Philosophy and Play
"What? No, I swear it's for work..."
Thought experiments, fiction, and art have long been staples of philosophical inquiry. Somehow, playing with the world draws out questions of what the world is in ways everyday life cannot. In this vein, we're talking on a silly-serious project: continuing to explore a philosophy of computing (and therefore a theology of computing) by playing Minecraft.
Minecraft certainly has a place within the history of computing - it is [currently] the most popular video game of all time. Being a game, it can function as a thought experiment, fiction, and art. It can serve as both a representation of the world and a world of representations - both as a world through the lens of computing and an experience of computing itself.
Coordinates
While setting up, I asked Aldo and Daniel to potentially join the server to see if they could connect. As Daniel joined this virtual world, I had the impulse to send my coordinates. See, the norm on Minecraft servers is to meet up by telling people virtual coordinates: there's a non-diegetic overlay that gives a lot of technical information about the game, including your position in world-space. Something like "0 45" is common to send in the in-game chat to tell people where you are. This world, because it's artificial, has already been mapped. If it wasn't mapped, it couldn't be processed by the computer.
For whatever reason, I decided not to share my coordinates but to describe where I was - “I'm at the shore of a frozen lake.” Perhaps this was an attempt to be “realistic.” But this explanation confused me - clearly, any attempt to be "realistic" is futile.
You never get dropped “in a world” from nothing, you're within a social structure. Locke begins with a discussion of a man in a forest. Who were his parents? It is not good for the man to be alone.1 As I’ve heard said, liberalism is the ideology of childless men who have forgotten their childhood… or in this case, perhaps Minecraft is the strange realization of a culture whose media cannot think of a person within a family. Like Disney princesses or heroes, family is an obstacle. Pokemon may do one better, where family is present but only as a launching-point: the game begins by leaving the house at ten years old.
On top of that, there's no global communication - that only arises after local communication. God deemed it beneficial that we first spread out and in fact not talk to most other people. Pentecost didn't undo Babel by unifying under one language, it allowed for diversity of language without sacrificing a unified understanding. It symbolizes the Church, who unifies the nations into a universal (catholic) mission.
Later, when Aldo joined, we had a similar conversation again about coordinates. After I (again) had minor crisis about "oh no, how do we play this coherently?", Aldo suggested that we play in the most fun way, which is obviously correct. Any other way would treat the simulated world as too real. For Aldo, that meant communicating as we were (globally), but navigating using diegetic (in-game) elements. I made a cobblestone tower and Aldo was quickly able to find us.
Versioning
Returning to our pre-session testing period, the second point we encountered was the necessity of having proper versioning to get this to work at all. I was pleasantly surprised the technology worked on the first try. Daniel pointed out it was important that I specified the version number. Technology, especially complex technology, is often forgettably fragile. In designing an artifact, "a previously established form of behavior becomes frozen or is multiplied with a predetermined and limited number of variants that are included."2 Versions are one example of that.
Creativity and Constraints
As we began, Aldo suggested the classic first task in Minecraft: building a house. He said he plays in a way that is built upon the given world. I certainly do the same. In this case, our space was a cliff next to a rather deep ocean, so Aldo imagined it as a good deep-water port. This led to a discussion about beauty: beauty seems to always be in relation to the given world - and even in this completely artificial world, we still seem to treat it as given. This doesn’t seem to be just a psychological holdover. Aldo pointed out that there is an impoverishment of builds on a Superflat mode: even when he took builds like castles from superflat into a world, that mismatch of context - that separation between the artifact and the world in which it arose - made it somewhat ugly. This also perhaps explains why creativity is better with constraints - why did God make our creativity that way? God creates everything from nothing; the wonder of man’s creativity is that he can make anything from anything.3
More to come!
Genesis 2:18
Joseph Ratzinger, Technological Security as a Problem of Social Ethics. https://newpolity.com/blog/technological-security-ratzinger. Also discussed in Ratzinger Thought of This First.
I was almost certain this was a corruption of a Chesterton quote, but I can’t find it now… any help?