Girls Just Wanna Have Gun

Some people in modern Minecraft really do get by on the low-tech survival gathering building kind of thing. However, it also said that Minecraft is not a game about colonialism - which is true - but even given that I would never use "it's about colonialism" to describe Minecraft, and even though many people don't go the pillaging and mass-production route, modern Minecraft sure is good at producing savage world-wrecking powerful villager-exploiters. Like seriously, they're everywhere. And it's unintended game design consequences that made it happen. For every two people who play casually, there's going to be one person who has all the weird knowledge about how to build Guardian farms and Redstone contraptions that harvest exp orbs from Endermen basically built-in. My point isn't that you have to stop playing casually or that playing casually doesn't work well, it's that we should be aware of what modern Minecraft does to the "metagame".

I used to drift from video server to video server a lot, you know, like Decidedly Vanilla or what-have-you (but much more obscure with nowhere near as much traffic), and the pace of the game was always set by 1-3 people who knew how to exploit rather obscure mechanics in the game to the detriment of monsters, NPCs, and animals in order to get heaps of items.

This wouldn't be a problem, except that if you are a construction player who wants to chill out and build a "Wonder" over time, you'll run out of time because everybody else on the server has everything they could strive for, is bored, and wants to go to the next season/map reset.

Even on a co-op server, Minecraft can be surprisingly competitive. Though this doesn't affect somebody playing by themselves, it does affect multiplayer, and it does have an effect on some of the let's plays you might watch. Plus, online it seems like people always get the extreme/perfect enchantments only 4 in-game days in.

I wasn't one of them, and there were certainly players who didn't know how to make those farms in the player list, but it's just worth noting that some insane colonial-esque things tend to dominate Minecraft on recentest version servers. And I thought "recentest" wasn't even a word until now. Singleplayer is obviously quite different.

Like, it is hauntingly prevalent how often villagers and animals end up trapped in tiny boxes, and it's all because it's rewarded by gameplay. And that's the thing... When a game rewards you for doing something, even if it's not your fave, it's no longer "all you". It no longer matters if it's optional or not. The game is driving you to do it. That's just game design.

Yes, even in a hyper-open sandbox like Minecraft. I don't want to play a version of Rayman 3 where you can skip five stages and gain their collectibles just by torturing Murphy for 20 minutes. I want to play a version of Rayman 3 where I have good reason to play through every level and have no reason to be a monster.

My personal answer to this is for me to use old-school multiplayer and no longer go on modern-day Minecraft servers. That's easy enough for me to do, considering the very intensive toxic waste I've faced in Minecraft updates since 2020. Though it's been a while since I've had a place to be that frequent in in MC multiplayer.

The thing about old version multiplayer is that it has the competition "boundary break" on lockdown. There's a way to build standard mob grinders with or without a spawner cage, but those aren't so overpowered and in my opinion they look cool. Those YouTube videos are really not fucking around when they say that old Minecraft has good progression.

Me:

>looks inside