#god i miss knl. thanks for being someone else to indulge me on tschumi | Explore Tumblr Posts and Blogs

bellshazes · 1 year

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PLEASE GO INTO DETAILS ABOUT YOUR BDUBS ANALYSIS FOREVER

restricting myself solely to bwbs3 for the moment because i am going to finish DIA tonight so that'll have to be a separate. thing. about narrative

i'm not interested in it for theory's sake, but because I think a lot of content around minecraft does not scratch the itch I want - sure you can teach me how to copy a build block by block, or even explain a process for massing a roof, but these still aren't enough. what I truly, truly want is many people having a conversation that would include things like...

how do i move around in the game? where do I spend my time? what are the implications of that?

how do i build the infrastructure necessary to support the continued playstyle i prefer without devolving into base chores and in fact encouraging the development of goals and completion of them in a game with no prescribed finish?

how do I interpret meaning from the world I build around me? how do distance, color, texture, scale, size, lighting, shape, time spent navigating, terrain, machines, mechanics, movement, etc. and their interrelationships impact the meaning I derive?

these are mere starting points; concretely, a conversation could look like moving from "what's the best most efficient farm objectively i can build?" to "how do I choose or construct a farm that matches its output and ease of access to my current needs and goals?" farm throttling is a huge concern in my imaginary discourse, since it's highly variable even across a single player's single world. (this may shock you to learn this is something I appreciate greatly about etho.)

bdubs is making really, really big arguments about what visual representation can signify not in isolation but in concert across many dimensions: he loves his fog and render distance settings because of what they do to an environment, and his builds interact with those distance limits; he is constantly pushing himself further beyond simple gradients into texturing into doing ambient occlusion on flat walls to suggest crossbeams and now expanding scale to increase possibilities for meaningful coherent block palettes. it's got his usual wrapping of bluster and pride but he's a lot more mellow and didactic in bwbs3! like, he is arguing for this approach in terms you would expect with historical art movements, about how to communicate meaningfully through art. he is doing pointillism!

today he talked about building in all those terms and more, and then also in the fourth dimension of time; this is the first thing I built and it is a time capsule of my skill and style at that point in time, and I am going to build this today as a capstone to my current skills and style, a proof of concept and a temple and a focal point and a new scale marker (since the mountain he built is now tiny in comparison lmao). he is playing minecraft in 4D! this is a really neat and meaty line of thinking - if you're playing a world, what could you build to be a snapshot of where you are now?

that turns the world, built-up, into a historical register. it's not that groundbreaking to do in retrospect, but combined with the foresight and level of intent and skill and on top of that articulating that to the audience makes building with bdubs season 3 really special to me. it's a cross between a seminar and a let's play; it's not building with like s1/s2 senses of just recording himself while building and talking in detail, it's building with in the sense of instruction and encouraging you to go try it out. it's his pitch for his theory of building! from what I can tell, it's pretty unique for that.

honestly the derrida and perec and everything is relevant and ripe but my first turn to theory with bdubs was bernard tschumi's advertisements for architecture, because some of them work so well with his life series builds (another post, another time). however, check this shit out!

advertisements for architecture frequently also engages with murder and the erotic as components of architecture - "Murder in the Street differs from Murder in the Cathedral in the same way as love in the street differs from the Street of Love. Radically." the erotic is less relevant, but the call to baser human desires is a fun touchpoint when considering the meaninglessness of death and especially in the context of MCYT the use of architecture even more explicitly than irl as prompts for interesting, novel, unpredictable interactions. at the same time, many built things in MC are mere facades (grian hcs7 megabase...... not to be rude but jesus).

and so the novelty and love for a guy who cares about and executes well a manifesto on unifying aesthetics and function in a dynamic four-dimensional framework. with that basis, you could start engaging piaget on play, baudrillard on simulation and simulacra, derrida on bricolage, perec on space, any number of theater-centered theorists from any number of lenses (marxist critique of the gradient trend when?) and so on endlessly. but I'm always overjoyed and intrigued by bdubs' arguments. he's so breezy about it, too, like he's driven toward something he's figuring out for himself and trying to share as he learns. nothin else like it

#peter answers #this is really not even touching the theory but i just. i love bwbs3 so fucking much #mc meta #blogging with bdoubleo #god i miss knl. thanks for being someone else to indulge me on tschumi

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