person.
This means that when things like Hermitcraft season 8’s apocalyptic ending or 3rd life’s high stakes shift the tone of in-game events toward the serious or emotional, the video format framing it all hasn’t changed in the slightest, while actions that would normally be read as purely out of character commentary are suddenly re-contextualized. As one excellent tumblr post about the ending of Hermitcraft season 8 describes, the let’s play convention can be used for emotional impact without anything about it having to change.
In fact, this familiarity can heighten the emotional impact, because whether you knew there was a “character” here this whole time or not, you’ve already grown attached to them through your attachment to the player, because that character and that player are not meaningfully separate. You’ve seen every part of this server get built up, played in, and lived in, before a mysterious cosmic event pulls it apart block by block. And like the characters living in Hermitcraft’s world as it crumbles around them, you had no idea something like this could happen. Watching Hermitcraft 8 as it aired, I was constantly asking “but they’re not actually going to end the world right? Right?” because there was never any precedent for it—Hermitcraft plotlines are usually completely devoid of consequences. The political conflict in season 7 was resolved with a minigame competition, and the shadowy government facility in season 6 was revealed as a theme park, rendering any previously perceived stakes completely void. There had never been a season that short either, adding to the sense that things had been suddenly cut off. But no. This time, the world just ends.
And this bending of convention isn’t new, rather it’s always been a trick of the genre existing in conversation with ‘normal’ let’s play series. As early as the Yogscast’s Shadow of Israphel in 2011, what begins with two players experiencing the game for the first time warps as mysterious buildings start appearing in their previously empty Minecraft world. In SOI, the players are at once themselves, Lewis and Simon playing Minecraft, and Xephos and Honeydew, the characters as seen by the NPCs inhabiting their world.
This is to say nothing of the livestream, where instead of simply being passively spoken to, or responded to at-distance, the audience can speak back in real time. Even if you’re watching a vod, a recording of the stream after it's been broadcast, most streamers include chat as an overlay over the game, so the live chat is forever preserved as it was in the moment. The streamer will interface directly with the chat, reply to messages, and take suggestions on what to do. The audience becomes part of the fiction. Usually, this fact is never explained or justified as a part of the game-world and its fiction, it’s just true; Minecraft roleplay is simultaneously a story taking place within a game, and a story about people playing a game.
To borrow a line from Brendan Keogh’s A Play of Bodies,
How we come to feel embodied in videogame play is much more complicated than simply stepping out of one world and skin and into others.
(…) Any clear distinction between the actual and virtual is destroyed by the perforations my grubby fingers inflict on Tearaway’s flimsy world. I tear holes through the videogame’s diegesis to look at it, listen to it, touch it, play with it, but never to fully enter it. Videogame play requires a multitude of worlds and a multitude of bodies.
In other words, the player is always both observing and inhabiting the character or avatar’s body, with one foot in the actual and another in the virtual. Thanks to work like Keogh’s, the player-game relationship is complicated but well-trodden ground. However, in our case a third party comes into play, the audience. We have to consider not only the game itself as an object, but the video or livestream created through the synthesis of player-and-game as a secondary object, subject to artistic decisions on the player’s part, and processed by its audience in conversation with the broader media landscape (and its established methods of engagement.)
Back to the stage:
The Verfremdung effect that Zetterstrand mentioned earlier, which I’ll be referring to here as the estrangement effect, is a term coined by German playwright Bertolt Brecht in an essay about the stylistic differences in acting between European and Chinese Theater. He describes it as:
(...) playing in such a way that the audience was hindered from simply identifying itself with the characters in the play. Acceptance or rejection of their actions and utterances was meant to take place on a conscious plane, instead of, as hitherto, in the audience's subconscious.
Brecht’s use of the estrangement effect in his own work was to pull the fourth wall down, revealing the fictive, constructed nature of the play. He wanted the audience to intellectually evaluate the events taking place on stage as a message to be received, instead of relating themselves emotionally to the characters—Brecht’s goal as a Marxist was to historicize the events of his plays, turning them to allegory (literally calling this “dialectical theater.”)
