of the people playing it.
Back when I was a mod-phobic Vanilla player, I would have sneered at all this.
Minecraft is not supposed to have “subsurface scattering”, whatever that means to regular mortals.
It is not supposed to look high fidelity, or high tech.
It is supposed to look like, well, Minecraft.
Its also interesting to think about what vibrant might look like, 16 years from now.
Im always tempted to call Minecrafts aesthetic timeless, which is objectionable for a bunch of reasons.
In general, timeless is an utterly vacuous descriptor.
Contexts alter and expectations change.
People die and other people are born.
Artworks find attention and lose it and find it again.
What will they hold onto, amid efforts to repeatedly sell them all-new, soon-obsolete vibrancies?
The original block textures are based upon minimal formal training in the visual arts.
The limited canvas size helped in that it makes a virtue of approximation and abstraction.
Mojangs efforts to make Minecraft more vibrant are just one strand of this community-wide experiment with Minecraft aesthetics.
The game file is absurdly compact at less than 50MB - you could send it as an email attachment.
Its not just about future-proofing the code, however.
Basso’s time capsule parallel also extends to the design and aesthetics of Animal Well.
This idea feeds through into the pixelart and its symbolist or archetypal vocabulary of tools and objects.
Again, while timelessness is a vacuous ideal, designing for it can be a useful social project.
They look like something youd find onMinecrafts infamous 2b2t server.
They absolutely look like somewhere you’d expect to find treasure, regardless of the era.
Game developers might take inspiration from that feeling of troubled enticement.
Is it helpful to consider what mixed emotions your creation might evoke, a hundred centuries from now?
