by Stone Marshall | Oct 1, 2016 | Awesome Book News, Minecraft News |
Time moves differently in Minecraft. A day lasts 20 minutes. A night lasts only seven. With the right conditions, Rome can be built in a day. And with the right supplies, a troll can burn it to ashes in minutes.
2b2t, a malevolent form of Minecraft, is full of such ruins: It’s a place of beauty and terror.
Ranked among the world’s most popular video games, Minecraft is often praised for fostering creativity and constructive play. It is the parent-approved successor of Lego, even used as an educational tool in schools. In addition to the usual gameplay modes, multiplayer servers turn the game into a social activity. These communal worlds are subject to rules: start a fight or destroy property, and a moderator will usually ban you.
2b2t is an “anarchy server,” the oldest and most infamous of its kind. It offers a world without rules, where aggression is encouraged and survival is rarely assured. 2b2t plays out like a Cormac McCarthy novel built with thousands of 1×1 digital bricks.
While Minecraft is the terrain of the imagination, 2b2t gives free rein to your darkest impulses. And now, 2b2t is being ravaged by war.
Anarchy servers are a dark tradition within Minecraft. In a standard game, you are dropped into a randomly generated world, where you mine for resources and build structures, one block at a time. There’s a survival mode – players have to scrounge for food and fight off zombies at night – and a more free-form creative mode, where players have unlimited health and resources. Players can join friends and strangers to play in servers online, though they are discouraged from attacking others, laying waste to buildings or using pornographic terms to describe someone’s mother.
There are no such rules on the anarchy servers. They are by nature inhospitable – in general, players are advised to bury their supplies, arm themselves to the teeth and be prepared to die many times over. 2b2t – “2builders2tools” – was created in 2010 by a user named Hausemaster and is known as “the worst place in Minecraft”. It has its own subreddit, a webcomic and a “2b2t Press” news site, where pseudonymous players post updates on the ongoing war’s latest atrocities. One writer exploring it found it to be littered with Isis flags.
Its first colonisers were users of the Facepunch forum, hence 2b2t’s seminal “Facepunch Era”. Members began to map and establish bases. The first factions were formed as rival forums signed up to the server and began to launch raids to destroy each other’s work.
Today, the server is more chaotic still. Players are divided into two camps. “Rushers” are disorganised players that are new to the game, seeking to infiltrate 2b2t’s settlements and claim them as their own. They battle the “veterans”, more experienced residents who have rigged the “spawn” (the point at which players arrive in the game) with traps to kill off new players.
The wave of new players was triggered by TheCampingRusher, a YouTuber whose video exploring the server was posted on 1 June and already has over two million views. In the video, his elation is palpable as he enters this previously hidden world. Almost immediately after it was posted, new players began to flood into 2b2t, throwing the server deeper into chaos.
Since then, the battle lines have become more ambiguous: 2b2t’s oldest users have retreated to edges of the map to preserve their settlements and sit out the siege in peace, leaving the new players to attack each other.
Much of the appeal of 2b2t is about learning what is possible – a world with few limits other than one’s will to power and survival. In the server, cuddly Minecraft becomes a horror game, one that demands a zen-like sense of self-effacement as you die repeatedly and re-spawn back to where you started. In the chat window, a stream of insults blends in with server updates. No arrival goes unannounced. No death goes unsung. While playing, I’m informed that a player called Dr Funky Pepper has just “become lava”. Two others get “slashed by a zombie pigman” and reduced to “a bloody meat pile with just fists.”
To traverse 2b2t is to feel lost and overwhelmed, and to play is to accept this pain and confusion as a condition of existence. The ordeal begins even before you enter: The queue to join the server is over 1,000 players long. A very slow-moving countdown appears on screen; when it reaches zero, you’re allowed in.
It took me three tries and over four hours to join 2b2t. It was worth the wait. I spawned before an abyss – I was standing looking at a heady drop into sea and stone and lava. After I overcame my virtual vertigo, I edged my way up a gigantic craggy mountain.
Hidden across the landscape are some especially cruel traps: fake sanctuaries that explode in flames, pits that drop you into a river of lava and false floors that open into prisons built from obsidian, with no way to dig out. (Players entombed there have no choice but to log out and sit through the queue all over again.)