(…) Above all, the Chinese artist never acts as if there were a fourth wall besides the three surrounding him. He expresses his awareness of being watched. This immediately removes one of the European stage's characteristic illusions. The audience can no longer have the illusion of being the unseen spectator at an event which is really taking place. A whole elaborate European stage technique, which helps to conceal the fact that the scenes are so arranged that the audience can view them in the easiest way, is thereby made unnecessary. The actors openly choose those positions which will best show them off to the audience, just as if they were acrobats.
Minecraft Roleplay is a medium which can ask to you to take two things as simultaneously true: the emotional fiction of the game-world, and the material relation between player, game, and audience. As we’ve already established, the spectator in our genre is incredibly seen. Everything is designed to be viewed, and this isn’t a secret.
A further means is that the artist observes himself. Thus if he is representing a cloud, perhaps, showing its unexpected appearance, its soft and strong growth, its rapid yet gradual transformation, he will occasionally look at the audience as if to say: isn't it just like that? (…) An obvious glance at the floor, so as to judge the space available to him for his act, does not strike him as liable to break the illusion. (...) The audience identifies itself with the actor as being an observer, and accordingly develops his attitude of observing or looking on.
Your ability to believe these two truths at once may be limited; you may be bounced back and forth. If it succeeds in impacting you emotionally, you may even go from the verge of tears to a sudden sharp awareness of what you’re watching, and how silly it all is—Minecraft roleplay knows this. It likes to mock itself. Players will exclaim, “it’s all just a game, you can just log out!” every time the reality of what they’re doing hits them. It’s farcical! No matter how serious a piece of Minecraft roleplay gets, it will almost always bounce quickly back to some sort of comedic hi-jinx, because the longer the tension holds the more absurd it all starts to feel. Sometimes, there is no line between comedy and tragedy at all, and you’ll watch characters start pole-dancing in mid air while holding a completely serious conversation about the death of their child…
As one QSMP fan describes on tumblr, “I love how it's a sign of a character not being ok on the qsmp when they floss instead of doing orange justice” in reference to the use of two different modded dance emotes carrying different emotional implications.
Minecraft’s visuals are extremely interpretive. In-game, your modes of interaction are limited: punching someone can be made into anything from a playful shove to serious violence, and half the time it’s completely up to a viewer’s discretion which is which. No two artist’s designs for any minecraft skin look the same, and this is part of the appeal for many people. Vanilla Minecraft will never add a chair block, the kind you can get in BiblioCraft or MrCrayfish’s Furniture Mod, because you can build a million chairs from the pieces already available, with stairs and slabs and signs and trapdoors and half-beds. Fans approach storytelling in Minecraft roleplay much the same—as a game of free interpretation.
The primary manifestation of this interpretive action is to dramatize, stripping back the contradictions and the stupid parts, strong-arming it into making sense, because it rarely does. Even the players themselves never seem to know what’s “canon” and what isn’t, what’s in-character and what should be tossed by the wayside. Fans invent in-game motives for actions that were only ever motivated by purely out-of-game knowledge or circumstance, because the key part of this dramatization process involves ignoring that layer of things entirely. It is, in fact, impossible to ignore the out-of-character in favor of the in-character without it undergoing an interpretive process because these things are not separate to begin with, even if it might be more convenient if they were.
And another thing—Minecraft roleplay is prolific. There is a lot of it. The QSMP is a server with 39 members (as of September 2023) give or take some inactive players, many of whom are livestreaming daily, at the same time as other members, for hours on end. It is not humanely possible for any one person to have seen the QSMP’s story in its entirety on time commitment alone, even if we don’t factor in the language barriers. Four months after the server’s birth, it consisted of well over 3,415 hours of archived livestream footage (likely closer to 5,000). That’s 208 days; four months is only 121. In order to keep up with the parts of the story you can’t watch, you have to rely on twitter update accounts, word of mouth from other fans, clips cut out and posted to Youtube, and fan-edited story compilations—all of which is curated by someone other than the original streamers and thus subject to everything from bias to simple misunderstanding. The Dream SMP was similarly dense, and a decent chunk of the early stuff is lost media now despite its popularity—in which case, all you have to go on is hearsay.
So, no one is ever on the same page. If you and someone else have read the same book, despite differing interpretations and priorities, you have at least read the same book. That is not always the case here.
