Ending BTM

Actually it was a series of blasts, starting with small detonations but culminating in the massive, world-annihilating explosion of an aptly-named “chaos crystal.” None of this was officially planned. Rather, acts of chaos and celebratory destruction gradually amped up in the final hours of the convention.

The beginning of the end came after the final panel presentation by Cervator, who talked about his Minecraft-inspired game project Terasology, which was explicitly (strategically) designed to be extensible and support modding from the start. One of the staffers wondered aloud what to do to keep people entertained for the next hour or so until the closing ceremony. Copygirl invited

everyone to go to her booth to acquire BTM Moon exclusive floating decals for their avatars, if they had not done so already. As a dozen of us crowded into the booth, one individual detoured to DJ Flamin’ GO’s station nearby to queue up some music. After playing around for several minutes with the elevators and sliding doors in copygirl’s ship, people filed out onto the dance floor. It did not take long for a population of autonomous curiosities to appear: a wolf, wandering penguins wearing backpacks, knee-high miniature horses wearing the Minecraft cake texture, a swarm of tiny clay soldiers hopping all over the place. Multiple people started trying to control the DJ’s music computer at once. Someone remarked, “This has the BTM feeling of utter chaos!”

Sensing that I might not have much more time, I took the opportunity to run around the now-empty parts of the station, taking note of booths I’d missed. Then I flew out to get exterior views so that I could analyze the layout later. By the time I returned to the fun zone, music was playing and people were hopping and gliding all over the place in what I assume was the best facsimile of dancing possible, given Minecraft’s limited expressive affordances. Fires had been set in random locations: I had nothing to worry about as I was in Creative Mode, but at least one less- fortunate attendee burned up.

Then the lightning strikes started, a rapid-fire of explosive bolts all around the room. Although these did not actually damage the structures, the sounds apparently signaled that

ceremony (or perhaps just wanted to ensure that the convention centre was preserved for posterity), wanted people to stop: “Please don’t destroy stuff!”

Zoll, however, responded by saying, “Please actually destroy stuff!”

The closing ceremony was to take place in a different Minecraft dimension, in a special room designed for the purpose. Organizers mused for several minutes on the best way to get the 30+ remaining players to that location. There was some discussion of a “rocket” but they decided it would be more practical to use a giant portal instead. Copygirl asked people to head to the panel room, and headed there herself with a crowd of about half a dozen in tow—getting from the Fun Zone to the panel room was not trivial, so it was helpful to be able to follow the person most familiar with the station layout.

We gathered on stage and waited as stragglers filtered in. As a prank, someone started throwing potions that made everyone float up to the ceiling. Copygirl asked us all to line up, face forward, and use the mod-provided “wave” emote at the same time so that she could take a group photograph. I was surprised at how well the group managed to synchronize the use of the emote. Then, a strange noise welled up all around, and suddenly we were somewhere else.

We had finally made it to the moon.

We were in a hemispherical glass dome with a flat, white floor and a raised stage protruding from one wall towards the centre. Outside was a tumbled, pale lunar landscape, and in case there was any doubt, signs just outside the dome in the four cardinal directions informed us, “This is the moon.” That didn’t stop several guests from joking that we’d been “lied to” when the normal Minecraft moon passed overhead—this dimension was using the same sky configuration as the convention centre, making the moon visible from the moon. “That’s actually just a really bright star,” someone claimed.

Technical discussion of mods and other favourite games, combined with plans and jokes pertaining to the next BTM (“next time there will be microtransactions”), formed the backdrop of ongoing voice chat for the next half hour. These seemed like fall-back topics to which conversation

reverted whenever it was not actively being pulled in another direction—as it was periodically, to attend to the business of wrapping up the convention.

First, copygirl took the stage to thank everybody for attending, and also to thank those who helped with organization. She recounted how she had taken over responsibility for the convention from Zoll in September, and had not been too concerned about the task, but about three weeks later, “panic set in,” and in practice most of the heavy lifting happened in the last few days. Zoll reiterated that this is how it has always been with BTM preparations (“Thirty-two hours? That’s a lot of time! What are you talking about?”).

Zoll then delivered his closing remarks:

As you know I’ve organized a few BTMs, and I have to say I am pleased with how this one turned out, even though the main attraction was not what it was supposed to be. Thankfully nothing of value was lost. Except the mobs of course! I’m really sad the mobs were lost.