To navigate this land requires an arsenal of hacked clients – altered versions of the game with enhancements, similar to cheats, like X-ray vision or teleporting. Popular cheats include the power to see through walls to find supplies and victims and one to improve aim. (This might explain how a figure in the far distance was able to shoot me down with a crossbow. In the dark.)
As I played, alerts in my chat window listed the deaths occurring by the second; the calming, ambient Minecraft theme song played as body after body hit the floor.
Nazi propaganda, racist slurs and a succession of death threats pour into the chat window with mechanical efficiency. Their sheer volume negates the effect, and they become part of the background. I want to beat this. I want to feel at home in chaos.
I too am cursing now, shouting very loudly at my screen. I fall. I re-spawn. I fall again.
Players are cueing up for four hours to play the elicit version of the game
For several years now, Devi Ever has been known on 2b2t as something of a pirate and a griefer (those who terrorise other players for their own amusement). She says the best sights in 2b2t are far out from spawn, logged by players on interactive maps where the distance is measured in bricks – one brick is roughly equal to a cubic metre. “The million [brick] mark, that’s where all the cool stuff is,” she says. “The thing I enjoyed the most wasn’t destroying, it was exploring.”
She adds, “Exploring 2b2t is like archaeology, there’s so much that it says about the nature of Minecraft itself and about the design of the game. 2b2t deserves a book.”
As a seasoned player, Ever has access to the priority queue, which allows her to skip the four-hour wait (some fans believe this is an artificial barrier, one thrown up to slow anyone who joined since June. Players have approached her asking to buy her old accounts for their quick access privileges. Sometimes they’re looking to trade inteligence for espionage or offering payments of hundreds of dollars. Information is currency in 2b2t: Ever traded a spare account for the location of 2b2t’s fabled Jesus statue, built in homage to the Christ the Redeemer in Rio de Janeiro.
The server’s massive size and ephemeral nature make it difficult to track its history. Still, there are attempts to organise its past into a coherent narrative. Reddit user ArchCrono, known in-game as ArchQuantum, authored a series of posts detailing 2b2t’s history, which eventually made it to the site’s front page. Their popularity is why he was asked to lead a faction into 2b2t, a challenge he reluctantly accepted.
Why do players queue for hours just to spawn and be killed off in seconds? “Minecraft notoriously lacks a standard story mode,” ArchCrono theorises. “This is a very real void the developers have not chosen to directly address.”
2b2t provides a meta-narrative beyond the game, similar to the half-time show during American sports broadcasts. Players post about the server on YouTube and Reddit, like amateur sports analysts. “If you are on 2b2t, what you do matters more than what you do on a single player or local setting, because it is available to so many people,” ArchCrono says. “The YouTube channels that cover 2b2t, particularly TheCampingRusher and FitMC, are providing commentary that crafts the plot of a story mode. When I posted on Imgur, I basically added an entire new section of plot.”
The rushers, then, are queuing up to play a role in Minecraft history.
A full version of the official game for schools will be available from November
Hausemaster, the founder of 2b2t, is a quasi-mythical figure both praised and trolled. He says he set up the server in 2011, when Minecraft Multiplayer was first released. Players flooded in, forming settlements and communities. He picked 2b2t’s final setting, “anarchy” mode without moderation. “I wanted to see what destruction would be made, but also whether there would be connections between players in such a chaotic, rule-free environment.”
I assumed Hausemaster would disapprove of the current influx of rushers, but he’s happy to see the server getting attention, even if the world he helped create erupted in violence. “2b2t is definitely not ruined – in my opinion it’s how it should be: absolutely chaotic.”
2b2t gives players free rein to abuse, destroy and self-destruct. It is essentially nihilistic, as players thrash against the walls of their virtual cage, taking out their disaffection on the same technology they are addicted to. Their behaviour is more than not safe for work: it is not safe for life itself.
Perhaps enduring this noxious landscape is ultimately 2b2t’s true appeal. “2b2 is about pride,” says Ever. “Pride in being able to flourish in what is considered the most notorious environment you can play in.”
Nobody survives very long in 2b2t – the pride comes from having died there.
