Minecraft, Sandboxes, and Colonialism | Folding Ideas

[@toreole5831]

Funny sidenote: in 1.13 there was a bug, where villagers would continuously drop their prices, while they are swimming in water. This obviously led to people essentially waterboarding villagers until the prices were at their cheapest.

[@windwaker105]

So we jumped passed colonization and went straight to the Iraq War

[@impact224488]

you still get Discounts from healed villager, leading to infecting and curing villagers until the have the lowest price.

[@Siriathion]

@@impact224488 So we're back to colonialism and purposely giving the native people the plague?

[@Spunney]

When I intentionally spread misinformation (this was never true what are you even talking about)

[@CraftsmanOfAwsomenes]

It's actually worse now, as people repeatedly zombify and resurrect the same villager over and over again to get a discount.

[@cako666]

Yeah you are not fooling anyone, mister. The only reason you made this video was to show people your notre dame replica.

[@blarg2429]

Now, now: he also bragged about his virtual cats.

[@Homodemon]

Not to mention show all the nice biomes that his world spawned very close to one another which is really cool to have

[@RoseAbrams]

Yep. It's like when Evan from Rare Earth made a video about Chinese imperialism in Africa as an excuse to show a video of a donkey frantically trying to hump another donkey.

[@lenjisaslamma6645]

There is this mechanic in the game that works around having illagers (mobs that are like supposed to be a raiding party) if you kill one of them thats holding a banner, you get a debuff that when you walk into a village will set off a raid that you have to fight off or the illagers will kill all the villagers, when you successfully defend the villagers. They will give you presents and emeralds. and you can do this about as many times as you want. You can get rid of the debuff you want by just drinking milk, or turn that village into a raid farm by constantly saving the village from attackers you purposefully set up so that when they are safe again they will shower you with money. they inadvertently added war profiteering.

[@WhytefangYT]

It gets even better than that - there are farms that specifically manipulate the way these raids work within the game code to spawn raids one after another and drop the raiders into a kill chamber where you get to kill them while afk with an autoclicker, or just manually clicking regularly, that function by (I swear to god) trapping 4 villagers at specific points on a 150+ block high tower and repeatedly moving job blocks so they become employed, then unemployed, every few seconds. The best of the ones I know, set up properly, can generate 56k+ emeralds per hour, and something like 5-10k of many other useful drops so that you don't have to go exploring for them. Just gotta abduct some villagers and shove them in a 2 high block to entice raiders repeatedly!

[@allyli1718]

This video is the gift that keeps on giving. Where else would I get comments like this?

[@LeBonkJordan]

@@WhytefangYT Actually, you only need one villager to do that

[@wigglerlesbian]

@@WhytefangYT They might have killed those farms in a recent update or an upcoming update.

[@player17wastaken]

The fact that the effect is triggered by a potion now

[@deawinter]

The game does incentivize the zombie curing method by the villager giving the player permanent trade discounts. Unfortunately, this now incentivizes technical players to repeatedly have zombies murder their villagers, so they can cure them and get further discounts.

[@Ditidos]

Not necesarily, as not all killed villages become zombies, only a handfull do. The number does increase with difficulty, but it's taking a risk.

[@Feu_Ghost]

​@@Ditidos it is 0% in easy, 50% in normal and 100% in hard who become zombie when kill by one, so not really much of a risk in hard

[@kriiler]

hard mode is pretty easy though. in 2020 me and my friends played on an smp in hard mode because the benefits such as villager trading were so high

[@Feu_Ghost]

@@kriiler ironically yeah, the reward far outweaght the damage boost of mob, which make it the true easy mode if you are good at the game

[@badger6882]

this is a poem and a metaphor in and of itself

[@murdeoc]

Minecraft's the only game that made think: "damn, I just accidentally drowned the wrong child" and only THEN did I have a good long think about myself...

[@Ravie3]

Here’s a guy who has clearly never played Crusader Kings.

[@Xenephos]

**whistles in Rimworld**

[@epicnesssss]

@@Ravie3 Ah yes, a normal day where you murder your children to secure inheritance for your perfect genius, hail, and strong heir while his mother being your sister-aunt.

[@lga4187]

You can tell its inspired by dwarf fortress

[@MemeFlavoredJam]

*nervous in people playground*

[@ExtraThiccc]

The leftism leaving my body the moment I boot up a building/terraforming game

[@felicityc]

accurate

[@mystupidlife123]

Me: basically a communist Me in Minecraft: **shops**

[@TigerBrows]

Me in real life: Hierarchy and power are inherently corruptive forces that, in time, will destroy a society and make it deeply unhappy to live in all the while Me, playing Stellaris: FOR THE IMPERIUM! THESE XENO SCUM MUST NOT BE SUFFERED TO LIVE

[@TheGamePixelz]

Cause leftists neeeever enslaved people /s

[@Hyndergogen9]

Same for me playing Paradox games. "What do you mean the peasants aren't happy being thrown into a meat grinder so I can loot the Vatican? Well then kill them all and raise a new army, there's Pope shit to steal."

[@kooeykooeykooey]

There's a minecraft modpack called regrowth, where you spawn into an endless wasteland with only burnt trees and dead grass, and you have to scavenge for a few seeds and use magic to bring trees, plants and animals back to the world. There are no ores in the ground, to get resources, you have to grow them with flowers. One of the mods in the pack allowed you to "build" cities out of nothing, but you didn't do the actual building. You brought stone and wood to the villagers, and they would build it themselves. A lot of these towns were based off non-white cultures, and while you could go in and change things after they were built, they looked really nice just how the villagers built them, so there was really no need to. I've played a lot of modded minecraft, but that one really stood out.

[@genessab]

Oooo memories, probably spent upwards of 800 hours on regrowth. Best modpack since ultimate

[@tjestirr]

So glad I came back to rewatch and read comments. I need to play this now

[@lucase.2546]

@@tjestirr Ditto, this sounds awesome

[@CheeseduckClaire]

Regrowth is definitely a remarkable stand-out amongst the countless modpacks over the years. I don't think I appreciated at the time how special and unique it was.

[@BBWahoo]

@@CheeseduckClaire Why is chris chan your pfp

[@alexmcd378]

Things get even weirder in modded minecraft. I've seen people set up villager breeding systems that pull villagers into an insisting station. If they have useful trade goods, a belt takes them to a holding pen. If they have no useful trades, they are dropped into a grinder that kills them to extract resources from their bodies.

[@TheGalaxyWings]

Ok now I want to build a totalitarian state in minecraft

[@bignerd3783]

based dystopia

[@SL-wt8fm]

"But sir, I cannot enchant this book with mending for no emeralds, how would I make a living?" "Take him to zombiefying chamber!" *mechanical sounds of gateway opening "NOOOO"

[@HalasterBlackmantle]

This is entirely possible in unmodded Minecraft, only with water transport system and manual "grinding".

[@harmandon]

eugenics 😭

[@nicklaurindo1916]

I hate when I accidentally recreate the *Spanish Empire* in Minecraft.

[@oretan2126]

**Himno de los Tercios intensifies**

[@redornament3248]

*_Noone expects the Spanish Inquisition_*

[@HunterSentinel]

... I fed mine to cats.... I regret nothing.

[@paulmartinez594]

*la marcha real in fife and drum starts playing*

[@v.7726]

*Rule! Britannia!*

[@ghastlyghandi4301]

“Let’s tame some cats” these few words lead to the deposition and oppressing of many people.

[@SerratedSkies]

Andrew Lloyd Webber? Is that you?

[@Millie-um2bi]

"ooh that tea stuff is nice" or "hey, we should get more of that spice stuff"

[@BonaparteBardithion]

Boy, these beavers and otters sure make nice hats.

[@gabby3036]

The very first of which being humanity's subservience to cats.

[@sebastiancarreira5832]

"Let's put some pepper on this dish" - Dutch dude about to trigger the european exploitation of peoples all around the globe.

[@RetroAlchemy]

"This would be so much easier if I could put villagers on leashes..." -"Hold up"

[@leelewis8749]

Leashes are to hard, what you need is a long chain with multiple anchor points for the people so that you can easily move them from one place to another.

[@Endocrom]

And you might as well get a bigger boat with room for them to lay down during the trip.

[@sketep1117]

@@Endocrom and to optimize, the room, you put shelves along the walls so more villagers can be transported.

[@ChickenUSA]

@@sketep1117 squidward amistad

[@yourlocalbicronoverlord]

Peter Yermishkin and have all the villagers tied together so that way if they try to rebel or just give you a condescending “hmm” you could push one or two off the side so that everyone else tied to them would be dragged over the side with them

[@tevanchinsangaram6467]

I recently came across a game called "Eco" which does an interesting job of addressing the environmental side of the problem presented in the video. It's another sandbox survivalcraft style game, but it provides consequences for your actions. Killing too many local wildlife will cause a population decline, and processing mined ores into useful metals creates toxic tailings which, if not properly stored, will leech into the nearby environment making the earth toxic, and preventing plant or animal life from growing there. It still leads the player into exploiting their environment to some degree, but forces them to at least consider the consequences of their actions.

[@NikolasPoklitar]

This is the game he pondered about around 11:00!

[@saltyvampyr]

that sounds awesome. thanks for the head's up!

[@angryakita3870]

@@saltyvampyr It’s a pretty good game!

[@thorn9382]

Minecraft mobs don't respawn

[@sunshinehunter3676]

In my experience, Eco in its current state is more about the economy than the environment, at least in multiplayer. Yes there are biomes, temperature, flora & fauna etc., but most servers have a time limit, mostly due to the goal of the game which is to destroy the meteor before it destroys the world. Players are supposed to be driven in this "survival and economy" vs. "preserving and coexisting with the environment" conflict but it's very unbalanced with the incentives biased towards the former. Pollution can be mostly ignored unless you're griefing your farmers, afaik water levels don't rvrn rise on default game settings, animals don't really have an impact on the ecosystems except other animal population *numbers*, some plant species can become unobtainable in the wilderness (especially when farming and selling them is profitable), and the list goes on. I've seen this and other comments like this before I decided to give the game a try last year, but I don't think it executes on its premise and surrounding hype well.

[@JRexRegis]

That's why I love the open-ended freedom of Minecraft. At no point are you actually forced to burn down a jungle or perform slavery - the game can very realistically be played in a sustainable, non-invasive manner. - You can replant every tree you chop down, as all trees drop at least one sapling, which makes deforestation completely the player's choice - You can grow a small field of crops capable of sustaining yourself, and leave the grassland or open coast untouched by industrial farming - You can operate a small orchard grown from saplings to to fuel your home, instead of quarrying mountain after mountain dry for coal - You can comfortably mine surface caves or trade with villagers for iron, which is all that's needed to construct adequate tools and armor - You can work to protect a village with golems and walls and torches, instead of building a horror facility where villagers are trapped in 1x1x2 cells with a work station in the wall However, all of these options require more work and creativity than building rigurously rigid designs into the landscape. There are many players who'll tell you that iron farms or villager jails are necessary to the game, for example.

[@thatguy8637]

Me and my friends have been playing modded lately, and we’ve been doing a “vegan” playthrough where we try to keep nature as intact as possible. It’s been genuinely relaxing and a ton of fun to role play as a shack dwelling hedge wizard rather than industrialize everything like we normally do.

[@vincentmuyo]

I tend to be somewhere in between - "obviously" I'm going to regrow trees and will try to protect villagers but won't care about hollowing out a mountain for resources. Then we make nice buildings, underwater railroads, the odd castle and gardens and other such things. I wasn't really into the industrialization of the process, it used to be a lot of work and would cause server issues.

[@jamiestl89]

Bamboo is great for powering furnaces, especially with an automatic setup with hoppers and chests, I bring it to new villages I find. I have also replanted so many trees around plains villages that the map starts turning green around it. Love me a good forest.

[@darklex5150]

all of that is completely boring, i like going to an adventure and bringing the resources i've gathered to my small island... huh, that sounds awfully familiar for some reason...

[@superslimanoniem4712]

It's just that iron farms and villager jails are the easiest way of obtaining enchanted diamond gear and iron, both things that you'll inevitably need quite a bit of and if you're planning to keep a world around for a longer time, will be necessary because mining for iron just isn't sustainable.

[@HoneyballLP]

But I asked first and he said: "Huuuuhhh!" so IT WAS A CLEAR YES! HE WANTED TO LIVE ELSEWHERE!