The “main attraction” in this case was the ill-fated attempt to display the Minecamp stream in-world. As discussed previously, all mobs were deleted as part of an ultimately fruitless effort to improve TPS. In saying “nothing of value was lost,” Zoll is implying an overall low opinion of Minecamp.

After thanking the organizing staff, Zoll asked the audience to think about which mod we thought was the buggiest. Then, on his signal, we would all shout out our answer. Most people said, “Screens!” referring to the OpenComputers monitors, probably because of the streaming difficulties. The jokes and teasing quickly followed, with one person saying “Stagelock!”—Zoll’s optimization and bugfixing mod, prompting Zoll and others to burst into laughter. Apparently the celebrities of the modding world were not to be spared the barbs of carnivalization either, although they were certainly gentler and were received accordingly, in playfully self-deprecating spirit.

Zoll also noted that another convention that “shall not be named” (i.e. Minecamp) had occurred that same weekend, and asked us which one was better. The overwhelming response was

“BTM”, with several chatters claiming (falsely, no doubt) that they were unaware that any other event had taken place. At least, Zoll noted to much collective mirth, we were now all better

informed about the “technicalities of international travel”—the most prominent meme from Day 2 thus making a reappearance at the closing ceremony.

Zoll, Tothor, copygirl, and Amadornes began to discuss plans for a “last man standing” contest of sorts. Zoll asked if Tothor could write a mod to make it so that anyone who disconnected would not be able to reconnect. Then, there would be some kind of “participation award” for whoever managed to stay on the glitchy and unstable server the longest. Copygirl suggested simply enabling whitelisting, but in that case server ops would still be able to connect. This led to a steady stream of attendees shouting in text chat, “CAN I GET OP”—a meme in which they were

pretending to be annoying young Minecraft players who (supposedly) show up on servers and ask for administrator powers.

Figure 5-15. End-of-convention lunar dance party. (Screenshot by N. Watson.)

Meanwhile, the partying started (Figure 5-15, above). Turrets began to appear and shoot projectiles at each other, creating explosions that were colourful but harmless to the terrain. Someone turned on loud disco music and activated a laser lightshow. Tomatoes began to fly. Someone asked, “Can we please nuke something?” Some device from the Draconic Evolution mod

generated deep warbling sounds and made the star field whirl past at breakneck speed. Of course the server crashed, again.

This crash did not kick everyone off immediately like most do. Instead, everyone froze and the world stopped responding to block interactions, but it was still possible to move around—only, one would be moving around in a client-side representation of the world, because it had stopped listening to network traffic. The Mumble chat, being run on a separate server, persisted. Zoll asked Tothor if he had remembered to turn off the “snooper,” which is Mojang’s anonymous analytics tool embedded in Minecraft. Tothor said no, so Zoll joked that this explained what was happening: “Mojang has finally shut us down!”

Zoll said that it looked like the server had decided to end BTM for us, but Tothor managed to get it restarted and we all rejoined. Lunar partying resumed. Tothor placed a COMMAND BLOCK

with a pressure plate to teleport people back to the convention centre—I observed people jumping on the plate before he had even finished programming the block. Because of the way command blocks work, they do not actually know who pressed the button. Instead, this block just targeted the closest player, and that is how I ended up back at the spawn plaza unintentionally.

The remaining people were now split into two groups—one at spawn and one still on the moon. At spawn, tomato chucking continued, and people started rapidly building all manner of curiosities, such as a row of lamps that lit up like a strobe. The conversation, which at times was very much unrelated to the in-world goings-on, discussed which staffers had volunteered at every BTM to date. Zoll was trying to remember the first BTM at which copygirl had played an organizer role, but then decided, “You get into the BTM organizers club just because you made Flamingos.” Copygirl commented that Flamingo is the one mod she would least want to have as the reason for such an honour. Zoll’s response is indicative of how modders perceive mod types to exist in a kind of hierarchy:

After I made Stagelock, I was always most sad that I was best known for making an optimization mod and not a content mod. Then I made Pinventory and that was my first mod to end up on 9-minecraft. Remember that wishes can backfire!

9-minecraft.net is a site that re-posts mod downloads without the authors’ permission, and generates advertising revenue in doing so. Having one’s mod end up there is a dubious—or at best ambivalent—honour: certainly for a mod to get stolen in this way, it must be popular enough for the profiteering poachers to take notice.