Lifesteal, for example, is unique for the fact that you can watch events unfold on livestream and then see exactly how each player curates and edits it down into coherent, self contained videos with their own linear storylines—sometimes competing or contradictory ones, depending on how different players choose to frame the same events. Because of that fact, if you’re really committed, you can piece together something at least resembling the true nature of events from livestream footage (albeit biased by who is or isn’t streaming at any given moment). You have the ability to tell exactly how someone has chosen to warp their story—sometimes the players will even complain to you about the fact that someone is lying in a video. In instances where Minecraft roleplay is exclusively livestreamed, the stream in its imperfect, unedited state is the finished product. This stands in contrast to pre-recorded videos, which have already undergone a sense-making process before they hit your screen. Lifesteal sits somewhere in the middle, with both options available.
But even with pre-recording, you’ll find all kinds of contradictions. Like I mentioned with Lifesteal, it’s common to hear two stories of the same event from two different sides. In the Life Series, which is pre-recorded, you only have these final conflicting videos to go off of, and any sliver of “objective truth,” if desired, must be put together like a puzzle where you only ever get half of the pieces. In BdoubleO100’s Limited Life supercut, he ends the video with a false piece of information, that Ethoslab was the one to kill him. This is not true; the player who says that Etho was the one to kill him was wrong, and from her pov you later find this out. But because Bdubs built the narrative of his video around his relationship with Etho, ending it there made for a satisfying conclusion to the video’s story arc.
Series names
Lifesteal and the Life Series are two different completely unrelated things. Sorry, I did not name them. The Life series is a connected string of death games where the rules and the series title changes slightly every time; it consists of 3rd Life, Last Life, Double Life, Limited Life, and Secret life. In that order. Yes, the last one is second, and the third one is first. I know.
Completely unrelated to either of those, there also exists X Life, New Life, Afterlife, One Life….. Minecraft server naming conventions are fond of picking a formula and sticking to it.
Sometimes, this means that the mechanics and backstory of the world itself vary from POV to POV, and depending on whose “lore” you choose to take as “canon”, your reading of the story can change dramatically. If you’re following the Life Series from Martyn’s POV, it’s a cyclical death game the players are trapped in against their will, where their emotions are being fed on by a shadowy higher power. If you’re watching basically anyone else, they will not be using this information to inform their actions in the slightest. Because the Life Series (like much of the Minecraft roleplay genre) is an emergent story built up over time, there was never a pre-established consensus on any of this going in, and so these branching paths are free to develop.
People have an intrinsic desire to make things make sense, and this subconscious habit of cutting things down in order to create a linear narrative is not unique to Minecraft roleplay. Later on in A Play of Bodies, Keogh describes videogame play as a type of live performance, in reference to the many branching timelines created by games with infinite death mechanics, where “game overs” function as “what ifs”:
(…) It is only after play that the “felicitous” (Jayemanne 2017, 34) play fragments are stitched together into one coherent and continuous narrative of what “actually” happened, much like the best clippings of a film shoot are stitched together to obscure an actor’s many bloopers.
The implication “is that we should consider videogame play as a matter of live performance in the moment of play, rather than a matter of straightforward reception or decoding where meaning is only revealed when the text is decoded in full” (Atkins 2007, 248). This idea of the videogame text as a “live performance” coheres with an embodied textuality emerging as the player-and-videogame in the moment of play and echoes analogies by other theorists, such as Graeme Kirkpatrick’s comparison of videogame play to dance and David Sudnow’s comparison of videogame play to jazz piano. The key difference, however, is that the professional dancer or pianist does not, one hopes, spend their performance stopping and starting and learning as they perform. The “live performance” of videogame play is not a continuous, virtuosic performance but a stumbling connection of repeated attempts that strive to mimic the virtuosic but that in reality are cut and edited together across character deaths, checkpoints, and play sessions.
Like with the film analogy he uses here, part of what fans who are interested in dramatizing Minecraft roleplay do is mentally discard the contradictions, the bloopers, the awkward pauses, the scene changes—everything that would usually be left on the cutting room floor.
Back to the point:
And still, sitting on top of all of these genre quirks, is the double awareness of virtual vs. actual, game/character vs. player/creator, there to complicate things.