[@kapitan762x54R]

Clasic cangaroo misunderstanding.

[@cypherfunc]

I'll admit, there's a certain point in Minecraft where you get frustrated trying to build farms and think "dammit, why can't I just use a lead on villagers?" and then you look at yourself REAL hard.

[@FishDinners]

Speak for yourself. I like to build villager apartments and condos, and give the villagers their own room. In late game, I name them too. It really livens up the gameplay and makes you feel like you've helped build a bustling town :)

[@lolface_9363]

@@FishDinners so your giving them new names huh

[@pandaonabus]

@@lolface_9363 Player: I want to hear you say your name. Your name is Toby. What's your name? Villager: e81ab4f0-68cb-4e61-9521-5149e6278d19 *whipcrack*

[@ThomasWilson4]

@@pandaonabus 🤣

[@GladiusTR]

@@FishDinners Okay, but is that free from unfortunate historical parallels? It's "better" but is it blameless?

[@baguettegott3409]

I always hated how, when you try to displace the villagers but don't put them far enough away, they run back to the others. They actively flee if you accidentally let them out of the cart/boat. They want to get back to their village. That's in part why i never really did that. I felt like if they wanted to be in their village, I should leave them there. Also, I love tending to my own little farm, and hate trading or having others do it instead.

[@DragonOfVenezuela]

I think the worst part about this is how many resources you can get from villagers that are flat out impossible or an incredible pain to get elsewhere (enchanting books!). It makes it so much harder to give up the colonialism because the game makes sure that you will end up missing out on very big things if you don't.

[@onenameddome9247]

@@DragonOfVenezuela to be fair you don't have to kidnap them you could build a canal, railroad or any other way of faster travel from your base to the village especially establishing a trade route.

[@bignerd3783]

@@onenameddome9247 but the funny utilitarian dystopia is funnier plus these 1's and 0's arent sentient

[@theflyingspaget]

@@bignerd3783 but we are, and I'm not sure how separated our understandings of life and games are.

[@thorn9382]

Every time I see a village I burn it down kill all of the villagers and blow up the remains

[@TeTaongaKorora]

I get where you're coming from with this and I do think it's a significant aspect of the human psyche to delve into, especially with the environmental catastrophes of today, but I feel you perhaps played a little too much into the dichotomy of the coloniser and the 'noble savage' when discussing the societal influences driving your interests in building and terraforming. Indigenous and colonised peoples around the world heavy shaped our homes and exerted control on the environment- obviously not to the extent of colonial nations- and this line of thinking that Indigenous peoples are pure and naturalistic is a harmful one that paints us as inherently primal and anti-development. Surely you've heard of Rapa Nui, or First Nations in NA that used fire to reform landscapes, or the great Central American nations. The zoo in Tenochtitlan was the largest of its kind anywhere in the world, by some measures the largest in history, and I can't think of a more overt assertion of control over the environment than a zoo on that scale. I think in downplaying the enormous construction achievements and terraforming of Indigenous peoples, it's playing a bit too much into the views of Indigenous as some primal oddity off to the side. Just something to think on, but I do love the idea of examining why we love building/terraforming games in this way and layering it over with your accidental colonisation is a great way to break into it.

[@notnotkavi]

Completely agree

[@FoldingIdeas]

Isn't that the conclusion of the video?

[@notnotkavi]

@@FoldingIdeasyes, but I do think talking about colonialism and then saying that an interesting game would involve making a natural environment from a factory kinda makes it seem like colonialism is about the destruction of nature rather than people

[@Dambiello]

A similar thought popped into my mind as well. I would like to stress I'm not pro colonialism in any way, I bring up my next point just to discuss, but the term "native" seems to be given a positive deposition by default. Possibly because the opposition, usually, is defined as "invaders", which does definitely have a negative meaning to it. Does being native to a place really give one the right to absolute authority to that place? Then people start picking at details to determine who's truly native or not, which is never unanimous. I think it's an interesting thing to think about.

[@TeTaongaKorora]

@@FoldingIdeas I read the conclusion as maintaining the coloniser v colonised dichotomy that the colonised are naturalistic and the colonisers are for development. It does speak to giving more support for Indigenous voices and to question the need to build and terraform, but I still read it as coming from the colonial mindset being framed in this harmful dichotomy, even if in a way that attempts to support those most harmed by that dichotomy. Taken to its extreme, we get Pocahontas and Brother Bear- fetishistic views of Indigenous peoples as animalistic and pure. I fully know that's not what you intend and I do know you want to be supportive to Indigenous & colonised peoples, but it is this same view of 'Indigenous=tied to the environment' that produces this worldview. It's what we're seeing right now in response to Ihumātao- 'Ah Māori always just want to stop development,' or even some supportive pākehā that want to protect the Land and not the Whenua- environmentalism not indigenous rights- instead of asking why this specific place is being protected. Lending support to Indigenous peoples is good, but breaking down the colonial worldview is critical for that to move forward.

[@corphish129]

To be fair, the obstacles preventing you from curing zombies mostly disappear once you're well established. You only need one brewing stand, and spider eyes, mushrooms, etc. are easy to get. Gold doesn't have much use on it's own, so it's good to have something to use it for. My friends and I have always ethically sourced our villagers from zombies.

[@bladdnun3016]

You mean you needlessly slaughtered those blazes after invading their home, just to "cure" a zombie villager from their undeath, which they didn't ask you for?

[@jay.instro.2361]

Feels like you are curing people for slavery as opposed to curing them for humanitarian reasons 🤣

[@anonamous936]

providing medicine to the terminally ill in exchange for a little forced labor and selling their goods at cost. Ethical!

[@thugpug4392]

@@anonamous936 it's canonically a discount from the villager themselves. They also don't do any forced labor necessarily. If you let them wander around and have a village for them they will pick up available jobs automatically by walking over to them. You're also paying them the rate they want because if you hurt them or buy one item too many times they'll raise the price of it.

[@draexian530]

I'll admit, I've gotten in actual fights over "ethical" sourcing of resources. My boys couldn't grasp giving up efficiency, especially in a game.

[@FourOf92000]

There you are, playing _Minecraft,_ when suddenly, you're Leopold II. You didn't ask for this, you didn't want this. But there it is. **Super Mario rock cover**

[@sketep1117]

This is exactly the vibes I had from this video.

[@noticias6111]

[edit:"You didn't ask for this, you didn't want this. But there it is"] and yet Pokemon is still on my mind.

[@imimlet6350]

Oh shit, your bringing back bad memories

[@VVV.12345]

This is an example of good bad citation

[@Alec_Reaper]

I've changed the textures, purifyed them, turned my weaponsmith into an officer, killed the nitwit, raided the pilligers base and burned it down. Now I'm mapping our glorious island and made contact with dumb desert villagers.

[@Name-ot3xw]

I recall a server owner describing my villager dormitory as a concentration camp.

[@theclimbto1]

Inconceivable!

[@LineOfThy]

reminds me of that one meme where a guy built auschwitz and the server owner is freaking out. and then I realized we've all essentially been doing that.

[@TheEmpress1768]

It probably was.

[@lizzyb.8009]

reminder to everyone in the comments: "It's both possible, and even necessary, to simultaneously enjoy media while also being critical of its more problematic or pernicious aspects."

[@oops6876]

David L. You’re speaking too logically, my friend. Like the Joker film, it’s fans cannot see the piece of media from anything but their own perspective. :(

[@uncivil_engineer8013]

Look, I get what you're saying, but I'm just gonna go over here and spam the same Twitch emote in chat until your comment is so buried that I don't feel like I have to evaluate my personal biases.

[@jesuslopez-hp6gf]

I see you are also well read on the most notorious art critic of the 21st century. ;)

[@boiledelephant]

It's still weird to me that Anita got so insanely dogpiled for her videos when that line was in the opening of the first one. She literally said "no hate, I like games but". I thought her arguments were weak, personally, but how could anyone get so offended by them?

[@roprope511]

Oh shit, is that why this video has like 4:1 like:dislike-ratio? Are people actually viewing this as a criticism of Minecraft as a whole or something?

[@thomasmott3518]

Love how as you're discussing what is essentially the triangle trade, you are boating along a river banked by loads of sugar cane.... nice touch if deliberate

[@AiluridaeAureus]

Pretty sure there are no villagers raiding other villages for captives to sell to the white man. Not letting you ease out on that part. I mean, yeah there are the Illagers, but they're really just there to murder people for ritual. So they're more of the Aztecs with mansions and armor instead of temples and obsidian edged clubs.

[@Literallyryangosling777]

Lol stealing the lands of the peacefull villagers to overwork them to death in your industrialized sugar cane island to satisfy the demand of another villagers for books, sussy

[@Sylfa]

Not at all to death, they have everything they want and are quite happy…

[@mossbugprincess]

god i would love a game where i was retaking a world from the people trying to change it by balancing swamp ecosystems wtf

[@felix56p]

Reus is... kinda like that?

[@thetertinator9562]

This will be the swamp thing game we'll never get

[@imsapphiregray]

Me too! If I knew the first thing about programming, I'd try to make a game like that myself lmao

[@willowarkan2263]

It would be really cool.

[@Ramsey276one]

Balancing swamp ecosystem??

[@HarperNell]

I think most people make jokes about the cruelty of what they're doing in Minecraft while they do it. Even I feel bad sometimes uprooting the nice, quaint village and placing them all in a big stone box to breed and trade. I think it definitely does touch on something real world because I find myself trying to make the living space 'nicer', and then I have to question why I care so much about these pixel block people. Especially when you enter the trade chamber during certain hours of the Minecraft day and the villagers, still on their regular programmed behavior tracks, all head for the door because this is the time of day they would all congregate in the town square to trade, if they were free. You've disrupted this practice as a part of their day without wondering why they do it.

[@nick012000]

"It's worth noting that there is not one where the player reclaims a planet from the extractors, balancing wetlands and ecosystems" There is now; it's called Terra Nil.

[@DRHARNESS1]

Its pretty good, its also still getting updates

[@penname8441]

+

[@gwenrees7594]

Thank you so much for introducing me to this game

[@jdatlas4668]

First thing I thought of when he said that, and I was indeed looking for this comment.

[@GoddoDoggo]

I mean there's also Sim City, specifically when initiate all of the natural disasters at the same time.

[@Taikina]

there's always been a strong current of humorous acknowledgement in playing minecraft, that everyone at some point suddenly realizes that they are recreating the horrific conditions of factory farms or something else horrifying. I think minecraft perfectly and unintentionally teaches you how easy it is to fall into these patterns if you just play it long enough.

[@FishDinners]

There's a villager rights advocacy group within the player base lol.

[@NoobFish23]

one could make the argument that, given the open nature of the sandbox, that any moment of horrific realization is merely the product of one following their own natural (culturally influenced) biases. The game doesn't tell you what your goal is (or at least not the last time I played it), so if a player never acts in a way that would lead to a "moral event horizon", there is no reason to expect them to reach one. Whereas, other sandbox-y, harvest the world type games (a la factorio) practically demand it of the player; in them, there is no way not to pollute, desolate, or otherwise destroy the environment around the pc. That is of course ignoring the tutorial (early achievements) that guide you to towards construction, but ignoring that, there's nothing that demands a player to explore, expand, exploit, and/or exterminate (as many of us love to do).

[@tomchang1838]

I was watching a vtuber play Minecraft and she was kidnapping villagers to breed them. I made this face :I

[@richardwhaler8717]

@@NoobFish23 Perhaps what is most interesting is revealed by how players react to the "badness" being pointed out, and what that means about how games culture and the games industry trains players to think. Games encourage players to see simulations of people as mere objects with no moral standing and no value beyond their use by the player. Which is a thing we should consider especially when "gamification" of real life is brought up. Importing the behavior modification power of games may accidentally import the value system of games as well, and that value system is often extremely egocentric, ruthless, competitive, aggressive, and anti-compassion.

[@johngojcevic8731]

No one does lol

[@HighGround_]

This man has clearly never seen villager trading halls and breeding machines

[@pricefieldx]

He has yet to experience the frick chamber

[@cassiekaizo1210]

or the wall of 1x2 cells and railcart system to automatically replace the villagers with bad trades that you killed by dropping them in lava

[@freeksam4412]

@@cassiekaizo1210 Built hundreds of those things back in the day- after 1.5, I crafted an entire underground hall out of quartz, archways, fountains, etc, and then created my most advanced machine that essentially throws the villagers through a rube goldberg machine that kills them if the trade is unfavorable. I literally created a machine that exterminates certain culture in order to gain material wealth. *But Minecraft, so still fun.*

[@wabch]

@@cassiekaizo1210 or a more entertaining solution to disposing of your. villagers drop them into a pit of zombies.

