Minecraft Matcha Flavored has too much spite for my taste

when the video was first posted, the comments were buried by praise, i had to scroll down to find people discussing the elephant in the room. since then, the video has gotten more than a million views and gathered a cult following, so much so that even the elephant in the room cannot even be found anymore - hence the need for this post, lest my voice does extinct.

this is something that i like to call “the veritasium effect”, where the video or creator has an aspect that so incredibly impressive you can’t help but praise it, thus burying everything else, especially criticism. other examples include captain disillusion and mr beast. the solution is to separate different aspects of the video. we can praise mr beast’s charity while acknowledging the emptiness behind it, we can praise captain disillusion’s unmatched production quality while acknowledging he’s kind of an asshole at times.

for minecraft matcha flavored, there are three distinct things here: the premise, execution, and attitude - the premise is something i absolutely agree with, the execution seems to be extremely high quality, the elephant in the room is the video’s attitude towards alternative playstyles.

the video correctly identified the problem with the “rushing to ender dragon” types, typically found in “minecraft is no longer fun” videos. so a major theme of those videos is that they don’t play the damn game, all they do is take as many shortcuts as possible to rush to the ender dragon and then wonder why it’s not fun. sometimes they offer a mod/datapack as a solution, living in an idealized reality where gamedev issues are that easy to solve. these videos all seem similar on the surface, but on close inspection the details contradict each other (and themselves). in my opinion, the real root issue is: 1) that they’re no longer 12 and they think depression can be solved through game design. 2) they have a narrow idea of how the game should be played, completely missing that there are infinite ways to play the game.

yet, the video overcorrects into a similar line of thinking. the video identifies the root cause as how mojang designs the game around mob farms, with a narrative that the game punishes casual players. the thing is, i have never seen a single mechanic added by mojang that’s catered towards mob farms, all i’ve seen are countless mob farm nerfs. if anything, casual players are the most catered to, and i believe that’s the main reason behind the disconnect between mojang’s behaviour and what the community wants.

if the “minecraft is no longer fun” videos are motivated from depression, this is motivated from loneliness. the minecraft community is overrepresented by pros who already played casually millions of times, and thus focuses on other ways to play (building, redstone), all while using mob farms as a shortcut to skip parts the creator finds fun. even if, in practice, no one is forced to optimize any aspect in the game, and the vast majority of players are casual players who never consume minecraft content. the root cause identified by the video is a misdiagnosis of that loneliness.

which brings me to the video’s definition of “casual”, a problem acknowledged by the creator. to me, this playstyle is actually doing things the hard way, and i would actually define the opposite playstyle as more casual, since shortcuts (from community knowledge, difficulty setting, gamerules, mods) dramatically reduces the difficulty required. i think that kind of accessibility is crucial, and not something to be denounced.

as of writing, the video sits as 1.6 million views with extremely positive comments. unlike veritasium or captain disillusion, it’s not due to technical quality this time, but how much of the project is a love letter to minecraft - something we’ve been missing and desperately crave from an oversaturation of minecraft content. but i wonder, do you actually love minecraft if you only love a narrow definition of it?