Gameplay Journal Entry #3 — Vivecraft Mod
Minecraft is possibly one of the most heavily moddable games on the market, and has been getting modded since the earliest days of its public releases. And while I’ve played around with plenty of mods that change the game in very perceivable ways, from adding guns or new enemies to completely overhauling the game into a narrative RPG, one mod I didn't fully expect to change the way the game plays was one that brings VR support to the java edition of the game. Something the Bedrock version of the game has had for a while, due to Microsoft’s own Windows Mixed Reality VR ecosystem, but a feature that the better java edition has gone without, and will probably never see native adoption of. Its because of this that I have a hard time agreeing with the negative outlook put on modding with the statement “This parasitic feeding off the largesse of a host transpires without return to said host, who, in turn, act as a thieving parasite to a host further up a chain of parasitism, a cascading flow that goes one way, and never the other” (Schleiner, 37). Sure, modders may be feeding off of the original developers of the game, and in some cases the work of modders does get taken and implemented into the game they were modding. But in cases like this, where one version of the game has VR and the other most likely never will, I see it as only a positive thing that modders have created something like Vivecraft to bring such a large feature to the version of the game that doesn't have it.
However, going back to the statement of how the mod changes gameplay, it may be hard to believe considering it makes no other changes aside from making the game run in VR and changing the control scheme to suit the VR platform. But while playing Minecraft in VR, a game that I have played for countless years in standard mouse and keyboard mode, I found myself playing the game a lot different than I normally do. Usually I would have a decent starter house and a good chunk of supplies before the end of the first day in game, but in VR the game is just a lot… slower. Almost relaxed in compared to the normal pace. Every action from breaking or placing a block to crafting tools or fighting an enemy takes longer with the Vivecraft mod, but not in a bad way. Sure you can still aim and press a button to mine, but its so much more immersive and fun to do it by swinging your tools at it manually instead. All these actions become almost intimately more hands on, and by the time I finished building a starting house, which took probably a week of in game time, it felt so much more like it belonged to me. Sure the Vivecraft mod may make it much harder to speed run the game or might make the game a good bit scarier when crawling around in the dark hoping monsters don't show up, but out of all the mods I’ve played with in Minecraft over the years this is the only one I feel inclined to really continue playing with, and its solely because of the subtle shift in how the game plays that I feel the draw to keep going back to it.
Schleiner, Anne-Marie. Ludic Mutation: the Player’s Power to Change the Game. S.n., 2012.