There’s an alternative Minecraft server without any rules
by Stone Marshall | Sep 27, 2016 | Awesome Book News, Minecraft News |
After enjoying years of undisputed dominance as the king of unlimited exploration, Minecraft has a new challenger in—you guessed it—indie darling/gaming messiah/space sim extraordinaire, No Man’s Sky. Boasting an explorable universe with an inconceivably large number of planets (2^64, or 18 quintillion, but who’s counting?), it seems that No Man’s Sky has seized the title of “biggest game” from Minecraft once and for all.
But how much bigger is No Man’s Sky, exactly? YouTuber and guy with way more patience than me, ibxtoycat, set out to answer exactly that question in a recent video. Both games are billed as functionally infinite, but functionally infinite is not actually infinite, so let’s break it down.
Any given Minecraft overworld is 60 million blocks by 60 million blocks, just on the X and Z axes. If you include the blocks above and below, you end up with an absurdly large number of blocks: something like 921 quadrillion. If you bear in mind that each Minecraft block is a square meter, you’re talking a surface area the size of Neptune. It would take months of in-game walking to reach the edge. (It’s worth noting that on older editions of Minecraft the edge of the world gives way to the ‘Far Lands,’ a procedurally generated zone of weirdness that is theoretically infinite, but increasingly likely to crash your game the further you go.)
As big as 921 quadrillion is, it’s dwarfed by No Man’s Sky’s 18 quintillion, which is a little over twenty times larger. That means that for every block in the Minecraft overworld there are twenty planets in the No Man’s Sky universe. And each planet, even if it’s small, is several thousand kilometers across. That’s a whole lot of real estate.
There’s a lot to be said here about quality vs. quantity—after all, you can meaningfully interact with every single block in the Minecraft overworld, whereas No Man’s Sky is filled with great stretches of empty nothingness and desolate planets that force you to come to grips with the horrible vastness of the universe. But there’s no question that No Man’s Sky is not just bigger, but considerably so. That being said, the distances involved are so inconceivably vast that it is unlikely to matter. The difference between needing two lifetimes and a thousand lifetimes to fully explore a game world is pretty much academic.
Whether or not either game has the staying power that will allow players to eventually exhaust their near-infinite depths remains to be seen (but hey, people are still playing Desert Bus, so who knows?). But for the time being, they should be enough to keep you busy.
by Stone Marshall | Sep 19, 2016 | Awesome Book News |
Last week, DC Entertainment CEO Geoff Johns addressed complaints from fans and critics about the thematic tone of the company’s cinematic universe. Johns acknowledged that the films were too dark and gritty, promising that the future of the universe, including director Zack Snyder’s upcoming Justice League film, was going to look a little brighter and more optimistic.
Here’s the problem: Snyder created the universe in which these superheroes exist, and he has no plans to go anywhere anytime soon. This is the challenge when you start with your biggest characters and branch out from there. Your tone is already set.
The reverse Avengers
It may not matter that Johns, Snyder and DC as a whole are finally ready to embrace a more lighthearted world where the heroes are a bit less dour, because the universe is already in motion.
At this point, how much can you change Batman or Superman’s character without making them feel like different people? The heartbroken, angry and revenge-seeking Bruce Wayne is the Batman modern DC audiences know, because that’s how he was introduced in Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice. The isolated, confused and self-sacrificing Clark Kent is the Superman that we’ve seen in Man of Steel and Batman v Superman.
Not only that, but Snyder is now setting up a whole new series focused on seven heroes: The Justice League. This would be fine if DC approached its films the way Marvel did, but it hasn’t. It went the opposite way, and that’s a problem.
Marvel introduced people to Iron Man in 2008, followed by Captain America and Thor. Prior to that, the Hulk had received a couple of films that, while not great, at least introduced movie audiences to a modern interpretation of character. The only new characters that Marvel introduced in 2012 with the first Avengers movie were Hawkeye and Black Widow.
Instead of having one director set up how each individual character would appear in the universe, Marvel let each character flourish under different directors and then brought them together. The tone of these films was all over the place, allowing Joss Whedon to a voice for the team that was a mixture of everything that came before. One director made some chocolate, another had made marshmallow, and then Whedon was able to look at everything and think “holy shit I can do S’mores with this!”
And lo, it was delicious.
Warner Bros. didn’t do that. In an attempt to catch up with Marvel, DC decided to introduce Batman, Superman and Wonder Woman before jumping right into Justice League. The most popular characters have already been introduced by Snyder, and they’ve already worked together, and the tone for the whole mess has been set. Snyder made a terrible sandwich and now Warner Bros. is trying to convince us that a new director will be able to make just the lettuce delicious.