[@harbl99]

1.14.4 -- You can now zombify and resurrect villagers for better deals. Even in death capitalism wins again!

[@zyaicob]

I come back to this video ever so often and every time I do I agree with it a little more and have more to actually contribute to the discussion so here goes my 2023 addition. I am a black man living in a former British colony, so that informs my perspective on the whole colonialism and subjugation of a perceived subhuman population issue. The zombie doctor method has historically been the only way I ever tried to create a village from scratch. It never once occurred to me to take existing villagers from their village. If I had considered it I'm sure I would have immediately asked the question "Where would that leave the village?" I couldn't bring myself to disrupt their community- even if they're not really human, they're certainly human enough that I understood, even if just unconsciously, that taking villagers out of their society and bringing them to mine would do untold damage to the existing societies and be unsustainable if I ever wanted to make another village. You described the zombie doctor process in a way meant to highlight its difficulty, tedium and inaccessibility. I was, of course, aware of this, but again, I just unconsciously assumed "Hey, they're villagers, they're pretty much people, of course it's a difficult and tedious process". So when my cousin and I wanted to build a village, we developed a whole system for trapping zombie villagers, shielding them from the sun and sorting them by occupation (or at least coat colour). At one point we had a massive 5 storey complex that was basically an hospital with a zombie villager in each cubicle. When we went to the nether our focus was on getting enough resources to make our potions. It was a very elaborate operation, but never once did it occur to us that it was too much work to get our own actual villagers, because again, they're pretty much people, of course it's hard. Before when I watched this video I never really related to those people you described who, being from different cultural backgrounds, played video games in fundamentally different ways. But now that I remember all the things I used to do when I played Minecraft with my cousins and sister back in the day, it seems obvious that I am also part of that tradition. Once when we were in a village we had found, my aunt, (I assuming hearing our conversation and getting the jist of what was going on), said in her facetious way "I hope y'all ain' in Africa killing black people". We laughed at another example of adults just not getting our video games and explained to her what was going on, but I now think a part of her, even subconsciously, was weirded out by the notion of going into a village and disrupting the villagers' lives with our own selfish needs and superior technology, treating them like signficantly less advanced and capable than we (which, of course, they were) and generally recreating some of the kinds of things that both our African foreparents and the Indigenous peoples of the Americas definitely went through. R.I.P. Aunty Mar.

[@user-finder0fluck]

I want to add that villagers' behavior is determined by code, similar to every other npc, the cats, the zombies, and so on; this makes them in intelligence on the same level as other animals within the game; They are functionally animals dressed up with humanoid avatar... So they will be treated like animals by some.

[@NikaHarper]

Love the hospital. My main joy in Minecraft is to redesign and build up villages while ensuring jobs and safety for the villagers, but my benevolence is tempered through different lenses. The village thrives, it's picturesque and connected to the nether rail, and has everything needed for... tourists. Or for me, when I'm passing through, and need bamboo. I've given them safety, a space in the world, a lifestyle, I TRULY care about these lil guys. But couldn't that also be seen as gentrification? Villagers, maaaaan. What a conundrum. Looking forward to your 2024 commentary.

[@zyaicob]

@@user-finder0fluck Here's my original 2020 comment copied and pasted here for the sake of everything being in one place, and so that i don't disappoint @NikaHarper the next time i have some more thoughts on this vid, I'll just post my subsequent thoughts here: The ~obvious and major flaw~ interesting wrinkle that I first found in this very well constructed and thought provoking argument is that villagers aren't like the human players. They are no more autonomous than cows or spiders or wolves in this game. Granted I know that that's a given within the limits of the video game, but still. The reason it's so off-putting is that they are (as you stated) humanoid, while also being less than human. They mimic so much of our behaviours, (building, planting, trading, specialised labour, etc.) which again contributes to the unfortunate emergent metaphor, but they are fundamentally less than human. (Although I suppose that giving humanoid entities less than human behaviours is what primarily contributes to the problematic nature of it all.)

[@ramppappia]

⁠@@NikaHarperI mean, are they losing their home because they can't afford it anymore? it's not gentrification, you're just making your personal villager zoos

[@outlawsyl]

Nah just get the villager leash data pack, they're too stupid to survive in their own village anyway

[@odinzan]

That's on you man, my Steve Minecraft lives in a hut in the forest

[@histori6259]

Your steve is a peaceful Georgian living in the caucus mountains and forrests with the looming threat of the Russian Zombies and Mongol Spider Jockeys.

[@0xCAFEF00D]

The only reason his Minecraft Steves hands are dirty is because he REQUIRED the luxury good of access to local cats. As he says, he grew up in a culture that values terraforming and has inherited that. Maybe he inherited something else.

[@TheAlison1456]

Dude, me too. I live in a swamp.

[@DARKthenoble]

My steve lives alone in a hole.

[@DARKthenoble]

@@hsemicolonc my steve lives in a 3 by 1 hole.

[@DoctorMelon]

The sandbox game "Eco" does some interesting things; you're tasked with preventing a meteor from striking the planet's surface, starting from the same "punch trees to get wood" conditions of minecraft - but the ecosystem and climate are simulated also. Over-hunting animals can destabilise the population, over-farming can dry the soil of its nutrients, and burning coal and refining metals can poison the air, water, and soil. It's a delicate balancing act - saving the world, both from outer space and yourselves. It's super interesting!

[@AnimeSunglasses]

I will have to try playing this.

[@davidgumazon]

"Over-farming can dry the soil of its nutrients" Floating Dirt: No.

[@Ramsey276one]

Sounds good! Link please?!

[@mylesvmiles7571]

these are a lot of systems you have to retroactively take care of there are some pro gamers who are always willing to push themselves out there but i don't see this game being super popular but also god dammit this is a great idea

[@VoltzNSmith]

The fact that this begins with a story about a love of cats is super meaningful to me

[@WangleLine]

cats are everything, after all

[@Loukbots]

‘It’s about cats, Hal.’

[@gabby3036]

*Digital* cats, no less. All that effort for a pet cat you literally cannot pet, while simultaneously there's a real life cat very likely within arm's reach (I mean, come on: you're trying to accomplish something on a computer - that's basically a summoning spell).

[@WWLinkMasterX]

Well, -Egyptians venerated cats -Some pagan religions held cats in great esteem -Medieval Christians associated cats with witchcraft -Cats were banned during the dark ages -The rat population exploded -This exacerbated the plague and killed a third of Europe -This decimated the workforce and raised the price of labor -That undermined feudalism and helped create capitalism -Which enabled the industrial revolution -Which allowed Europeans to conquer the old world. It's like pottery, it rhymes.

[@BBWahoo]

@@WWLinkMasterX We need to destroy cats

[@S0URUS]

I think this came from mojang’s goal to make each update act as an “upgrade” that players could apply to their old worlds. Many of the devs themselves have 10+ year old worlds so to have a drastically different meta every half year or so wouldn’t be ideal for these old worlds. The same with older players just now revisiting Minecraft and playing how they know and only after establishing their base do they understand the new mechanics. Since the updates mojang creates promote for the upkeep of previously established bases, players are inadvertently led to the train of thought that leads to “I should just bring the new stuff back to where everything else is”. Similar to how early colonists reacted when god dropped life version 1.14.

[@seandun7083]

And to be fair, they have been changing that a bit lately. Specifically the amethyst geodes have the blocks which grow crystals and cannot be moved.

[@youtubeuniversity3638]

​@@seandun7083 If you try, they vanish! Basically trying to *make* players deal with Things Being Far. Unfortunately, Amethyst is... limited in how much you can justify using, and without a second thing like it, in that it is "locked to where it spawns", you could very well just build base on top of it...

[@KirikkSiSq]

Btw did you see these new changes they're planning for trading? They now literally incentivise colonism bc after these changes you're gonna have to transport villagers to swamps, to get Mending

[@CertifiedPancake]

I attempted some villager-napping of my own once back in 2019, and was attacked by a patrol of pillagers mere blocks out of the village, they slaughtered both me and the innocent villager. I was so consumed by guilt that I immediately gave up on my plans and decided to just make a clear path to the closest village I could find and resign myself to some walking. I held a mini funeral attended by me and a curious sheep, and planted a memorial tree and a rosebush. Haven't tried to kidnap a villager since.

[@NikaHarper]

I have a memorial fountain from the time my friend brought an illager raid to my prized village, killed everyone inside. I found one in a basement and one on the roof, by a miracle, and was able to repopulate and thrive once more. I do not need the fountain to remind me of the massacre, I WILL NEVER FORGET IT.

[@KirikkSiSq]

​@@NikaHarper that's why I'm gonna look carefully after anyone who enters my world It has several things from 2014, I don't want for them to be destroyed by some stupid kid Also, if I'm ever moving villagers to Central Island, I'mma place them underground bc the island is from 0.8.0 Also bc Central Island underground reminds me of StoneBlock: there are no natural caves above y=5, only tunnels I dug

[@IceLaic]

“I’m not your dad” But why not

[@jeesook93]

Call him daddy

[@terri8372]

@@jeesook93 yeah, why should Philosophy tube be the only daddy? lol

[@lornaginetteharrison7168]

IceLaic: It’s time we had *’THE TALK’!!!*

[@justthecoolestdudeyo9446]

It's been a running joke between my sister and I that we call him "Daddy Dan Olsen" when referencing him lol

[@PhongTran-uc6mk]

Colonize my colon, daddy! Or mommy? Quickly please...

[@gizoginjr]

Ah yes, like that time Dwarf Fortress accidentally incentivized systematically breeding and slaughtering mermaids because their bones were among the most valuable renewable resources in the game. This was an outcome so repulsive to Toady One - the game's creator - that he would then go on to make mermaid bones nearly worthless to disincentivize such behavior in the future.

[@quixotes4478]

The difference is that mermaid genocide doesn't easily scan to any existing events in history where as Minecraft's systems more clearly encourage reenacting colonialism. Yes yes I know those darn SJWs tryna ruin muh vidya by... engaging with the themes and ludonarrative.

[@lowleypeasentmr.l8836]

@@quixotes4478 I can think of two, somewhat similar examples, killing albinos out of a belief that they had magical healing properties and people collecting the bones of mummies to snort

[@Hideyoshi1991]

@@quixotes4478 from Rome to China, Japan, Siam, Persia, Abyssinia and the Aztecs. It's just good old fashioned Empire.

[@unblorbosyourshows9635]

@@lowleypeasentmr.l8836 People did WHAT with mummy bones???

[@lowleypeasentmr.l8836]

@@unblorbosyourshows9635 After Napoleans disastrous invasion of Egypt he brought back ancient Egyptia artifacts (most notably the rosette stone) this set off Egypt-mania in Europe and North America, most notably in Victorian England, where unwrapping parties took place(gathering around a mummy while a person unwraps the mummy, before passing out pieces of the wrapping and body), people bought ancient relics to put in drawing rooms, massive efforts to decode the hieroglyphs took place and yes, some people snorted crushed up mummy bones

[@johnnychabin6982]

I think there is some moral value in having this kind of choice, especially in the outcomes it gives you. Most morals in video games come down to “shoot the old lady? yes/no,” where “yes” only gets the player arrested. But that’s not how morals typically function in real life; people don’t do evil things for the hell of it, they usually do it for money, or some other clear advantage. Minecraft has an unusual number of mechanics that can be abused immorally, such as colonialism, factory farming, mass-murder, deforestation, etc. These are often difficult to do, but are clearly beneficial, at a moral cost the game makes very obvious (most mobs have a “cutesy” design, and scream when killed, and most can easily be beaten). Although some of the societal parallels the game has are unfortunate, it gives you a hidden choice. Play the game at face value, and respect the presence of others, or slaughter and enslave to progress faster, and be left with a dead world and a monument to your own narcissism.

[@AiluridaeAureus]

Yeah the shit this guy goes on about is like if he played Undertale/Deltarune, and then made a video essay about how it's Toby's fault that this guy deliberately went down the most evil route possible.