Judging from the chat, interesting things were happening back on the moon. People were shouting, “NUKE NUKE” and “BOOM BOOM BOOM!” Someone said, “Did you say something about blowing up the moon? We can blow up the moon….” Then a voice said, “What’s that? Fuckfuckfuckfuck, it’s a nuke, it’s a nuke, it’s a nuke, it’s a nuke.” The chat reported several deaths by radiation, meaning that the folks from the moon reappeared at spawn.

Figure 5-16. Carminite reactor detonations take their toll on the spawn plaza. (Screenshot by N. Watson.)

Copygirl commenced her own destructive fun at this stage, placing “Carminite reactors” from TwilightForest. When detonated, these blocks create small holes and generate flying, fireball- shooting monsters called ghasts (Figure 5-16, above). As the spawn plaza turned into Swiss cheese,

someone remarked, “I guess spawn is going.” Another exclaimed, “Who the fuck did this?” Copygirl asserted that “kind of the point of the end of BTM is to blow up spawn.” Someone else protested: “No, don’t, please,” but copygirl reassured them that the entire world had already been safely backed up: “We have a mod called Back The Fuck Up which backs up everything.”

“But BTM has been able to run without backups. It was not able to run without flamingos,” someone said.

Zoll: “Yeah, we actually ported the Flamingo mod back to 1.4.7 just so that we could have flamingos at RetroBTM!”

The celebration of “BTM madness” peaked. People started playing with adding gravitational fields, causing everyone to go upside-down. Some mod-added nukes, which look like vanilla

Minecraft TNT with a radiation symbol on the side, appeared at spawn, but they were not successfully detonated: many of the bomb effects were disabled within the convention centre (although not, apparently, on the moon) to prevent griefing.

Then came the chaos crystal.

The entire spawn plaza instantly dissolved beneath my feet, and I fell through the void to my death. When I respawned, I beheld a station that was missing most of its middle. Where the spawn plaza once was, there was only a gaping circular emptiness (though there was some debate in chat over whether it was a circle or a rhombus). The nothingness was expanding outwards, eating away at the convention center, and as I watched my telescope disintegrate, someone remarked, “It’s a bit late to stop blowing stuff up” (Figure 5-17, below).

Exclamations of amazement followed:

“That’s the thing exploding. Oh my goodness.” “How big is that explosion?”

Again there was a note of protest against the destruction, and again copygirl asserted, “This is like BTM tradition that we completely obliterate the server.” If, as Schneier and Taylor (2018) suggest, Minecraft play tends towards either the monumentary or the momentary, then BTM is a

contradiction: a grand, intricate monument to modder culture that lasts for three days and gets destroyed in spectacular fashion.

Noting that an annihilated station would reduce lag significantly, someone joked that “at least we’ll have 20 TPS46 _{when we’re done.”}

At first, several people said that the cause was the detonation of a “Draconic Reactor,” but the perpetrator corrected them:

“Actually it wasn’t the Draconic Reactor. That wasn’t enabled. It was the chaos crystal… which isn’t disabled.”

Figure 5-17. Effects of the chaos crystal detonation. Top: My field station disintegrates in the chaos vortex. Bottom: The majority of the station has been consumed. (Screenshots by N. Watson.)

46 _{20 ticks per second is considered the standard speed at which a Minecraft server ought to run under good}

“Oh, thanks for letting us know now,” replied copygirl, who had gone to great lengths to disable features that could cause “hell to break loose” (recall the broom dispenser—Section 5.1). Somehow the enormous liability of a station-obliterating bomb had gone unnoticed by all of the organizers. It could have been very bad, copygirl noted, if someone had discovered earlier on that chaos crystals were functional.

As crystal-related deaths and client crashes prompted an increasing number of attendees to call it a night, conversation turned back to modding matters. Zoll said, “I’m still disappointed that there was no modding API news at Minecamp.” Copygirl sang a few notes of “Where’s the modding API,” a music video created by the YouTube channel Yogscast as a humourous lament about the instability of Minecraft modpacks and the lack of official mod support. To drive the point home, someone said, “Can I quickly mention that the Where’s the modding API song is from 2013?”

It seemed as good a note as any to end on: me hanging in space above a chaos vortex, while the modding community hung in limbo over the question of official modding support—yet

surviving, even thriving. I flew to the zenith, stood back, and watched the world end.