Video games have garnered an unfortunately negative reputation within the societies across the globe. Represented in popular media by the image of  obsessive, inappropriate and socially inept men; and reinforced by ambiguous controversies linking video games and mental illness to gun violence — a topic which deserves to be taken apart in an essay of its own — the notion of “video games” has earned its fair share of negative connotations. In older societal circles, video games have become synonyms of laziness, unproductive, and an in-all useless waste of time that can scarcely be considered a hobby; and in younger generations, it’s not impossible to find those who believe only “losers” spend time on video games. Even within the gaming community, there are instances of “gatekeeping”, in which certain titles are considered “less of a game” than others, and the fans of said titles are labelled “cringy” or “childish”.

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As a college student who has been gaming since I was six, I have utmost respect for video games as not only a form of escape from harsh realities, but also a platform of storytelling — of innovation, community and rhetoric. It irks me to the highest degree when people disregard “gaming” as a waste of time and illegitimate or laughable hobby. I’ve moved around the world, travelling constantly as a child due to my family’s business, during which the only constant in my young life was a pink Nintendo Gameboy Advance and the Pokemon cartridges I stuffed in the pocket of its case. Later, once again, thrust into a new life in California at the start of high school, I found consistent solace in online communities — no matter where I moved, the familiar warble of a Skype notification, the voices of friends from thousands of miles away; they were comforts that I would stay up well into the night to indulge in. It was about this time that I discovered Minecraft, which offered my friends and I not only a platform to communicate on, but also to adventure and play together.

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Minecraft — though the connotations attached to the game have changed greatly — is, at its core, a survival video game. Starvation, falling from heights, fire, drowning, and monsters are all factors that can kill the player, forcing them to lose their place, items and levels; and are as such things that the player has to account for and “survive”. A very brief explanation of the core gameplay: players are “spawned” into a lush world filled with different environments with nothing; not even the clothes off their back. With few instructions, the game expects the player to quickly gather some resources — from the trees and caves around them — before nightfall. As the sun sets, a variety of monsters begin to appear around the world, ranging from lumbering zombies to the devastatingly explosive creeper — which has become a mascot for the game.

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Players can gather resources to upgrade their tools, set up a farm, build a shelter, and eventually explore other dimensions, brew potions, kill and “grind” monsters to build up their own combative ability. With some basic port forwarding (or via LAN), players are also able to set up servers so that their friends can play with them in real-time. The goal of the game is to travel to the “End”, a barren land terrorized by a massive dragon which requires the player to be skilled in all forms of combat to take down. After its death, the player is guided to jump into a void. Following this, a long, beautifully surreal poem is played, commending and addressing the player themselves — not the character they’re controlling — and ending with the jarring lines of:

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the universe said you are the universe tasting itself, talking to itself, reading its own code

and the universe said I love you because you are love.

And the game was over and the player woke up from the dream. And the player began a new dream. And the player dreamed again, dreamed better. And the player was the universe. And the player was love.

You are the player.

Wake up.

 

After this chilling ending, the player is spat back into their home; but are still able to continue playing in the world that they had built into, which many do. On its own, Minecraft is a solid game — with plenty of replayability, beautiful in its simplicity and made popular with consistent updates from its developers. In Gamasutra - Personality and Play Styles: A Unified Model, Bart Stewart categorizes players into 4 archetypes: Killers, Achievers, Explorers and Socializers. Even as a singleplayer game, Minecraft appeals to these archetypes: An infinitely generating world with numerous biomes satisfies the Explorers, while an optionally linear gameplay progression with achievements appeals to the Achievers. Killers and Socializers, of course, thrive on PvP and PvE servers respectively, where depending on the server’s rules players can either blast each others’ bases to smithereens, or build thriving cities and empires together.

