...

The idea of “completeness” in a creative work is an interesting one, for it implies a sort of teleological essence to artistic development: that the artist is always aiming towards some platonic ideal nested in their imagination, and that any work that fails to reach that trajectory is “unfinished”. I’m skeptical of this idea, though I’m failing to find the words to say why. In any case, some of my favorite works are “unfinished”: the works of my all-time favorite author (Kafka) are fascinating in that they resemble less of traditionally bounded literary objects and more of general trajectories or sequences in their “unfinishedness”. Exegesis of an unfinished work like Kafka’s requires a sort of literary calculus in interpolating its many air pockets and reaching towards its impossibly vast cliffs; but an unfinished art piece is stubborn, and the pursuit of answers will always remain a pursuit, a reaching or pointing, as a functional limit will always approach its target but never strike it. Maybe nothing is finished, maybe nothing is ever reached.

What makes pre-release Minecraft so interesting to me is how it cultivates a similar relationship with the player, occupying that electrifying state of flux and incompletion that demands player fulfillment. Actually, I’d argue that’s the appeal of any good sandbox game: in no other genre does the player act as such a supreme executor of interpretation and creation, and early Minecraft is one of the crown jewels of this in action. There’s a remarkable economy to its nodes that prevents any redundancies or overlapping between them: an entity such as a pig is not just an environmental artifice, but one of the three(!) main sources of health restoration, each with its own gradient of return on risk (pigs are quick to kill but nonrenewable, wheat’s consistent but slow to grow, etc). The obvious effect of this is a tighter mechanical rigor - getting food in the early game in old Minecraft is an actual challenge - but it’s the broader psychic effects that I’m more interested in here. As Minecraft has gotten bigger over the years, it’s become engaged in a greater particularization of its world: now pigs come in different shades, animals like pandas and armadillos roam around, and every new Lego piece under the sun is here. I get the feeling that Mojang has become disinterested in the player’s role as interpreter of the world and instead has begun to see them more as an inhabitant, or perhaps a tourist. It’s not just object variety either: even the newer post-release music feels complementary to a world that’s already been “finished” for you, all its emotional strings tied and logic mapped out long before you ever set foot in it.

Any painter could tell you that one of the most important skills of the craft is learning when to stop and put the brush down, and I fear that modern Mojang has taken a Rothko piece and painted llamas on it. Playing Better Than Adventure (a mod that aims to refine the beta 1.7.3 version of the game) has struck me with how much more palpable the spirit of discovery is when you pare down these extraneous things. It’s subtle, but I’m noticing so much more of a connection to the in-game world around me when my mental overhead is freed up of Mojang’s art department portfolio and when the game actually encourages a mastery of its world. A far slower mode of traversal (no sprinting or elytras) means that each step away from your base incurs risk, and encourages player-built transportation like railroads. The world generation in beta has something of a secrecy to it as well, with far fewer gulches and ravines, encouraging the player to search far and wide for more revealing caverns. Self-restricting myself to not using a bed (far more feasible without phantoms!) has also been a wonderful idea, as it promotes more creative territorial management to prevent enemies from spawning near your base: cool builds like castles actually have a pragmatic purpose when there’s something to defend yourself against!

And it’s those points where the paint thins out and reveals the vague sketch underneath that old Minecraft allures me the most. My favorite features in old Minecraft are the unfinished, half-implemented ones that lie on the frontier - things like golden apples, music discs, those eerie cubic dungeons. There’s something about the sparseness of elements on display here that lends them so much more of an indeterminate and legendary character, like they’re throughlines to some underbed of the game unknown to us. This is a big part of the game to me, and I’d argue it was for most people back in the day: older Minecraft has such a great potential energy brimming underneath it that demands interpretive extrapolation, and is fertile ground for urban legends.

BTA is admittedly a pretty conservative take on beta Minecraft: outside of a few tweaks, it’s nearly indistinguishable from the base beta 1.7.3 game. Minimalist as I am at heart, I also do miss some of the structure generation that’s been introduced later in the game (like woodland mansions). But for my money, this is the most fun version of the game I’ve found in a long while, and has revitalized my interest in a game that I’ve previously lacked the words to describe my growing disappointment with. Definitely recommend checking it out!