[@fluffytowels1145]

In my opinion, binary gameified morality systems just don't work in general. Not only are they absurd in some cases absurd (pickpocketing someone is morally worse than killing them and looting their body, unless they are "evil" in fallout 3 and new vegas), but they also make the player automatically pick the good/bad option because they decided that they're doing a good/bad playthrough, instead of actually engaging with the moral problems. Because games rarely incentivise being neutral and give bonuses only if you get a lot of good boy or bad boy points. And when games try to encourage evil with greater rewards, they back out at the last second making the good path actually more rewarding in the end (Bioshock) or make the evil option too evil for the reward to be worth it (Blowing up Megaton in fallout 3).

[@stratospheric37]

@@AiluridaeAureus i don't think that's a fair comparison. both of these games may have some sort of moral system but both of them definitely try push you towards one path compared to the other. in the case with minecraft the way the game is about resource management and shaping the world it pushes you to do the terraforming, deforestation and colonialism (oops!). undertale actively discourages you from killing people and doing the genocide route cmon

[@fellinuxvi3541]

@@stratospheric37 Which only serves to make it a less realistic choice in the end.

[@irrevenant3]

IMO Dishonored does a pretty good job of this by making the good route more work and less convenient - then letting you see the consequences of the path you took.

[@Epinardscaramel]

Well it's not colonialism, you're just helping them out by constructing infrastructure that they could not… oh god.

[@scriba5777]

Well, the villagers can't, and neither could most natives in the colonial era.

[@Agos226]

@@scriba5777 the colonial apologists have logged on

[@gentlemanscarecrow5987]

@@scriba5777 The villagers can't because they weren't programmed to be able to. If you believe the same is true of real native groups, we have a problem.

[@JeoshuaCollins]

@@gentlemanscarecrow5987 The OP sees the problem here. Do you? No, the Villagers weren't programmed to be able to fend for themselves. It's almost as if they were created different, and need the PC to do things for them, since they are devoid of free will and just follow basic impulses. It's the White Man's Burden for video games. That's the issue the video is describing, here.

[@gentlemanscarecrow5987]

@@JeoshuaCollins Do you think I'm implying that the villagers having no free will is a good thing? Let me clarify, I do not.

[@MalcolmCooks]

I always felt like Factorio leaned into the whole colonialism thing instead of shying away from it. To me the overall tone says "Colonialism bad, here's a game where you are a bad guy doing colonialism."

[@T33K3SS3LCH3N]

Factorio has a downright holocaustial facet. Not only do you colonialise the place, you set up an automated industrial scale genocide apparatus to completely depopulate as much land as possible.

[@MalcolmCooks]

@@T33K3SS3LCH3N yes, thats pretty much the point of the game. definately not accidental or unintentional

[@JacksonBockus]

But like... the game is still fun, right? I haven't played it, but I know people have sunk hundreds of hours into it, so while it may have the meaning "Colonialism is bad", it you're doing a colonialism and it's fun, then it also has the meaning "Doing this bad colonialism is fun and addicting." Not trying to attack Factorio, since like I said I haven't played it, but it's a potential problem with any game that puts the player character in a villainous role, like Spec Ops: The Line.

[@Jonsoner]

@@JacksonBockus But why should it be a problem? Isn't it great when games challenge the meaning of fun? Of being a good guy? Of doing the right thing? For example, Lisa the Painful and Spec Ops: The Line are so great for me because I wouldn't have thought about what it means to, as a player, want to be a hero, even if the world doesn't need you to try to act like one and you end up making everything worse by trying. Or just proving fun by being objectively an evil person Factorio, where you have fun by coldly and methodically try to find ways to annihilate the entire ecosystem because they keep trying to nibble at your factory. To the point where I played Toxic Love from Ferngully while burning a forest filled with fauna by making a train filled with mortars. Or Rimworld and modding the game so my colonist eventually get used to all the atrocities that I'll make them do for wealth "What's that? The new guy is having a mental break because he didn't know that we harvest organs of prisoners before selling them to slavery? HA! I'll force him to do it himself later, he'll probably fail the operation and maybe kill the organ bag, probably making him cry some more". To me, is vital for games to provide challenge to the players, and not necessarily in difficulty but by challenging the players own thoughts and ways of playing. Specially if it's about scary, ugly or disgusting things that we cannot and probably shouldn't ever experience in real life. So I don't believe in shying away from those topics in games since they can make us grow more as a person. At least it did for me.

[@luckyc4t110]

@@Jonsoner If a game tries to tell a player that the actions it is telling them to take are bad, but fails to convey that judgement, then it reads as an endorsement of the bad thing. This problem is worsened by the fact that an audience is inclined to empathize with and agree with the main character, and especially with a player character who they inhabit. It's true that a game like Factorio can provide an interesting and insightful look into colonialism and the feeling of being a colonialist that makes a player reinspect their own values as a player and a person. It's just as true that a more average player can pick of the game, be met with the same colonialist sentiments that they've been culturally submerged in their entire life, and uncritically agree with the game and what it is asking of them as something good. It's the classic problem of satire, in which whatever ridiculous statement you make will reflect what some idiot out there unironically believes. When you ask a player to reenact colonialism as a critique of colonialism, there will be people who don't see the critique and only enjoy the reenactment.

[@SL-wt8fm]

I do love that gaslighting villagers for cheaper prices after zombifying them and curing them is a mechanic

[@TheEmpress1768]

This is like, biological war and genocide.

[@nicole-ls4jb]

"My interests and values are authentic, but they didn't form un a vacuum." What an excellent observation. I'm going to be mulling that over for a good, long while.....

[@DreableNeebal10]

Hahaha you built a village for them? My friends and I simply enslaved them into some interconnected stalls in a cliffside.

[@swedishm90camouflage17]

the way it should he done! building individual houses is inefficient as heck

[@aero-aha]

I put mine in a cage connected to my house I’m a monster i know

[@kaliorexi4807]

@@aero-aha No worries, look up "CallMeKevin" You are completely fine, believe me

[@RyoKasai25]

The monsters was us the entire time.

[@kaliorexi4807]

@@RyoKasai25 No, we're just efficient

[@babahu15]

this one drew in a different crowd. i particularly love the "you're thinking about this too deeply" comments like... welcome lmao

[@mixiekins]

I get what you mean, it just brings up interesting concepts and gets folks thinking about gameplay design semantics, which can actually be very useful exercises to improve experiences. It sure would be nice to have a From The Ground Up (botw side quest) method of easily establishing a new town, but wherever you please and by politely inviting villagers who would be well-suited to that location. I get that you can expand existing towns, but what if you want a town nowhere remotely near any existing ones? Would you have to build the nearest town into a mega metropolis to reach that farthest corner? It's unfortunately unsightly, tedious, against the wants of the player, and (of course why bother arguing this when we're talking about cube-people, but also) very unrealistic; urban areas are founded though dispersed dots of towns that on their own grow until they intersect to form a larger mass (why urban land areas like Chicago tend to have neighborhoods in the city proper and townships further out), whereas it's far less organic for one small town to explode out and encompass all the open land and few sister town that are around.

[@greenredblue]

I mean... it’s one thing to apply analysis to a situation that doesn’t necessarily support it. It’s quite another to twist pretzels out of a game just to *vaguely* construct a scenario you wanted to discuss anyway. *He’s* the one who decided the villagers were too inconvenient to access. There’s so many ways he ignored for fixing that problem: move into the village, set up nether portals, build a red stone railway (quite fun to do!), ride horses, even set up a canal (which he eventually did *anyway* to transport slaves). Or, since we can see he’s technically proficient enough to set up and run a server, just create some command block teleporters. *OR* or, since we see he’s technically proficient enough to _install mods_ (considering he’s clearly replaced the rendering engine), he could use any of the _dozens_ of fun and easily installed fast travel mods. But no, none of those will do. Instead he decided that he had to build his own village from scratch. He himself pointed out that there are easy / ethical ways to do this, including terminal commands and saving zombies. But nope, virtual slavery it is. Even this wouldn’t be so bad if he just approached it as a simple meditation on the exercise of free will in an imbalanced power dynamic. But he actually implied that his *own* choices, which ignored options that were both faster and more fun, were the intended experience. Concluding: “yikes.” This is what disingenuous, bad faith arguments look like. And it’s kind of insulting to both Minecraft and an audience that expects well-informed even-handedness. He could have picked literally any other game to support this discussion - he himself even gave some good examples! But Minecraft just doesn’t work for the point he’s trying to make.

[@CTOOFBOOGLE]

Guy Boo this video is not judging minecraft on a moral level or anything, it’s a critical analysis of some of the deeper implications of various gameplay mechanics. People like you are why videogames aren’t considered art by many.

[@greenredblue]

Nicholas Brush 6:10 - 6:25 You’re telling me that this video does _not_ directly imply problematic intent on the part of Mojang and Microsoft. I’m very curious what exactly you think “that would be a yikes from me” means. Also, you’re defending _this video_ which explicitly details the problems with other-izing, with the phrase “you people”? (Paired with a completely irrelevant conclusion, btw.) Really. That said, I give even odds that you’re just trying to troll. So FYI I won’t be seeing future replies.

[@CTOOFBOOGLE]

Guy Boo I am not, but since I guess you have blocked me whatever.

[@ashaelatv]

"Alternately you're going to need to acquire villagers from existing villages." oh no "It's just a matter of getting a villager near enough to the water that you can push them into a boat" oh noooooooo

[@no-man_baugh]

Not hype on where this is going

[@Cami555555Sheep]

GET IN THE BOAT

[@gamersagainstweedrepresent]

*OHH NOOOO*

[@ilikeceral3]

The harder they try to escape notch’s influence, the harder notch pushes himself in.

[@chance9512]

I want to like this, but it's at 666, so yeah, not happening.

[@qwerasdliop2810]

This is the same as killing homeless people in genshin. Like my first thought as someone from an ex-british colony was- "Wait a second, I'm the outsider here. Why am I killing the homeless people for loot?"

[@river_brook]

it's borderline comical how hard Genshin Impact's later storylines push for humanization and empathy with the mooks that you're mechanically obligated to massacre on a daily basis (Hopefully without spoiling too much) you get some truly horrific bombshells dropped on you about the nature of the setting, and then you just...keep on doing horrible humanitarian crimes, until some unspecified point in the future where all will be resolved and/or revealed. Yay?

[@gavinattalahadiyan325]

Funny that Hilichurls are technically also once Khaenriah's citizens. But then again, most of the time.they attack the Traveler first, not the Traveler attack them first.

[@qwerasdliop2810]

@@gavinattalahadiyan325 yeah like how any ancient tribe would attack outsiders and unknown trespassers from fear?

[@hello_alpine1693]

@@gavinattalahadiyan325 tbh they're probably the most obvious BOTW holdover in the game, basically just being Bokoblins, so I'm not surprised their explanation is more complicated within Genshin's story

[@bjam89]

Wait, as a outsider, why would you kill homeless people for loot?

[@WereScrib]

The accidental colonialism actually interests me less than realizing the idea of these massive buildings. It directly reminds me of why I had difficulty enjoying Minecraft with friends. I grew up in a rural area that's history were settlers that kinda sorta 'went native' according to the narrative (Not really the case, but WA had a lot of intermarriage). Moreover, my ancestral background not from that, my real connection not close to small scale settlers living in the 'smuggler towns' of my area, was of a Ukrainian immigrant fleeing from Polish, Austro-Hungarian, and Russian imperialization and the cultural and ethnic destruction they brought, with stories of traveling musicians as heroes, as cossack hosts as government, and folk legends of lone hunters chasing antelope. Moreover, I saw my rural area as 'good' and the encroaching technology of Seattle as 'bad' to the east. So my creations in Minecraft were always on the edge of my friends strange machins and vast metropolises. I'd find a large tree and carve out the branches to build a small house inside of, hidden away. I'd build small, and kept moving from place to place. My largest settlement was nestled in a natural formation, barely big enough for the necessities at the time. I'd mine mostly by going down into chasms because I was deathly afraid of destroying the environment in Minecraft. It sometimes felt like I was always running from my friends, because if they found some beautiful spot I was living in a tiny home in, it'd not be long before they'd decide to just collect a 'little' and five giant trees in my jungle were suddenly gone. The river was diverted, and a weird rock formation in the distance was flattened and a keep grew in its place. It was a weird metaphor for the feeling of life.

[@just1desi]

I love this comment so much and your tree house sounds awesome.