A lot of fans struggle to process this dual nature—which is natural to videogames, but not always so well aligned with some broader conceptions about how fiction works. You’re emotionally resonating with something that is, on its face, extremely silly. You might be embarrassed about it, you might feel the need to preface it with “well, this is kind of cringe, kind of stupid, but…“ every time you explain it to someone. And you wouldn’t be alone in this, with how much the genre relies on mocking itself. It’s no wonder the next move is often to start hitting the thing with hammers until its shape is sufficiently serious as to not embarrass you.
On the flip side, it might never resonate emotionally with you at all! You might never be able to bridge that gap, put aside your awareness of the medium; you might still enjoy it, get a good laugh out of it, but you’ll be looking around at everyone in the first camp like, “what is going on here? How are you guys doing that?” because you’re unable to buy into the fiction.
Of course, as often as the players mock themselves, they still keep playing, keep performing these emotional moments. They reward the audience for caring, because they care too, or else they wouldn’t be doing it. When different sects of your audience want completely different things out of your work—the type of surface level Youtube viewers that make you money, for example, versus a smaller but more dedicated group of fans invested in the fiction—creators can end up in a balancing act between the two, trying to appeal on both grounds.
Let's start talking about elephants in rooms: is Minecraft roleplay fictional or not?
This is essentially the question that launched 10,000 weird little niche online slap fights—wander around tumblr long enough and you will probably stumble into someone with “MCYT fans DO NOT INTERACT” pasted on their front door, or some confused soul asking “but aren’t these real people..?” under a drawing of Grian and GoodTimesWithScar kissing, or something.
The response you’ll get from fans if you ask this question usually involves pulling out clips and quotes where creators describe their characters as characters, and their stories as stories, etc. And yes, there is plenty of that. This line of argument is not, however, very effective when the person you’re arguing against has almost certainly already made up their mind. Because If you can’t buy into the fiction, you might also not buy that there is a fiction. Or, if you’re someone who is completely unfamiliar with Minecraft roleplay, but does know what a let’s play is… you get the idea.
It’s also an argument that defines fictionality entirely on the grounds of authorial intent. In other words, what makes something fictional rests not on the qualities of the work itself, but on whether or not the author (or creator) says it is. This makes practical sense, because it gives you something to point to as evidence, instead of having to get into ephemeral territory, like the fact that sometimes it just feels like fiction (you will notice that my argument here is 7,000 words long, so not very snappy…) But if you’re already this far in, I’ll assume you’re willing to entertain alternative frameworks.
In the 2002 essay Making It Up: A Definition Of Fiction, James O. Young describes two prevailing definitions of fiction. The first stakes its claim in authorial intent, asking whether or not an author means for the audience to play a game of make-believe (in other words, suspension of disbelief) with the work, and the second basing itself on what an audience does with a work, regardless of intent.
The bare possibility that Homer or Milton intended to write history, but did not, ought to be profoundly disturbing for the intentionalist.
Young’s definition, instead, is interested in evaluating the quality of the work itself. He considers fiction “the result of a certain sort of process: the process of making it up,” concluding that “Whether something is a work of fiction depends, not on what authors intend to do, but simply on what they do.” For Young, fiction is defined by its lack of bounds; to produce fiction is to be constrained only by yourself and your own mind. Intention has no part in it, because even if someone sets out to write history and believes it to be history, if he does not actually follow the process by which a work of history is produced (examination of sources, use of supporting evidence, etc: all external constraints), then what he has written is fiction. The fiction writing process can involve any of the processes which constrain various types of nonfiction, observation of reality, or examination of sources, or whatever else, but crucially, it doesn’t have to.
Despite Young’s essay focusing almost entirely on literature, for obvious reasons I can’t get away with marrying the fiction process to the writing process here. Even when he brings up the documentary format later on it doesn’t require any further clarification of this point, because any film has undergone the kind of curation and staging we’ve previously established as creating a notable difference between the pre-recording and livestreaming modes of Minecraft roleplay. Scripting, or even planning out events in advance regardless of how other players might respond to them, to be performed on livestream, can also be considered as a writing process.
But what about making things up as you go? Improv theater is precisely the art of making it up as you go. Telling someone a story you’ve made up on the spot, or acting out a scene you’ve made up on the spot, both clearly count here.