Changing the tone of an entire universe is already a difficult process, but deciding to do that while giving the same director the keys to the entire kingdom is even more challenging. Not only do the upcoming standalone films have to come from the universe Snyder created in the first two movies, they’re also ultimately going to have to fit into the team up that Snyder is also directing. The directors being brought in to “save” the tone of the DC franchise are stuck with grimdark both in front and behind them.
It may not be this bad
Now, to be fair to Snyder, the director claims otherwise. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter ahead of the release of Batman v Superman, the director said that one of the reasons they wanted to bring more directors on board to help craft the DC cinematic universe was to ensure that each film felt different. Snyder told the magazine that there’s a “danger when you try to mimic things like tone” and they didn’t want every movie to feel like the same experience.
Executive producer Deborah Snyder added that it was very important to the studio that each movie had its own tone and that the filmmakers were given the creative freedom they needed to make the movies they wanted. While the studio would have final say over what idea for a character made it into the final script, and in turn, the film people would see, they wanted an amalgamation of talents.
Warner Bros. decided to bring out the big guns early in the cycle to kickstart The Justice League
Again, to their credit, both Snyders are aware of the issue facing the universe, but they’re not addressing the main problem. As long as Snyder is in charge of setting up universes for characters, there needs to be a bit of synchronization between directors to ensure it feels like it’s one world. That’s why there are moments in Suicide Squad that make the film feel like it’s attempting to be dark and gritty — most of them concerning Batman — while the rest of it tries to pack in as much absurdist story beats as possible. The weight of Snyder’s vision is to going to be hard to escape.
Although the change in direction didn’t land with audiences as much as Warner Bros. wished it would have, it’s the first time since the DC cinematic universe began that something seemed different. Johns is set on making sure future movies aren’t as downright grim as Batman v Superman or Man of Steel, and Warner Bros. seems like it’s heading in a slightly more Marvel direction, although far from being that family friendly. For a split second, it almost feels like everyone has figured out how to diminish the criticism they receive time and time again while still appealing to fans.
The lingering question is whether that can happen at this point with so much of Snyder’s influence tied so heavily to the universe. Bringing more directors on board means there’s room for growth and exploration in the DC universe, but in order to remain as consistent and coherent as possible, Snyder’s original conception for the world will have to appear in every film in every way. Especially since these characters are being introduced on the path to The Justice League film.
Warner Bros. decided to bring out the big guns early in the cycle to kickstart The Justice League, but the films were critical disasters. Marvel plays it safe by making sure characters and tones can be removed or kept from the Avengers if they don’t work out, but Warner Bros. doesn’t have that safety valve; Snyder’s vision and sensibilities are shot through these films on both sides. It was a risky gamble that didn’t pay off.
Snyder’s DC universe tried to make The Avengers in reverse, and that’s where it failed
by Stone Marshall | Sep 18, 2016 | Awesome Book News |
It’s an understatement to say that Avengers: Infinity War will be packed. While Captain America: Civil War featured 12 of the MCU’s superheroes and a number of other supporting players, the third Avengers flick will feature upwards of 60 movie characters who will be involved one way or another in the long-awaited conflict with Thanos. Obviously that means there will be a lot of familiar faces, but according to directors Joe and Anthony Russo, they also have a few unexpected faces up their sleeves, some of whom might hail from the small screen.
While speaking with the Toronto Sun, the Russos acknowledged the obstacles in place that make it hard to include TV characters in the movies, they do look at all these characters, but they don’t want to give everything away about what they’re planning for Avengers: Infinity War. Anthony Russo explained:
We do consider everyone. We don’t want to get too specific about what’s going to happen with these movies. We want these movies to be a surprise for audiences.
There’s been a lot of back and forth about whether Marvel TV characters will ever appear in the MCU’s big screen adventures, especially Infinity War. Although the Marvel movies and TV shows do take place in the same universe, they’re run separately, and because the movies are developed so far in advance, it’s harder to coordinate schedules and not mess up a project’s plans. This past May, the Russos implied it was unlikely any TV characters would show up in Avengers: Infinity War because they were focused on “telling the stories of the characters that currently exist on the movie side,” but maybe they either changed their minds during the scripting process or simply want to offer a little hope to the TV fans who want to see certain characters, namely the Netflix heroes, appear in Infinity War, even if it’s just a cameo.