[@gamzee3610]

Our playstyles are a bit different (I find a spot near a river, make a small farm with a few animals, build a 2-3 room house. Then never change my base no matter how far I explore) but I have similar experiences playing with other people as. They'd make these giant gaudy cobblestone generators and automatic egg/cow farms, and villager breeding stations to make the perfect traders. And I just couldn't get into it because when I was playing with them Minecraft felt less like a world to explore and more like a series of mechanics that you manipulate to get The Most Stuff. Which I guess there's nothing wrong with that, but to me it takes away what I think it takes away the magic of the game. Minecraft just isn't a game that's better when you speedrun through it, you know?

[@fergochan]

"deathly afraid of destroying the environment in Minecraft" I love Minecraft, but that's exactly how I feel. The procedurally generated environment I find myself in is precious and unique and I don't want to damage its character.

[@IrvingIV]

This is why I always do the majority of my building in hand-carved caverns, so that the natural landscape is untouched, while sprawling labrynths of splendor are allowed to lurk just below the surface, waiting to be discovered.

[@captaincomic8678]

...You must be fun at parties.

[@GunnGuardian]

You know my first thought was, "Why don't you just make a nether highway to the village instead of kidnapping them? It's a lot easier anyway." Then I guess it becomes a Globalism metaphor instead.

[@TheGerkuman]

True, but at least one is preferable to the other. The issue is that the villagers still don't get a say in the matter. Imagine finding a village and them saying to you 'dont build within 50 squares of our town'. Imagine trying that and suddenly they're out there with their diamond swords to drive you away Imagine nomadic villagers with tents, who are confused why you believe the land can be owned or build upon and try and conserve as much as possible. Sadly no-one would do that, because it would make the game 'less fun'

[@BvousBrainSystems]

That's the metaphor side of the question, now I'm here with the practical side within the game: if the village isn't within render distance, nothing happens in it, children aren't being born and don't grow. Therefore, it's desireable to have your village be where you will spend most of your time.

[@elgatto3133]

@@TheGerkuman NOMAD VILLAGERS WOULD BE SO COOL

[@Colleywoodstudios]

"Alright gang so I solved the transit problem BY USING HELL ITSELF!" Basically the plot of doom 2016 lol

[@AmeriChrisTheMage]

@@TheGerkuman "...it would make the game 'less fun'" We must have different definitons of fun.

[@brickvideos4851]

This comment section bothers me so much. Everyone needs to chill. He didn't say that this was an issue that needs to be resolved. It's an observation. Just because this undertone exists, that doesn't mean that you are the equivalent of a European colonizer. That doesn't mean that minecraft is a bad, or violent, or a racist video game. But just because it is a video game, that doesn't mean that this discussion isn't worth having. Minecraft players need to remember that an examination of minecraft is not an personal examination of their character. It is true, however that this video began to focus on the ideas of civilization as a whole and not just colonization. But the villager immigration thing is definitely colonialism. The tone of this video was kind of dark due to the lack of music. I'm sorry, but a mostly neutral voice with (almost) nothing to accompany it gives off a tone of emptiness. Overall I loved the editing and content though! Great and thoughtful video.

[@TheManinBlack9054]

Yeah I agree, comments like this are inevitable, but it's still quite saddening how little thought people put into trying to understand those videos and what it tries to study, because sometimes one might try to think about something for longer than two minutes and try to engage in a constructive discussion and not just outright dismiss everything you do not understand.

[@Ellie_deMayo]

Ah, the ol’ I identify as the stuff I like reaction......... ......Hard thing to shake off....

[@willowarkan2263]

Maybe I haven't read enough or maybe this was different when the comment was posted, but I haven't seen any such comments. I write, because I'm always curious if it's really something I missed, one way or another, or if it's akin to comments predicting dissent to come.

[@blarg2429]

@@willowarkan2263 I first watched this video when it had just come out and am on my third or fourth viewing as of this writing (my, how time flies), and let me tell you: either you just haven't found the old comments decrying this thinkpiece as trying to ruin the game, or the authors of said comments deleted them. This is the first time I've been able to enter this video's comment section without becoming annoyed at the kind of rhetoric Brick Videos was describing.

[@salj.5459]

Bad Face Makes sense considering that Notch is a fascist, check his Twitter

[@Laittth]

10:40 you forgot the part in Factorio where there's literally a game mechanic called "pollution", which things in your factory make and causes a race of bug-like creatures that live on the planet (often literally called natives) to attack your factory, making a large part of the game revolve around developing military technology to protect your factory or quite literally wipe the natives off the map.

[@thecringequeen31]

Wow, that’s really fucked up

[@aboringperson9069]

It is interesting how Factorio (and, to an extent, Satisfactory) both show the consequences of the player showing up. Though the player in Factorio has crash-landed, the game is very open about the negative effects they have on the world around them. Pollution is a mechanic, the artstyle is grungey, and the music itself was made to reflect it. The game does not try to hide it, the devs-considering their right lean iirc-are fully aware of what it looks like regardless. Satisfactory is a lot cleaner in artstyle, combat, and consequence, but I'm pretty sure the player character is a corporate drone sent down by a nebulous, intergalactic corporation.

[@almostambidextrous]

This video is such a prime example of how reflecting on the meaning/messaging of media is not NECESSARILY == condemning that media. Well done. Anecdotally, when I started Minecraft in 2015 I had NO IDEA how the game worked, I'd harvest blocks carefully for fear that a cave might collapse if I mined too much. And when I first found Iron ore, I thought, "What is this weird block?" and intentionally left some behind to preserve the memory of where I'd seen it for the first time. Now of course I know "better", but because of my nostalgia for that early experience (and perhaps a smattering of OCD), I still choose to play the game this way, striving to augment the environments I come across. Like, I'll mine a vein of coal but also place cobblestone slabs and stairs -blocks that don't naturally occur in caves- in such a way that they look like rubble in the void where the coal once was; I'll mimic the oak supports of an abandoned mineshaft; I'll make it LOOK like there was a mine here. Manipulating the environment to tell a story. That's just one example. I've done similar things in Ocean Monuments, ravines, and villages. Of course it slows my progress, but OTOH, I've been doing this in the same world for 4 years, and I explore a LOT, often getting lost on purpose and even being forced to make new bases, so that I tend to forget about things I've done previously... every now and then I come across such a thing from my past, and the passage of time being what it is, it feels almost like discovering something made by someone else. I love that Minecraft allows for this sort of world-building.

[@Khyrberos]

I love this

[@squirrel_killer-]

This is where I say "people make mods that make those things you do out of habit active mechanics" isn't it? Terrafirmacraft being the most intensive example

[@ChestersonJack]

It’s cool to find someone who does the same thing!! I love making my progress visible

[@zeynaviegas]

I loved seeing comments of people thinking about their gameplay experience on a deep level. Cara, this is the reason I love this game and why I still came back after not playing it for 3 years.

[@bromomento2952]

@@squirrel_killer- I recommend terrafirmacraft+ , still gets updated.

[@cassandralynn1277]

This video is a strictly optimal intersection of my interests.

[@TheHiroBlade]

This is actually kind of weird. I've been watching Folding Ideas for a few months now, AND I just got back into minecraft like a week ago. I am literally in the process of tearing down and rebuilding a naturally spawned village for my own purposes. Considering how many minecraft videos I've watched in the last week, I'm surprised the algorithm didn't just say. "Yea, watch this. Trust me." and then play it as soon as I logged in.

[@peterdumpel5729]

Cassandra Lynn Your wording makes it sound like you really dig colonialism edit: oh god I just noticed the 'dig'

[@tophers3756]

You must be a lot of fun at parties.

[@YEAHBABYITSPAT]

Same!

[@SydtheKyd]

@@peterdumpel5729 In Cassandra Lynn's defense, you can be interested in colonialism in the sense that you like studying and analyzing it, without endorsing its actions.

[@zebulonpike9024]

There is an inverse factorio, known as terra nil, where the player must repair an industrial hellscape and terraform the planet back into something resembling nature.

[@CatLover-lk9gz]

It sucks that there aren't more games like that. They are all so fun to play, and watch as plants take back the earth.

[@norafromash5087]

One of my favourite things to do in minecraft, even before the trading update, was to find an existing village, wall it off so zombies couldnt get in and kill the villagers, and just expand the village. There was something quant about having your little square with the villagers that you could decorate and make peaceful.

[@isabellarios7489]

Never had I ever faced the uncomfortable legacy of colonialism then when I was playing Civ V and stumbled onto a continent that had no civs or city states spawn on it, just barbarian camps. I was wiping out camps left and right until I went, "wait a minute...." haha

[@CarrotConsumer]

Was that before or after you nuked another civilization?

[@imveryangryitsnotbutter]

@@CarrotConsumer Hey, Gandhi nuked first.

[@willowdove6703]

The entire barbarian mechanic is extremely uncomfortable to me in the first place. I try to think of them as pirates or outlaws and that way they’re not, like, an actual cultural group. That way it makes sense that they’re automatically hostile and nonnegotiable. But then why aren’t they CALLED pirates?

[@EngineerLume]

The amount of times I've come across an abandoned yet plentiful island, went "YOINK," and then had to kill the, now that I have thought about it, Native Barbarians trying to fight is honestly probably too much

[@CraftsmanOfAwsomenes]

@@willowdove6703 Well, this doesn’t even work because in certain iterations of the series Barbarians can found their own civilizations as the game progresses.

[@xavierwagner3238]

I live nomadicly in minecraft. And god there is nothing greater then becoming intimate with the world by memory.

[@toamastar]

Sounds like a cool way to play, how do you move all your stuff!? Or do you just take the essentials and get more resources where you move? :)

[@WarriorOfStarclan]

@@toamastar I imagine an ender chest full of shulker boxes? That carries a ton of stuff!

[@toamastar]

@@WarriorOfStarclan yeah thats a good theory tbh lol

[@sammyangel98]

Nomads do settle, but not permanently... so maybe temporarily setting down stuff before deciding to move on.?

[@voidgod8300]

I do that as well, it’s a pretty refreshing way of replaying Minecraft.

[@Uccisore28]

You may also want to consider the cultural influences that cause you to regard a wilderness as beautiful and pristine, as opposed to a nightmarish hellscape inimical to human flourishing that MUST be tamed. If you grew up with things like electricity and boiled water, then you are likely romanticizing the wilderness (since you only see it from a distance), which of course is going to play into what you think of games based around terraforming it.

[@yonatanbeer3475]

Yeah, minecraft presents a very Romantic idea of the pristine wilderness, the wonderland of nature devoid of human meddling. Food is abundant and safe to eat, disease doesn't exist, all the animals are peaceful folk who will just run around when you punch them aggressively, etc. That influence is more interesting to me than the history of colonialism that minecraft inherited.

[@flytrapYTP]

@@yonatanbeer3475 are you forgetting the part where suicide bombers and giant spiders are abundant?

[@chatboss000]

@@flytrapYTP Peaceful mode is a difficulty option. Also, bears and other wild animals don't just all come out at night and burn in the sunshine.

[@jhonatanhernandez3568]

@@Mrpersonman0 you can respawn though

[@elcabbage2306]

Yonatan Beer there are literally zombies and chimaera man pig undead abominations that walk the land, it’s a fucking children’s video game. Meanwhile there are wars and famine and rape and disease in less developed countries, but no, you’re not concerned with getting these people the things they need to live healthy and long lives, you’re concerned with hurting their feelings by comparing a modern day video game to the actual horrors of colonialism when I guarantee no person who actually took place in such horrors is playing fucking Minecraft

[@fiji9258]

I just wish Minecraft had systems (or at least a mod) that made biomes less static and more interactive. For instance, it would be cool if the kinds and amounts of animals in a region changed depending on what you did there, like maybe cutting down trees could reduce the amounts of chickens as they disperse for more cover, or maybe there could be different qualities of soil or something. Waste systems too, so you have to actually consider your footprint.

[@JNJNRobin1337]

unfortunately no mods for that have yet existed; and i dont know how long until they might

[@sharkfacemlg]

He makes it seem as if creating a village is unintended/insanely difficult by spelling out every step to make a village from curing villagers, when 99% are part of the natural progression of the game, EG: raiding nether fortress, creating potion and obtaining golden apples. 1 of which is needed to complete the game, and the other 2 greatly trivialise boss fights.

[@ekki1993]

Not sure where are you going with the comment, but you're missing the point. Do you really do all the game's "natural progression" on every playthrough? Literally no one of my friends who play/played minecraft ever finished the game. They just goof around making custom builds and I'm pretty sure none of them made their iron farms by unturning a zombie villager.