Before you start wondering where the line has to fall between making it up as you go and simply playing a game, the most interesting thing Young does is this:
The key to dealing with the grey area cases is the realization that the property of being fictional is one that comes in degrees. There is a spectrum that runs from a science fiction novel (at the fictional end of the scale) to The Origin of Species (at the other end). Works can be found all along this spectrum. Perhaps no work is either completely a work of fiction or completely a work of non-fiction. Neither intentionalism nor the make believe theory is easily able to accommodate this insight. Either an author has the intention that readers make believe what he writes, or he does not. Either audiences employ a story as a prop in a game of make believe, or they do not. A work can, however, be the product of a process that has something in common with the process that gives rise to fiction and something in common with a process which produces works of non-fiction.
Young also understands that this idea may not seem intuitive to some people, and provides a solid argument for why it should be considered anyway:
For a start, I am not certain that the doctrine of degrees of fictionality is contrary to the intuitions of all people. Many people, I believe, think that there is a sense in which some works of literature (...) are not just made up and not just fiction. I take the fact that some works are described as "true to life" as evidence of intuitions in accord with the doctrine of degrees of fictionality. Moreover, the fact that we speak of "fictionalized" stories is telling. I do not think that anyone would say that such stories are pure fiction or pure non-fiction. Every or virtually every story is a product, however, of something like fictionalization. The typical first novel, for example, is generally a reworking of the author's experience.
(...) It is true that we call some things works of fiction tout court and other works are regarded as having nothing to do with fiction. We do this, however, despite the fact that we have no hard and fast way to draw the line between the two classes. Nevertheless, as Wittgenstein would say, we are able to go on. We can go on to call some things works of fiction and others works of non-fiction even though we cannot say precisely where we would draw the line.
Hopefully we can agree by now that Minecraft roleplay generally falls somewhere in the middle of a spectrum like this, or moves from one end to the next over time, or bounces back and forth… With something like the classic "let’s play" towards one end (remembering the fact that while simply playing minecraft may be “reality,” the second you record, stream, or edit it, it becomes a work, whether that work is fictional or not), and something more like a stage play no one has gotten to rehearse at the other. Or, sometimes a different configuration entirely.
And that its precise position at any given time really, really doesn’t actually matter that much. We don’t need to start graphing it. What matters is the fact that the grey areas exist, and can be allowed to just be grey areas. And the fact that, as we’ve previously established, people don’t always react the same way to these cases.
If your suspension of disbelief is already hanging on by a thread, the constant reminders of reality might make everything feel too real. If you have different codes of social conduct established in your mind for how people are allowed to interact with a fictional object, vs with a representational object, and you no longer agree that it falls close enough to the fiction end of the spectrum for those rules to apply, then it can feel like a violation has occurred when someone disagrees with you. (or, as is often the case, for only some of the rules to apply—romance, heavy emotional speculation, or graphic violence, might all cross a line in someone’s mind depending on context.)
I mean, okay, let’s go back a few steps; “fictional” and “serious” or “emotionally resonant” are not synonyms. Fiction can be comedic. Comedy can be emotionally resonant. Sometimes the emotion present in Minecraft roleplay comes from a moment where the curtain comes down and someone tells you how they’ve really been feeling, or from witnessing a genuine friendship grow between two people on screen (and this is arguably the defining appeal of not just Minecraft roleplay, but a large portion of "let’s play" and streaming style content in general. It’s exactly why Minecraft roleplay had such a boom in popularity over the course of the pandemic, because it made people feel connected.)
However, (Anecdotally,) Minecraft roleplay fans generally seem to perceive comedy and lighthearted events as “less fictional” than they do scenes dealing in heavier emotional beats. This is interesting for absolutely not being an area of contention with other types of storytelling, and it happens because of the familiarity in play, that constant understanding of the actual relationship between player and game. The line between joking around with friends, and asking your best friend to ban you off the server because of how guilty you feel over what happened to him, for example—one of these is more likely than the other to come up in a person’s ordinary, every day interaction with the game.