The interview also addressed Captain Marvel, who will be leading her own movie in 2019. However, earlier this year, the Russos may have accidentally let slip that Carol Danvers will debut a little earlier in Avengers: Infinity War. While the brothers wouldn’t confirm or deny whether this is the case, they did approve of the decision to cast Brie Larson. Joe Russo said:
It’s an incredible piece of casting. You couldn’t ask for better. Not only is she an amazingly talented actor but she’s a wonderful human being. We’re really looking forward to the opportunity of re-teaming with her — if we were to get the chance to work with that character.
As the article noted later, the Russos used this same “coyness” when talking about whether or not Spider-Man was involved with Captain America: Civil War, and we know how that turned out. So while her appearance isn’t official yet, it’s looking more and more likely that Carol Danvers will pop up during Avengers: Infinity War. That said, because Captain Marvel will tell Carol’s origin story, she may not necessarily have her powers when she’s alongside Earth’s Mightiest Heroes.
Avengers: Infinity War hits theaters on May 4, 2018.
The Avengers: Infinity War Could Feature Unexpected Marvel Faces, According To The Russos
by Stone Marshall | Sep 6, 2016 | Awesome Book News |
Deathstroke (a.k.a. Slade Wilson) has an extensive history in the world of DC Comics, stretching back to 1980 when he first appeared in the pages of The New Teen Titans #2 and began his rise to infamy. The daunting metahuman adversary has long been a fan favorite in the DC universe, as his superhuman speed and lethal tactics make him the perfect assassin to take on the might and cunning of heroes like Batman and Green Arrow. Although already established within the CW’s so-called Arrowverse, Wilson was supposedly on his way into DC’s Extended Universe for a Suicide Squad pop-in – one that never happened.
As the first Justice League movie rolls on in London, news arrived via Ben Affleck’s Twitter account that Deathstroke would be crashing the team’s first party. Although the announcement wasn’t accompanied by any casting news, rumors are still swirling around Joe Manganiello (Magic Mike XXL) taking up the role. Actor-based curiosities aside, the real question is how does Deathstroke fit into Justice League – and whose side will he be on?
The Villain: Is Deathstroke Working with Steppenwolf?
An old fiend of the family, Deathstroke’s opposition to the Justice League wouldn’t take much coaxing, especially if he’s preparing for his role as Batman’s main antagonist. At the same time, Slade Wilson has no history of working alongside the Apokoliptian general or his second-in-command in the comics.* In addition, his loyalty coda wouldn’t necessarily allow him to ally with an interplanetary menace seeking world domination. His four-color history has made it clear that Deathstroke has his price. A Steppenwolf collaboration even has a tiny bit of precedent, at least in the TV realm.
In the final season of the Superman prequel series Smallville, the US Army attempted to enact something similar to the MCU’s Sokovia Accords on its heroes. Called the Vigilante Registration Act, the anti-superhero legislation was spearheaded by a certain Lieutenant General by the name of Slade Wilson. It’s later determined that Slade was acting under the influence of a certain alien known as Darkseid. Although Snyder and Co. probably won’t be cribbing any plot points from the Superman spinoff, the story could provide some inspiration for the mercenary’s entry into the DCEU.
Still, as the godlike leaders of the parademon hordes, Darkseid and his right-hand man don’t really have much need for hired assassins. Human adversaries like Lex Luthor, on the other hand, even operating under the influence of the Apokoliptians, could hire Deathstroke to disrupt the newly created Justice League. The merc has collaborated with Luthor in the past, joining him in the Secret Society of Super Villains during “Infinite Crisis.” If so, the metahuman hitman could make life difficult for the DCEU crew. Of course, it’s also possible Mr. Wilson could take up arms against the League for an entirely different reason (more on that later).
*Footnote: The only other time Darkseid and Deathstroke worked together is when the New God hired the Terminator to take out the Teen Titans and the X-Men. Since that story was very non-canon, and less likely to happen than Wolverine joining the Avengers, it won’t likely figure into the equation whatsoever.
What Role Will Deathstroke Play in Justice League?