[@sharkfacemlg]

@@ekki1993 Yes. especially in multiplayer servers/realms because your missing out on high level items like elytra and an entire dimension in the game. If its on survival theres no point in not progressing.

[@chatboss000]

@@sharkfacemlg For an experienced player who wants to quickly start a village, it's incredibly cheap and time efficient to boat a villager over as opposed to spending time "naturally" progressing.You only need 5 wood planks(and a shovel on bedrock edition) That being said, you are right - it's unintentionally difficult compared to the alternative newer mechanics present. Because before, there weren't as many mechanics, nor was there much of an incentive to make villages.

[@legendofFranktheTank]

@@chatboss000 for an even more experienced player it might be easier to simply make a villager breeder in a central location and move them where they are needed. But why are they different then any other animal In the game, why are you okay with farming cows and pigs but not testificates. Just because they are fictional creature doesn't mean they are conscious the same way a human player is. The game makes it obvious that they are just intended to more like animals because on a mechanics level they don't do a lot to separate them. They've even stated in blog posts they aren't builders warriors or leaders, of they aren't builders they didn't even build the villages they live in. The problem with this videos is he's pointing at a mob that doesn't look anything like a human and saying person

[@chatboss000]

@@legendofFranktheTankThey are different in the same way I'm fine eating beef or pork IRL but wouldn't eat human flesh. The game makes it obvious they are more like animals? No it doesn't. >Unlike most mobs, villagers interact with buildings >unlike most animals, you can't tie a villager on a lead >unlike most passive animals, there's consequences for punching/killing villagers, to the point that iron golems target you in a village. So I feel justified in thinking having a (accidental) game incentive to kidnap/mass-breed villagers (Hero of the village farming, getting rare trades, etc.) rather than cure them is kinda wierd. Finally, check out "The Thermian Argument" - it's a vid made by the same dude who made this one you're commenting under! And miss me with that minecraft.net official canon as an argument next time.

[@henryglennon3864]

Can't you make villagers by going to the river, sculpting people out of clay, writing the Hebrew word for truth on their foreheads, and walking around them clockwise three times, while intoning the true name of God?

[@cinebst]

@Ashley Lynn ah so i have YOU to blame

[@sarar4901]

+

[@thesurvivorssanctuary6561]

Soooooooooo...minecraft villagers are Homunculi? That would explain their strange noses and noises, 😂🤣

[@alexdejesus582]

Got rid of this in a patch for balance issues.

[@definitelynotofficial7350]

That's not too far off from how you make iron golems in Minecraft.

[@YukitsuTimes]

While I do appreciate the overall sentiment and agree with the video both in general and most of the specifics, what is interesting to me as someone who is somewhat outside of the European perspective of history, is that you automatically think about the European colonization when looking at these games which is in itself a type of eurocentrism. Remember that all places in the world were once pristine nature untouched by man. Until someone came to that land to colonize it. Is it illegitimate to say that those people who first arrived in the Americas thousands of years ago had once gone through many of the same processes that we see in these sorts of games? I don't think so. Saying otherwise denies that they attempted to create, to master their environment or build complex infrastructure with the resources at their disposal. It sort of denies the idea that the colonized people were societies as we tend to think of them. After all, "what if America, but without native Americans" was what the native Americans got to experience when they began colonizing America.

[@FisherStAmour-xl4qz]

It is important to point out that the native Americans had been here long enough that, with the population density and development they had, where a part of the local ecosystem and their removal is still causing problems with some local ecosystems today.

[@0xCAFEF00D]

It's beyond eurocentricm. It's much more of an anglo/angloamerican thing to constantly think about colonialism and the slavery especially. The environmental aspect of Factorio hits closer to home.

[@emperorleroy6747]

While yes, the colonized also affected the landscape of the world, but the only civilization to abduct and enslave millions was Europe. Without Villagers, yeah, Minecraft would be a blank slate like it was for other civilizations. But the intersection of civilization and abduction of villagers points only to European Colonialism as a relevant parallel.

[@Diax1324]

It's a misnomer that all areas were once "untouched by man". What does that even mean? Humans and pre-humans (Homo erectus, etc etc.) have been around for millions of years. There has never been a bit of terrain familiar to us that has been "untouched" in any regard; that is unless you subscribe to creationism.

[@WIlliamCHowes]

Personally. I think it's selfish of him to attribute to his own culture what is innate in all of humanity, whether we like it or not.

[@Astronomikat]

It's funny. I generally start my runs with Minecraft looking for a viable village to start improving before I go about doing anything else. Then I trek outward looking for neighboring villages and points of interest. After which I begin to build outward from the initial village, roads, rail systems, etc. to connect the surrounding villages together. I pretty much never move villagers with boats or mine carts. I just build them new nicer homes, and more farms and work sites, storage, docks, etc. and give them free bread and trade with them to level them up. I like to pretend I'm building a friendly utopian anarcho-syndicalist or some sort of socialist society. haha.

[@NotALotOfColonial_SpaghettiToG]

that is so nerdy i'm gonna have to try that

[@robertoazuaje9279]

That's pretty much what I do, basically

[@Hemostat]

You gotta give them unique flags too

[@wawe5557]

I do that too! I add more beds, more torches, and wall up. I gather railways from mineshafts to connect my base and the villagers, instead of kidnapping them. I add more work stations under open air, so that they can still work in their village, but I at least know exactly where they are and access is easy. Hauling them is way too much work, that you can instead spend improving what's already available!

[@Astronomikat]

@@wawe5557 Exactly! I've also started building libraries and writing books about the lore of the various towns I've discovered and helped grow. lol. I'm using a translator to convert my stories into a kind of late middle English.

[@MagnusvonYoshi]

It's not a sandbox game, but isn't "reclaiming the land from a rampaging industrialist" the plot of Kirby Planet Robobot?

[@MrTombombodil]

Also that VR Hawk Trainer game is literally about playing as an indigenous person fighting back against a robotic industrial colonist.

[@Cumbercuke]

The Titanfall games too,

[@NarfiRef]

Ferrohazard Also, the Oddworld games.

[@littlefieryone2825]

Well now I have to play Kirby Planet Robobot.

[@Emperorbart7]

Also Sonic the Hedgehog vs Dr. Robotnik/Eggman

[@rogofos]

I remember selling weed to villagers back in 1.7.2(?) Long time ago.

[@waffles6280]

wait what

[@Whatismusic123]

Hol’ up.

[@justrez2571]

WHAT?

[@defaultmesh]

HOL UP FREN

[@RemixedVoice]

7x7 Weed Shoppe

[@matesafranka6110]

Based on all this, I think the sandbox exploration genre is ripe for its own version of Spec Ops: The Line.

[@SourSourSour]

Heelll yes my dude, it's gotta exist somewhere

[@TehBurek]

That's a genuinely cool idea. Wonder what that would be like...

[@PanAndScanBuddy]

Spec Ops 2: The Farm

[@CharlieDB96]

+1 trip to the therapist

[@lhumanoideerrantdesinterne8598]

@@TehBurek It would probably be a game where you start in an hostile land and are constantly incentivized to build and exploit your village, but by the time you have it running, you'd realize that you permanently ruined the environment around, that the lifeforms you've been slaughtering to build it also had hopes and dreas of their own and that you're only recreating a cycle of catastrophe and destruction that lead to your initial conundrum. Actually, wait... This game already exist. It's called Bastion.

[@crisis8v88]

Taken further, you need to somehow keep your villagers safe from threats they face in the world to protect your investment in those few high level villagers with the dope items for sale. To do this, you fashion shelters for them, which take the form of increasingly restrictive spaces. Eventually you arrive at the logical conclusion where your villagers, now sequestered into their prisons designed expressly for your convenience, toil endlessly not for their own fulfillment, but yours.

[@comicconcarne]

Stardew explicitly focuses on joining an existing community and benefiting it. Sure you can take the capitalist exploit route, but that makes you a douche. Being on a equal level to the NPCs is not only less of an unfortunate implication, it's also more engaging for roleplay.

[@TheDelinear]

There are some inferences in the game at prior civilisations (Elves and Dwarves and the shadow people) who may have been displaced by humans, although it's unclear if they just killed each other off and humans moved into vacant lands. There are also the Junimos, who appear sentient and have moved into abandoned human buildings since their forest homes have been reduced. So it's not entirely clear that we have clean hands in Stardew on the whole colonialism front, even though we are mostly presented as a force for good in the community.

[@bakakamille7805]

I've been playing a lot of Stardew recently and I think despite it being like pretty obviously anti corporation it still kinda like accidentally a bit odd. Just due to the fact that it is a game it's very easy to see a lot of people playing it and making what is pretty much a very capitalistic form of farming especially at the end game. Also like Krobus kinda touches on the idea that the entire mines sections is kinda weird.

[@AiluridaeAureus]

But don't you see?! You can play as a WHITE MAN doing FARMING THINGS on land that a BROWN PERSON might have walked on once! Yeah, this guy just went "Ahh, what's da most popular buildin things peoples' playin? Ah eyah, it's all about killin da natives."

[@Ansalion]

@@AiluridaeAureus Uh, the point he was making had nothing to do with race. It was about our cultural values, how we see civilization and the conquering of nature as good. This doesn't have to involve any natives. Cutting down trees and bushes to make space for farmland is taming the wilderness and that is something you engage in a lot in Stardew Valley.

[@bumfricker2487]

I wouldn't say that Stardew is as perfect a critique of the pernicious nature of capitalist systems as it thinks it is. Pierre wants to be Jojamart and the difference between the two is one of degree/extent rather than one of values. In fact, the player is strongly incentivized to do the same: seek out efficient means of money generation by exploiting natural resources and NPCs.

[@MegaCoolOwl]

A Dark Room is a construction/exploration game that directly addresses the colonialism of the protagonist

[@xovvo3950]

the mobile version was very distressing bc I did not pick up on the change in mechanics until all the refugees in the village were re-labelled slaves. I was not expecting the shift away from "eke out a comfortable existence with other refugees and accidentally escape the planet" to "you're a slaver now, should have listened to your builder" (although so far the framing of the moral is a little YIKES)

[@gabrieltwinwithulm7466]

Very good point. I had never thought about ADR in this context, but you’re totally right. I also appreciate that the game then challenges you to do better and be better - beating the game without creating infrastructure or enslaving natives

[@MYNAMEISTEDNOTED]

But so old and strictly text / ASCII based and that’s barely even fun at all to show to an audience (evenifitisoneofthemostinterestingcolonialistsimulatorseverdeveloped(especiallyconsideringthemobileremake))

[@sunnydong9069]

Wait hold up, I played it a few times and never stuck out for too long and you're telling me that this silly idle game has a dark colonialist twist!?

[@jamie_mkv]

@@xovvo3950 I literally cried the first time I finished the mobile version

[@SWAGCOWVIDEO]

last remaining villager after i tnt the entire village in superflat creative: "hmmmm"

[@Gureenu]

and dont forget the "hmm"

[@beansworth5694]

I imagine myself as an actual feudal lord when I play Minecraft. I embrace the fact that the player character isn't necessarily a good person, they're a settling and conquering nomad with capabilities similar to a demigod compared to the other inhabitants. I don't know if engaging in evil acts in a fictionalized setting is necessarily evil or unvirtuous if it's done critically, in fact it can have a good outcome if you take a step back and realize what systems incentivize your behavior to act as 'the bad guy' when you're just playing the game and then take that knowledge to prevent yourself from doing that outside of a virtual space, where the people you interact with aren't NPCs with the most basic encoded instructions and are instead actual sentient beings with moral consideration.

[@CatLover-lk9gz]

I think the exact same way my guy. And you aren't wrong. The player charachter in survival is the closest thing to a god. Very few mobs can build. No mob can craft, a few mobs can destroy. But most can't match your destructive power. Funnily enough. The end credits also seemingly refer to you as a powerful entity. And don't worry, so many other games include war crimes. You aren't alone. And minecraft is very tame compared to other games....

[@KirikkSiSq]

​​@@CatLover-lk9gz at the end of the day, it's better to do bad things in games rather than in real life And games allow you to try something you'd never do in real life As for Minecraft, yeah, villagers are just dummies

[@DoAllDogsLikeMarmite]

"What if slavery, but with Squidwards?"