Going back to the estrangement effect for a second. Let’s imagine that you walk into a theater, watch a play that intentionally pulls down the fourth wall, and then leave; there is a clear starting point, ending point, and boundary for the audience’s role here. Now imagine that you encounter some kind of immersive street performance that you didn’t sign up for, with no clear boundary between you and it—this would probably make a lot more people a lot more uncomfortable than the former. Where does “character” separate from “persona”? Is it limited to the bounds of a Youtube video/Twitch stream, or encompassing a creator’s secondary online presences, like their twitter account? What happens when you have a direct, constant line of contact between creator and audience, and any fan content produced could easily make its way back into their line of sight?
There is such a pervasive anxiety surrounding these questions that there are 7,742+ works on the fanfiction website Archive of our Own using the tag “not RPF (real person fiction),” signaling with great insecurity that they’re writing about characters, they promise. Virtually all of them are related to Minecraft roleplay, with a staggering 97% of the works using this tag published during or after 2020, the year the Dream SMP rose to massive popularity.
AO3
This is partially due to the fact that prior to May of 2022, the AO3 tags for all Minecraft Roleplay series were synced to the “Video Blogging RPF” fandom tag on AO3, which encompasses Youtube series in general and doesn’t account well for grey areas like this one, where something can be both a Youtube series and, well, not RPF. That said, “not RPF” tags are still regularly in use over a year later, and the anxiety persists.
Something else the Dream SMP introduced to Minecraft roleplay was the practice of appending “c!” or “cc!” (“character” and “content creator” respectively) to the beginning of names in situations where the character and the creator share the same name. This specifically began in December of 2020, after the Dream SMP’s exile arc got heavy enough in subject matter that people seeing tweets calling Minecraft youtubers abusive without the specification that it was all just roleplay seemed like it might cause some problems. c/cc tags have since trickled down into ubiquity in the land of post-DSMP minecraft roleplay, though you can gauge a server’s direct lineage to DSMP fairly well by how heavy their use is, in contrast to series that existed before it with their own fan cultures already formed.
The language is interesting, because the need to specify that you’re talking about a character also highlights the fact that you feel a distinction has to be made in the first place, that there could be confusion over it. It also betrays that same insecurity through its overuse, the need to signal “this is fiction, I’m not being weird, I swear” to everyone even though a potential reader would only actually understand what the hell a “c!quackity” is if they’re already decently entrenched in Minecraft roleplay fan culture.
The way I’m describing all of this probably makes it obvious that I strongly dislike the “c/cc” system—it’s almost always used redundantly, in situations where context clues are already more than enough to tell that you aren’t discussing “real” events. I mean, so much as mentioning a server, build, game mechanic, anything endemic to minecraft, is enough to communicate that you mean in the game.
And that’s the other problem—Going back to degrees of fiction, how much does the line between “c” and “cc” actually matter? What happens when the choices characters take in-game are motivated by out-of-game information, and in ignoring this fact and trying to file away the real-and-actual in favor of the fictional-and-virtual, you have to start making up new motivations that never existed on screen? What if there isn’t any meaningful difference between in-character and out-of-character motives? This isn’t always the case, sometimes Minecraft roleplay involves much more traditional character-to-actor relationships, but it is the case often enough for contention surrounding it to come up over and over again.
The c/cc split acts like there is always a clean break, 100% one or 100% the other, when creators themselves and their audiences alike are constantly instinctually acknowledging that it’s possible to be only partially in character. And yes, the terminology was never created with these nuances in mind, but it ballooned out away from its original use case into a loose framework for the medium at large, and people treat it like one. Despite this, Its utility is primarily defensive rather than descriptive; fans use c! tags out of a fear of their intentions being misunderstood, creators use them to defuse an audience that might take an in-game argument too seriously and start harassing a fellow creator. Or, as in their original context, to distance themselves from the character.
c! vs "cubito"
In Spanish-speaking Minecraft roleplay fandom, and thanks to the QSMP providing a bridge between language barriers, some english-speaking spaces, the term “cubito” (literally “little cube”) is used to refer to a creator’s minecraft character (ex: “this is about the cubitos” or saying “Etoiles cubito” instead of “q!Etoiles”*). Cubito rules. For whatever reason, it feels much less clunky–maybe because it refers doubly to the Roleplay character and the literal in-game avatar. Someone may not always be actively roleplaying, but if they’re on the server, they are inhabiting their cubito, and I like the way this terminology accounts for that.