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However, perhaps what really made Minecraft into the overwhelmingly popular, household-name of a game is its versability, and its moddability. Moddability is one of the lesser-known essentials in game-design. Certainly, games can stand without it, but in a game such as Minecraft, the ability for players — any one of its 91 million ones — to add to the gameplay experience has proved invaluable. With addons called “plugins”, players are able to add to their multiplayer servers — from adding entire economies and currency shops to encourage player interactions, to completely rehauling how the world generates to force players into challenging playstyles — when correctly configured and set up, server-owners can transform their Minecraft servers into seemingly, a different game entirely. There are currently over 42,150 such resources on Spigot, one of the larger plugin websites, all but 800 of which are free), and almost as many publicly listed servers for players to choose from, the most popular of which frequenting over 10,000 players regularly.

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I stumbled on one of these servers when I was 14 — 6 years ago — Desteria, a Factions server (a savage gamemode rife with betrayal and combat, in which players join together and create “factions”, farming for resources whilst fighting and raiding others’ bases for riches). The server attempted to recreate an RPG in Minecraft, offering players a choice between four classes upon joining under a canopy of vast, shadowy trees. I was instantly intrigued. Turning the server inside out, learning its intricacies, and frequently helping the staff members landed me in a Skype call with the server’s moderators — a phenomena that had my tiny child heart fluttering as though I was meeting the president. We hit it off — one of them is still my closest friends to this day, and I’ve spent many a holiday visiting her in Seattle — and eventually, I received a staff rank myself. The lowest one, one that could only answer questions and mute players for a couple hours, but a tremendous achievement to me, then. The server made money via microtransactions — cosmetics and “crates” which utilized RNG to reward the player. Within the year, the server had grown from a few hundred to 3,000 players, and we were making tens of thousands a month — flourishing so well that we held regular events and fundraisers for charities (if the players hit a certain amount of monster kills, we would donate a certain amount of money to a charity they voted for, etc). I had worked my way up to a Manager rank — and I was receiving a 10% cut of the profits. In turn, I drew up content-design documents, troubleshooted gameplay, worked with Java developers to produce updates, and wrote announcements briefing the players on said updates.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(an example of a content document, complete with calculations)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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(an example of a community announcement)
 

I also handled the customer service aspects of the server: replying to emails, ensuring purchases went through and being threatened with lawsuits over tiny mistakes — the whole retail experience. It was a job, in all senses of the word — to fit my role, I had to research tirelessly into game design concepts, learn to use photoshop to create graphics, to utilize rhetoric to win players over, to combat DOXing and dDOSing, and, perhaps the hardest of all, to work with a team of other vastly varied people to ensure the project ran smoothly. Although I’ve since left the server management scene, several of these skills benefit me to this day in academia and professional settings.

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Perhaps the easiest way to explain the process of creating, managing and maintaining a Minecraft server is with a real example, although six years of experience isn’t easily put down on paper without boring the hell out of any reader. Last year, I was tasked creating a new project, from scratch. The process begins at conceptualization — what kind of gameplay would we want the player to partake in? Did we want long-term replayability or dynamic and fast-paced action? Did we want the players to fight or work together? What theme would the server take on? The final decision rested on a Galaxy-themed Skyblock server. Briefly put, Skyblock is a highly industrial gamemode that pits players against each other not physically, but with the win condition of “whomever has the most in-game money”. The gamemode prevents the world from generating, at all — placing each player on their personal, tiny floating island, from which they must expand, building both crop and monster farms and selling this loot to claw to the financial “top”. These winners are calculated every month, and the top three receive a sum of prize money via PayPal. The fact that there are limited space and resources forces players to truly know every intricacy within Minecraft’s game logic and get creative with their farm designs in a wild dash for compact efficiency — quite a few times, I’ve met professional engineers flourishing in this gamemode for obvious reasons.