[@GameLeaderR]

Best title screen quote

[@marshalmarshall2109]

It's more akin to the Indian reservations than slavery.

[@alexis_electronic]

@@marshalmarshall2109 eh, semantics

[@Max-hl3wp]

what group do you think the big nose merchants represent?

[@vinesauceobscurities]

You mean TESTIFICATES.

[@Rycluse]

In my experience, most of the Factorio community acknowledges that you basically play the villain. The most telling part is when they removed the resource dropped by alien bases that's essential for researching the final rocket. Now there's literally no benefit to displacing the natives... but you do it anyway. Because even though the oil well by my spawn point can be used forever (albeit slowly), what if I want MORE oil?

[@davidgumazon]

Build a portal. Visit a Minecraft world. Search for a bedrock that produces infinite oil (Buildcraft mod)

[@clcsqueejy04]

Was going to say this. The subreddit for Factorio has many and frequent posts talking about being the villain and an invader.

[@Chronically_ChiII]

You're an animal competing for survival. You are no more a villain that the species that try to kill you for using the resources of the planet.

[@blarg2429]

@@Chronically_ChiII Okay, moral relativist.

[@Chronically_ChiII]

@@blarg2429 If morality wasn't relativistic you wouldn't have people protesting abortion.

[@smjaiteh]

I love the new Folding Ideas gimmick of him playing video games and ruining them for everybody, by applying the regular societal logic we live in.

[@StraightPunkEdge93]

@@someguy4405 Bruh this shit is pretty niche. As much as i love Folding Ideas and his interesting concepts, there ain't no way homeboy is making money from this video. Also chill out dude.

[@notadolphin9995]

I don't feel like that's what he's doing at all. In my opinion he does NOT want you bad white man to feel bad about enjoying a game that implies (in this case) colonialism in fact this a wrong framing the right often tries to apply to leftist critique in order to get people upset about or dicredit the questions of leftist critizism. This is what people generally don't understand about leftist critique (and I don't blame them) because that is ultimately what Dan does: he critizises things from a culture critiqual/ sociological pov. Rather than trying to find "the fault" at an individual level said critique is aimed at the underlying structure of our culture (in this case glorifying the unexplored land and giving you excuses to utilize its resources among which are in some cases it's inhabitants). The point is to think about it and ultimately to create a different approach to culture. In this case "Journey" and similar games offer exploration without the implications of colonialism. Again, the point is not to get all other games banned or to condemn those who like them but to examine critically (maybe even not for academic practice but for finding a better alternative).

[@EwMatias]

@@someguy4405 People affected by colonialism have to think about it everyday as a basic condition of their existence. And if white people in the global north should do it too, out of basic decency.

[@willuda7098]

Some Guy quit crying

[@Colleywoodstudios]

Let's play spot the dude who doesnt understand artistic interpretation

[@benraisher]

“The concept of progress acts as a protective mechanism to shield us from the terrors of the future.” -Collected sayings of Muad'Dib, by the Princess Irulan

[@OsirusHandle]

very good quote

[@ThexDynastxQueen]

Villager kid: Where did mama go? Villager Dad: She got pushed into a boat and will never come back cause some dude wanted more pet cats. Are you satisfied now, algorithm?!

[@RokuroCarisu]

Could've gone worse. I heard of another quite popular Minecraft player who pushes people straight into canals...

[@ObsceneVegetableMatter]

@@RokuroCarisu Did he not also, himself, get pushed into a canal once?

[@markshulman3150]

this is basically how the transatlantic slave trade worked

[@jek__]

And then villager dad proceeds to breed with villager kid, because family structure is invented entirely in the mind of the player and they lack even the capacity to know or care

[@BonaparteBardithion]

@@jek__ So, they're clownfish?

[@AsiniusNaso]

Oh, colonialism and inhumane industrialization in Minecraft? *cackles in Dwarf Fortress*

[@madhijz-spacewhale240]

ye old days of Merfolk bone farms

[@semi-useful5178]

PRAISE BE TO ARMOK. LORD OF IRON, GOD OF BLOOD!

[@harbl99]

Arrow pointing from the (carefully mapped, calculated and beta tested) infinite goblin blood fountain power generator to unspecified 'nefarious contraptions' elsewhere. Dorf Fortress: the premier 'Am I the monster?' introspection game.

[@TheAnalatheist]

The speaker sounds like a damned elf.

[@zacharywhite5631]

I’d really like to play Dwarf Fortress but, try as I might, I just can’t get into it. There’s so much stuff going on in the game that it kind of feels genuinely hopeless attempting to learn it.

[@fleacythesheepgirl]

Moral of the story it's better to go to hell and back then become a slaver.

[@koboldcatgirl]

And better to be a zombie pigman than a fascist.

[@niall_sanderson]

Honestly, going to hell and back to save somebody you've never met from a horrific disease is just about the most good and righteous thing you could possibly do.

[@siddsen95]

"Then", intentional or not, improves this observation.

[@fleacythesheepgirl]

omg I hate you XD

[@tuffy135ify]

Or...you know...just cheat in villager eggs.

[@LadyArtemis2012]

I was watching a Minecraft playthrough where the streamer was looking around for a place to settle down. They found a spot they liked and started talking about all of the plans they had for the area. One of those plans was to terraform an existing depression in the terrain into an entirely new lake. This depression happened to be the location of a village. There are certain historical parallels here that immediately jumped to mind. Later in the same video, the streamer was talking about the importance of keeping villagers safe from hostile mobs. A task he accomplished by digging basements under the villager's homes, pushing them in, and then making it impossible to leave. My point is that Minecraft isn't exactly a great vehicle for teaching players about ethics...

[@boundbythecurve]

The little grumble noise the villager makes as you boat him away is...uncomfortable.

[@actualizedanimal]

He's just kind of like "So this is happening. Okay."

[@seacucumberable]

Haarrrh ಠ_ಠ.

[@FerousFolly]

Mmh indeed

[@furtado704]

How politely they mumble as they are taken away from their friends and family.

[@cinebst]

Gonna be real? That bit at the end of the video straight up gave me a chill. The juxtaposition was surprisingly disturbing. (Which was Dan's intention, I'm sure)

[@souler__]

Actually you've got me thinking, and I'd quite enjoy playing a game where I manipulate ecosystems. Designing species, taking out food chain jenga pieces to see what happens and fixing the consequences... Sounds fun.

[@AncestralFruitcake]

Eco!

[@JBloodthorn]

Just don't let EA get involved...

[@RitobanRoyChowdhury]

I'm about a year late, but take a look at Equillinox. It's a game developed by ThinMatrix, a youtuber who created a video diary of the development process, and it's about balancing ecosystems and discovering new species and stuff.

[@neoqwerty]

If you're interested in the biology, HEAVILY recommend Creatures, for the PC. GOG is selling the collections and while it's old, most of it still works on Windows 10 (or running it through a virtual 98/XP machine). You literally can examine the genes and nudge evolution and work with several different kinds of lifeforms, some of which eat or steal from others.

[@jackolantern9034]

they’re very old, but simearth and simlife are pretty neat ecosystem simulation things. they’re emulated on archive (dot) org

[@colleen6440]

Please do this type of analysis with the Sims.

[@PedanticPig]

"Will Wright is not Immune to Propaganda: The Sims as Capitalist Utopia" by Huntress X Thompson might be along the lines of what you're looking for!

[@HuntressXThompson]

@@PedanticPig Thanks for recommending my video! It was really interesting to see Dan arrive at similar conclusions but coming from a different direction (colonialism/minecraft instead of capitalism/the sims)

[@matthewmacdonaldchannel1]

Huntress X Thompson - Subbed. Diving into your content once I’m done with deadlines.

[@torres_asdf]

I made a similar spicy political take on my channel on Minecraft, check it out if you want more of this :)

[@Endocrom]

Or Kingdom, where you ride around on your horse throwing money at peasants so they will do your bidding.

[@kachelstacktus]

The slave metaphor doesnt get any better when you realize that the optimal way to treat villagers is either putting them in a 1 square meter cell for easy trading, putting 3 or more into a 1 suqare meter cell for iron farms or forcing them to breed to get more villagers. But to be fair, mojang has at least stopped people from mass slaughtering them to get the best trades. In versions 1.12 and below, you could bot change a villagers trades. So to get the best trades, you just had to breed as many of them as you can and then kill all the ones with suboptimal trades or the wrong professions. The amount of blood on my hands from that time is quite frankly staggering

[@MartoLun]

I'm not sure... while I definitely see your points regarding colonialism and the appeal of taming the wilderness, isn't taming the wilderness more of a... civilization.. thing? Mesopotamia, Indus Valley, The ancient south american natives, and many others.. Human Civilization started when our ancestors, thousands of years ago, managed to obtain a mastery over the environment around them. The invention of agriculture, the domestication of animals, the invention of bricks and mortar... These are all examples of humans controlling nature in order to benefit their lives. I don't think these things are inherently colonialist in origin or nature. Sure, the specifics varied from region to region, with cultures in Asia and Europe developing an idea of private property and ownership of the land, while cultures in North America shared nature, but didn't own it. But be it a nomadic village's tents, or a huge stone pyramid, humans build. It is what we do. It is what has defined our culture for thousands of years. Colonial or not.

[@iso-kun1644]

@@sunn7615 I don't think that's what he's driving it. I think it's more the fetishization of expansion, extraction, building and whatever and doing to the detriment of of enivornemt is bad but that doesn't make it bad entrisically

[@eles928]

@@sunn7615 I disagree that that's the point of the video because he directly arguing against that line of thinking at around 13:30. I think he just wants to reexamine the way we interact with the world around us and try to find a better, less exploitative way to do things

[@eles928]

@@sunn7615 I don't think he's trying to come up with a "solution" or a "right answer", I think he's trying to pose a question that's rather interesting to think about

[@flametitan100]

@@eles928 The problem I seem to be seeing is that his point apparently got muddled when he brought up the question of why there aren't more games about nature reclaiming old factories, and people interpreting it as him saying that an anti-colonialist sandbox game would look like that. Which is probably not his point, but it's a case where one of his examples could've been left on the cutting room floor in order to make what he's saying a little more clear.

[@MartoLun]

@@fizzah5158 "the concept of nature and resources in need to be tamed is influenced by colonization. the very idea that humans are separate from animals, forests, land, and even each other and that these are all forces to be conquered is a historically recent invention" Uh, no it's not. It's not a recent concept, at all. That concept dates back to the literal beginning of history itself. Hell, that may have been the moment that history started, over 5000-12000 years ago, with the invention of writing and the founding of the first large settlements of humans.

[@pricefieldx]

no one: Random Swedish Man: GET IN THE BOAT

[@SpikeCole]

Pricefield x is he Swedish

[@pricefieldx]

@@SpikeCole .....pewdiepie......that rock must be uncomfortable to live under

[@principleshipcoleoid8095]

Can we put Dragon in a bucket?

[@principleshipcoleoid8095]

@@ij067 nO!111! Pewdiepie BUILD A SMALL EMPIRE for them! But he doesn't feed most of them and still forces them to work... unpaid laber... killing of people who don't agree to do what the leader want. PeiWDiepIE is A COmmUNIsT CoNFIrmEEEEEEdD!

[@oOclonOo]

@@principleshipcoleoid8095 Based pewds

[@Crowley9]

So... the only characters in the game you can trade with have large noses and make golems. Uh... huh.

[@bumfricker2487]

totally coincidental, surel- *checks notch twitter feed* UHHHHHHH

[@qazwsx6340]

was notch working on the game still when villagers were introduced?

[@Yzarro]

I don't know if Notch had anything to do with villagers, but his dive off the political deep end started after he sold the game, so I don't think this was him intentionally being antisemitic in any case.

[@Natalie-nf9vl]

@@qazwsx6340 yes for sure

[@teaartist6455]

And we, the players, regularly exploit, kidnap and generally abuse them. ...historic reenactment featuring very dubious stereotypical caricatures?

[@splak_5624]

you were just bringing those villagers "freedom" and "democracy"

[@celestesimulator6539]

To be fair to Factorio, that game is kinda designed to intentionally make you think: "are you sure you're doing the right thing?"

[@GayBrain]

Also Factorio: Here's a building that can basically perform a mass genocide.

[@Brent-jj6qi]

@@GayBrain Also Factorio: Yeah, the nazis didn’t go far enough with their railway guns, clearly they could’ve won if they just had more railway artillery

[@lanakou142]

Same with Satisfactory. They've explicitly said part of the reason they'll never implement truly "clean energy" is because that would miss the entire point of the game.