*QSMP fans use q! Instead of c! Because of general convenience and member overlap between QSMP and DSMP (q!badboyhalo and c!badboyhalo are separate instances of the same guy’s minecraft character, for example) but it serves the same purpose. Cubito and q! are (obviously) used in tandem, because they have slightly different applications.
Out of every series I’ve briefly described here, Hermitcaft, Lifesteal, QSMP, Shadow of Israphel, etc, each one functions differently from the last. They frequently take cues from each other, and they all utilize the same medium, but none of them work in exactly the same way when it comes down to it. Some players are more comfortable with roleplay than others, more or less put off by getting dragged into it—The streamer Spreen’s stated reason for leaving QSMP was precisely because he wasn’t interested in rp. It is of course true that not all Minecraft youtube is necessarily Minecraft roleplay, but like with everything else we’ve talked about, the line isn’t a clean one. Naturally in interacting with Minecraft, extended jokes, light hearted conflict with other players, backstories for your cities, items or pets you’re particularly fond of, an arbitrary goal you need to justify to yourself—all of the things people do to make this kind of imaginative free-play compelling in general—are quick to arise; and quick to spiral into something larger without any warning, or any real planning. Video editing is an exercise in narrativization to begin with—you’re already telling stories.
At the end of the day, there’s a disagreement happening here over what “ownership” of an idea even means, one specifically caught up in trying to determine where someone's ownership of their own likeness begins and ends—so it's no wonder that people get up in arms about it. I don’t think there is a single answer, one set of social rules that everyone will ever be satisfied with, especially not when Minecraft roleplay is not and has never been one thing.
What I’m really interested in is understanding why these kinds of disagreements happen, and taking the time to investigate how the medium itself shapes people’s reactions to it.
What makes fiction fiction is that it’s made up, while non-fictional things actually happen. So which one is it? I’m really not interested in the question! I have to confess that even more than with people who aren’t willing to buy into it in the first place, I get a little sad when I hear the argument that it’s always completely, simply fictional, so you don’t have to worry about it, because of the implication that acknowledging any motive beyond the internal logistics of the game-world somehow breaks the fiction. In reality, the two cannot always be separated. And I like it that way.
In Conclusion:
…And we’ve made it to the end. This is more or less a thesis statement, and a sign post pointing to where Barrier Blocks can go from here. This isn’t a project with a set end-goal, and going forward it will vary in formality, structure, and polish. I put a lot of effort into this first post, because it’s a first impression, and because I knew exactly what I wanted to say (although it ended up with about 4,000 extra words, somehow…) Future writing will be more fragmented and exploratory, and I hope that my ideas will change and evolve over time as I do more research, with these posts serving as a record of how and why those changes take place.
Right before I finished writing this post, I picked up one of Ursula K. Le Guin’s essay collections (“Words are My Matter”), and I’ll borrow the description of her process, because it resonated with me:
When I can use prose as I do in writing stories as a direct means or form of thinking, not as a way of saying something I know or believe, not as a vehicle for a message, but as an exploration, a voyage of discovery resulting in something I didn't know before I wrote it, then I feel that I am using it properly.
TLDR: this is not a finished product, despite appearances.
A final note: I’ve sunk a huge amount of time the past couple months into watching through Lifesteal season 4, and with Lifesteal, more dramatically than with any other MCRP I’ve ever seen, I am constantly getting bounced back and forth between feeling completely bought in to the emotional stakes of what’s happening, and then having an “Oh my god this is all so stupid, why am I doing this?” moment right afterwards (if you have ever watched Lifesteal, you will know why.) And one of the reasons I think it’s important to put my ideas about this stuff out there is because I’ve had a lot of fun with it, now that I’m aware of why this happens and capable of observing it, kind of being able to put myself into either mood at will, instead of internalizing the "this is stupid" feeling to mean that I'm wrong for being capable of getting emotionally invested in it (or that someone else would be wrong for not getting it.) If you’ve ever had that instinct to internalize feeling embarrassed about something like this, hopefully I’ve at least given you some food for thought.
If you read each and every one of my 7000-something words, I hope you got something out of it ^_^ and if not, you are welcome to throw tomatoes at me, but nothing too sharp ok? Come back next time!