 

After a name was decided (this took embarrassingly and surprisingly long) and I was able to procure the .com and .net domains for redirecting to later when the server was live, the project was on concrete foundations. Given that the gamemode was cripplingly dependant on an economy and player-to-player / player-to-server transactions, it was essential that the economy be properly fleshed out. If players gained money too fast through poor balancing or an exploit that went slipped through the cracks, it would discourage any new players from joining what seemed to be competition that they could never beat. On the other hand, if grinding got too tedious or slow, we would lose our existing players. Every potential transaction, the value of every item and the like had to be carefully decided, calculated, and run through a spreadsheet to ensure no one kind of farm was too overpowered. Once this was decided, I mapped out documents after documents of gameplay features for the developers and programmers to follow — these documents can range from the development of new monsters, items, and events, to APIs that make developing future plugins easier; much too much to explain in a paragraph, but a few examples can be found here. Every aspect of every gameplay feature must be calculated and documented, and more often than not it falls to the content manager, rather than the developers. This is where game design concepts such as gold sinks come into play — taking account into RAM and server memory, each feature has to concisely serve a purpose in ensuring either balancing, gameplay enhancement, replayability and/or player retention. It’s also at this point of the process that one learns a tremendous amount about how to properly write clear and concise technical documentation — being yelled at by angry programmers for hours of wasted code from a misunderstanding is not an experience one forgets easily.

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Once the plugins have been developed, they have to be tested preliminarily to ensure that there are no glaring exploits, bugs or compatibility issues with the other plugins. After they are deemed working and configured correctly, it is vital to beta-test the server with a group of players, preferably with various playstyles. Blunt, “killer”-type players are especially helpful in this case if one has acquired essential skill of taking constructive criticism — I’ve met many of my best friends after they’ve ripped through exploit after exploit and given unabashedly honest feedback on my work; after which I often invite them to a call to further discuss topics on server design. After all this closed-group beta testing (I’ve found that it’s safer to perform an open beta as well, albeit this is often foregone in the interest of time), the server is ready to open to public and run its course. The startup process takes from months to a year, depending largely on the competence of the team — I’ve had to deal with programers who couldn’t deliver a single line of code without creating a bug somewhere, but also had the pleasure of working with developers who went above and beyond, even catching and correcting issues with my initial calculations. Management can relax for a little after this, but the work isn’t done. Without regular events and updates, players quickly lose interest, and as such it’s vital to continually work with developers to push out a small update each week at least — simply for the user base to see that the staff are engaged with the project, still. The creation of a server is a very long-term commitment, but the moment when players commend you on a feature well-designed, or when you see them engaging with your features as you hoped — that feeling is indescribable.

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I will never be able to list “minecraft server manager” on my resume — one can barely mention “minecraft” without being teased even in the gaming community. There are times when I feel as though I might have wasted all that time working a job that, while paid well, was not something I could cite on a CV as an official “past experience”. However, the knowledge I’ve gleaned from this half a decade — game design, customer service, detailing feature updates, working and leading a team, server file management; not the mention the dabbling in web development, java, digital art, graphic design and writing of lore — these are invaluable, to me personally, to my interests. They have helped greatly in my hobbies of game development, in academia where I am expected to build a website or design beautiful slides, and — I believe — in my future hopeful professional endeavors as a writer. I don’t regret clicking into that very first server as a 14-year-old child, and I certainly don’t regret a second of passion and work that I’ve put into learning the process of server management and design.

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Initially, I hesitated to choose this as a topic for this paper, even, due to the connotations attached to the game — and on that note, I’m extremely thankful that I was given a platform in academic writing, to explore and reflect on a game, and huge part of my life, that I hold extremely close to my heart. While I’ve moved on to other games with my friend group, it’s undeniable that Minecraft has tremendously affected my interests, passions and skills.

As I write this, I’m sitting in a Discord channel with my friends of a few years — each and every one of them I met through servers I had previously managed. The circumstances through which we found each other may have been virtual, but the connections we have forged are not — just hours ago, we discussed plans to meet-up and road-trip through California during the summer. It’s late, but they’re playing games to keep me company while I work; their raucous laughter and screaming melding into a familiar, comforting melody. For all the flak that the world gives us for the insignificance of virtual relationships, for the unimportance of video games, the immaturity of playing a “dumb block game” — without Minecraft, without games, I would not found these beautiful individuals, and they would never have found me; nor stumbled across each other.

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And this — this I would not trade for the world.