[@duckface81]

@@lanakou142 factorio just makes your miners and assemblers super dirty

[@Nyx_2142]

The answer to that question is, yes. Yes, you are doing the right thing. Cleanse the bug menace and exploit those resources.

[@tyler.richards1]

So did no one notice that while the reason they did this colonial relocation was because the villages weren't on their boat route, they ended up building a boat route to The Village, and then still went through with the colonial relocation anyway?

[@zyaicob]

Once you start playing god, where do you stop?

[@Magus_Union]

Ikr? It's almost like he purposefully ignored all other solutions in the game just to make a social commentary.

[@JessicaEpperson]

@@Magus_Union not really, he saw that the game incentivized i certain type of play and after he was done he realized it was a social commentary. Idk why you have a problem with this

[@Magus_Union]

@@JessicaEpperson That's projection. He could have made a Nether route, or just use the boat route constantly, or decide that Villagers aren't worth interacting with because most of their trades are bollocks.

[@gavinyeet5821]

@@Magus_Union You really didn't just say most villager trades are bad, did you? It doesn't matter if 99% of trades are garbage, mending exists.

[@happycamperds9917]

I remember that the world I made with my siblings had a weird rule where we would always replace all trees we cut down with saplings to preserve the natural resources.

[@ryanwillingham]

not a weird rule, just being a good minecrafter lol

[@LineOfThy]

ye thats good

[@KirikkSiSq]

Well, I decided I'm not making new builds on the Central Island bc I wanna keep the unique 0.8.0 terrain I build underground instead, it reminds me of StoneBlock Outside the Central Island, however, I do whatever I want, outside world is endless as are the resources there One player can't ruin an endless 1.20 vanilla world, so chopping trees in the forest is fine if there are many of them If there are only few, it's better to place saplings wherever trees grew

[@QuestionableObject]

My question is: Instead of doing all that stuff to abduct villagers Why not just build a railway to the village?

[@Chickenman161]

That's just a longer way of abducting them tho.

[@QuestionableObject]

@@Chickenman161 But instead of abducting them you build a proxy settlement near their village like a trading post that connects to everyone's own plots of land with powered rails to zoom along to I dunno maybe it's just me but I don't like to rebuild the world much in Minecraft I try to construct in tandem with the natural shape and layout of the generated land, the most i"ll do is refurbish the abandoned mine-shafts or carve out dwarf-style holds on the insides of mountains with only basic structures that conform to the land on the surface.

[@robokill387]

@@Chickenman161 no it isn't, that's pure equivocation.

[@sketep1117]

@@Chickenman161 no, he meant to travel to the village and trade with them there

[@georgerussell2947]

Auswich 2.0

[@trstmeimadctr]

Jules Skotnes-Brown seems to be in a 'if you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail' situation

[@thesurvivorssanctuary6561]

"Death of the author." I'm pretty sure that you have a point as to the cultural programming inherent in such ideas as "taming the wilderness", but I believe that this is more a personal I interpretation more unique to yourself and your area of expertise. We see what we expect to see, and what we see is simply a reflection of ourselves. I think that you're overreaching insofar as you extrapolate that these ideas are more prevalent then far more innocent ones. The natives hunted and gathered, farmers used agriculture, and EVERYONE has a Home. "Taming the wilderness" is less about exploitation of "the natives", and is more about being a native of the land. Throw monetary incentives and player-based transactions for villager-geschtant, and then we're undoubtably on the level of colonialism. I just think that...this is a little too..."what have we done!?". Rather then, "Neat! I think I've found some subtle buried colonialism ideals in western ideas about surviving outdoors!"

[@GamingOS]

Yeah, i think he doesn't realize that the actual in game intent is for you to almost become a member of the village and immerse in it (he even said that the developers want you to build it up and expand) you're incentivized to protect them because the village offers many resourceful opportunities and trading with the same members will build a repoire that will grant you better deals. I think what his accidental colonialism just reveals that Human mind will naturally find the most efficient way to do something (especially in a gamified simulation with no consequences) and that, although morally abhorrent, the kidnapping of the villagers is the most efficient way if you want to relocate them; so i think the essay unintentionally reveals more primal desires, stuff rooted in game theory and shit like that, instead of some inherent bias that these game have being made in a postcolonial world (Even though the game was made in sweden, a country with a roughly cleaner idea of colonialism, as compared to America.) 1 AM word diarrhea over.

[@TheAlison1456]

Agree. Though by the end of the video I wasn't sure if he was discontent with having realized the subtle similarities between colonialism, nativity, and survival games. Despite not knowing, I chose to assume otherwise.

[@yonatanbeer3475]

@@GamingOS The primary difference between minecraft villagers and real people is that in real life you can build a city for a group of people and they're live in it, but in minecraft the only way to move villagers is to physically relocate them. You can't talk to them, you can't convince them, only "do a colonialism" on them. As such, the only choice you have with villages is to live on their terms, adding on to where they spawned (a possibly, usually, terrible location). The villagers aren't human, they're like TF2 trading robots with health pools. I think more depth would make the whole system less "gamey".

[@yonatanbeer3475]

@@Mrpersonman0 Actually yeah, I've seen lots of people do it. The only way to build a village around your house and get villagers in the places you want them is to steal them.

[@GamingOS]

@@yonatanbeer3475 I see your point, but I don't think there is any reason to make it less "gamey" when it is, quite literally, a game.

[@thomas3224]

That’s why I enjoy playing the game as like a nomadic lone cowboy type. I just kinda wander around with a donkey or horse and take shelter whenever I need to. When it comes to villagers I preferred just passing through for a night or two for some food or shelter and then go on my way without disturbing anything

[@ansel569]

This is a really interesting and thoughtful video. I love the way you phrased the argument, I think it was done eloquently and in a way that many people forget to do. Our values, how we act, what we view as success and progress is a byproduct of our past. Like you said, it does not exist in a vacuum. We aren't evil, but that doesn't mean our actions and values shouldn't be examined further. This is a really good video and it definitely made me think about things in a way I hadn't before. Ultimately, we are not to blame for our past, but we cannot be willfully ignorant about what it made us become.

[@davidgumazon]

Hi

[@Armaggedon185]

Good insights with the villagers, but there’s a moment where the idea of wealth extraction gets conflated with construction. One is colonialism, the other is civilization, which a lot of “the colonized” actually had.

[@LunerKunai]

Yeah, I think its a bit silly to conflate non-western as seemingly nature loving simple 'colonized folk' with several cultures that WERE colonized but did not resemble the scattered tribal societies of North America. This all reeks of blatant Amerocentric views.

[@koboldcatgirl]

@@LunerKunai This is all fair, but I think it's worth acknowledging that different cultures see industralization and massive construction/urbanization differently, and not every culture *would* see the New York City skyline as a mark of progress. Americentrism is *also* assuming that every society has the same definition of "civilization" as Western Europeans did-the definition that also demands rigid hierarchies, privatization, and unsustainable growth/expansion/industrialization.

[@MrFram]

The whole villager thing was his idea. There was no reason to do that other than the fact that he wanted to move them to a new location. And on a different terrain this would be harder to do. A different player would have built a nether highway to quickly travel to and from the village

[@wisegoongala4305]

@@LunerKunai yea while well intended this is a VERY whhhhite video

[@NovemberXXVII]

How dare you drop the following 12ish minutes of this on me right after the shock of finding out you aren't my dad.

[@matthewshiers9038]

Definitely food for thought there. As someone who's tried both methods of creating a village and often just stopped seeing villagers as anything more than a resource for powerful tools and armour, I have to admit - I don't feel right doing it. Only exception to this is SkyBlock maps, where I just know that leaving them unattended and unprotected is liable to get them killed, and I need all the help I can get in rebuilding a sky world.

[@deciMae]

I really enjoyed the video, but one thing I felt was important: I don't think that games where you do the reverse, where you decolonize, where you return a system to nature are less complex then the examples given, rather they are a lot more complex. The reason why they are not being made is because nature is a lot less easy to systemize then the technological or even colonist world (because those are inherently systemical). I would like to see one, though.

[@JaneDoe-yj1ki]

"Is the food chain of a marsh any less complex than assembling red chips in Factorio?"

[@deciMae]

@@JaneDoe-yj1ki Yeah, he was saying much of the same thing, but in my understanding he was saying it as a defense of that these games can be interesting, if I understand correctly. What I'm trying to say is that these games are really hard to make, that is why it's easier to make more colonialist style games, and that that is a reason why you see those kinds of games more (not just colonialist culture, although that certainly is another reason). Maybe I completely misunderstood what he was trying to say, if so, my apologies.

[@happyfullfridge]

Walking Mars fits that description, you create small eco systems on a dead planet

[@agilemind6241]

There is also the PlanEvo browser game which isn't actually counter-colonist but does involve balancing ecosystems as the main game mechanic. Another good one I recall was Sim Park (from the 90s) where you had to balance different plant types to attract different animals to your park and had to deal with restoring the ecosystem after a natural disaster. Both prove that modality isn't actually that hard to pull off for a game, rather it is a cultural bias/cultural values that favour the build-civilisation from the wilderness style games over the build-wilderness from a desolate terrain style game.

[@amaryllis0]

@@JaneDoe-yj1ki Gamify the "food chain of a marsh" in a satisfying and immersive manner. There's a reason Factorio works, satisfying mechanical gameplay, and that gameplay is inherent to the industrialism and incredibly difficult to replicate within other contexts.

[@johnblunt6693]

I was playing a Minecraft earth server hosted by a friend of a friend and in a get rich quick scheme to gain power in the servers economy we ended up sailing villagers from Quebec to southern China. It was as we drifted in the ocean that I saw the parallels between our actions an colonialism

[@thehuman2cs715]

Hey this is totally unrelated and probably quite random but could you please tell me where you got the earth map from? I've been looking for one for a long time but haven't found one yet

[@sololinnea]

@@thehuman2cs715 I bet they're talking about Earthmc! That's the most well-known one.

[@myky992]

Welp just when I finished walling off a village, creating a few more iron golem, building my castle in the middle of the village square, and establishing a mining operation+farmland right on the border. Oops indeed lol

[@myky992]

Hey turns out I didn't do the worst thing actually that honor goes to Dan jesus (lol)

[@MiotaLee]

I put a lil fence around the village borders, expanded their stupid tiny farms and built a few new houses and added more workbenches for more vocations. They started breeding like crazy and spawned a bunch of iron golems. The Iron golems at this time pretty much match the population. :S

[@myky992]

@@yozul1 Yeah at least I did not ship them by boat to another continent!

[@myky992]

@@MiotaLee I only just learned they breed on their own with food. The village I found had no farms and I had to put down pretty much all the job blocks! about to read up on how to give them food and make them more independent

[@BvousBrainSystems]

I tore down their quaint little houses and built a large housing project. Much more efficient.

[@bscorvin]

Finally, a video that explains why I choose to characterize myself as an greedy, capricious overlord when I play Minecraft or Dwarf Fortress

[@steveejohnson7932]

Minecraft actually has a bit of an organic moral choice system. You can get villagers the good way (curing zombies), but it's really hard. You can also do it the evil way (kidnapping), and it's relatively easy. There's nothing wrong with this system. In the real world, evil doesn't come from a desire to do harm. It's not caused by wickedness or cruelty, these are just symptoms. Evil comes from laziness. It comes from optimizing the wrong things. It comes from truly not caring about the factors that matter. Being good takes hard work. And why bother being good when being bad is so much easier? You didn't really care about the villagers, only their stuff. So this is what you did.

[@crabmonkey2247]

gottem, DEEZ NUITZ

[@theclimbto1]

As Lord Helmet stated in Spaceballs "This is why Evil always triumphs over Good, because Good is stupid!". You say lazy, where another would say efficient. In the end, it's all about Progress. I'm sure we'd agree, needed 100 people to make enough Food to feed 50... not so good. Needing 5 people to make enough food to feed 50... better. I mean with the first, we starve, with the second we thrive. But how did we advance to that? What things did we have to do, and what were the impacts of those things? Did we have to clear out some trees? Did we have to selectively breed for better farmers? Did we have to introduce poison to protect the crops, that may have a long term impact on ourselves while having an immediate benefit of keeping the plants safe from other animals? It's always been about progress. And the counter has always been 'but at what cost?'.