Audio Essay

Audio Essay Transcript

[Introduction:]

Today I am talking about Unstable Universe, a scripted Minecraft SMP YouTube series.

To get right into it, Unstable Universe is like... if you told three guys to make a modern epic in Minecraft?

This series toes the line between taking itself seriously and acknowledging the absurdity it’s built around.

It conveys its meanings and themes through the game itself and the mechanics within it, as well as through the content creators playing their characters and acting out the story they’ve made.

The series incorporates many in-game mechanics and exploits as a key part of its storyline, and is focused on the impact that these game-breaking mechanics and exploits can have on the world that the characters live in.

If I were to be discussing meta, which I will briefly touch on from time to time, it would fall into the category of the current long-form content meta, as every episode after the first four are consistently over three hours long.

The story of Unstable Universe is told through three alternating points of view; that being, it’s told through the very biased eyes of Parrot, Spokeishere, and Wemmbu.

Parrot’s point of view focuses on puzzles and solving problems, Spoke’s point of view focuses on exploits and glitches, and Wemmbu’s often centers around conflicts, be it his own or those between factions.

Given that this story takes place within a video game with limited customization and movement, Minecraft roleplay series like Unstable Universe rely heavily on audience interpretation to convey the narrative within the series.

[Part One:]

When it comes to Unstable Universe in particular, setting the scene relies not only on in-game mechanics, but also building, lighting, and character interaction.

The driving factor of Unstable Universe’s plot is the concept of every game-breaking exploit that was once patched now working again.

Through these exploits, in-game materials and items can be duplicated, throwing off the entire economy that had previously been built up naturally through player interaction and grinding for resources.

It’s not just exploited materials that create the environment that Unstable Universe takes place in, though.

The characters whose points of view we watch through often also make use of the F3 debug screen to check their coordinates, and in earlier episodes, would even check the tab list to see who else was online or near them.

As another example, many of the puzzles, prisons, and traps that are used within the series rely heavily on in-game mechanics and knowledge of how to use these to a player’s advantage or disadvantage.

Occurrences like chunk-banning, in which a player is within the radius of an item that holds too much data for a server to send to its client, are used frequently to avoid the other option of permanently killing an enemy.

Scene building is an extremely important part of world building, not just for having a physical set for characters to interact with and carry out the story in, but also for setting the tone and hinting at background information.

For example, upon seeing the Zam Empire, the audience can easily pick up on the sheer amount of wealth and power Zam has compared to someone like Parrot.

Everything that the audience is meant to see is shown, though sometimes mistakes are made, such as a Wifies death message being seen in chat backlogs of Parrot’s “I Uncovered Minecraft’s Greatest Secret”.

Another example of this would be Kenadian’s bunker design used in episode nine of Unstable Universe, titled “I Got Hunted by Minecraft’s Deadliest Players”, in which the design itself was cut off and ruined by faulty work with the world edit mod as it was copied and pasted from one server to another.

Mistakes like this not only affect the look of the scene, but also how the scene plays out for the characters involved.

Kenadian talks about this more in a past livestream titled “‘Debunking Wifies’ Q&A + Behind The Scenes”, which, obviously isn’t focused on Unstable Universe, but he does bring it up and talk about the missing room and the potential that it had.

Basically, given that the room had been cut off, this resulted in it being buried in the stone of the surrounding area it had been pasted into, making the room look confusing, unfinished, and resulting in an escape route being rendered entirely unavailable to Parrot and Wifies as they were on the run.

On another note, the bunker that Spoke leads Parrot and Wifies into is meant to look intimidating, suffocating, dark, and uncomfortable... and it succeeds.

The final trial that Parrot and Wifies must go through in episode five of Unstable Universe is uncomfortable to watch not just because they’re forced to work against each other for the first time, competing to see who doesn’t get chunk-banned, or even because Spoke is watching and commentating over their competition the whole time, but also because the bunker is made to be dark, imposing, and difficult to escape from.

This is only heightened by the fact that Parrot and Wifies are both without armor and weapons, meanwhile Spoke is still fully geared.

As discussed in Dario Martinelli’s “Creativity and Visuality of Closed Spaces: The Case of Ettore Scola”, the relation between inside and outside of a certain space is a competition of opposing characteristics.

Martinelli writes, “Often, the interaction or conflict between the two spaces is embodied by specific characters – in different possible combinations: people coming from the outside who break the equilibrium of the insiders; outsiders who experience a personal change once they access the inside; insiders who “unlock” a given condition only when they manage to access the outside, and so on.”

[Part Two:]

Unstable Universe episodes tend to follow a similar pattern, and just like traditional series, follow a similar narrative structure.

Despite this, with limited points of view for the audience to watch, there are obvious biases within these character driven narratives that can be dissected further.

In general, Unstable Universe episodes tend to follow a simple pattern of a problem being introduced, the point of view character beginning their quest to solve this problem in a way unique to their thought process, allies and opposition being acknowledged, a conflict arising, and, more often than not, a cliffhanger ending leaving the audience to speculate on what will happen next.

On the topic of characters and differing points of view, Jaime Barahona Martínez, et al. discuss in “NARRATIVE STRUCTURES AND TECHNIQUES OF TRADITIONAL SERIES IN DIGITAL PLATFORM CONTENT The Case of Role-Playing Series in Minecraft”, “The characters become the main narrators of their own stories, as each of them is a content creator, addressing their respective audiences, with their own points of view... The primary mode of expression for the characters is through dialogues between the characters and the plots that they themselves develop, simulating naturalness and sometimes coincidence. This final element, in conjunction with the dramatic content of the relationships between characters, represents one of the most attractive aspects for the audience.”

Unstable Universe is unique when compared to the other series discussed within this article as the audience always had the ability to watch along with almost every other creator’s point of view who was involved, whereas with Unstable Universe the audience is limited to just three points of view.

There are, of course, biases present between each of these three points of view that Unstable Universe viewers are presented with.

For example, each point of view character believes that they are doing the right thing, and that any character in their way must be working against them and is in the wrong.

This, of course, isn’t exactly true, as there are multiple occasions in which two, or even all three, of the point of view characters’ goals align with each other, even if they never realize it themselves.

As mentioned in Martinelli’s “Creativity and Visuality of Closed Spaces: The Case of Ettore Scola”, another case of what the author calls claustrophilia, which is basically just an emphasis and love for closed spaces, within storytelling is that of the plot relying on characters eventually reuniting or running into each other and interacting.

Each protagonist carries their own story, and when reunited these stories overlap and converge into one.

[Part Three:]

Because of these stories overlapping and becoming one cohesive, or sometimes more confusing, depending on the series, story, Minecraft SMP series rely heavily on audience interpretation and interaction, and Unstable Universe is no different.

Mer writes in “Barrier Blocks: On Minecraft Roleplay and the Fourth Wall, Part One: Introduction”, “Minecraft roleplay is simultaneously a story taking place within a game, and a story about people playing a game... [It] is a medium which can ask you to take two things as simultaneously true: the emotional fiction of the game-world, and the material relation between player, game and audience.”

I recommend reading Mer’s ongoing Barrier Blocks series, because it covers a greater number of series within the minecraft roleplay genre.

If you want to learn more about what is going on outside the scope of my very Unstable Universe-focused research, then it’s definitely worth checking out.

Back to what I was saying, with only three points of view to go off of, audience interpretation of events can become even more heavily skewed than that of a livestreamed series in which each point of view involved in a conflict can be sought out and analyzed completely unedited.

Episode five of Unstable Universe, told through Parrot’s point of view, ends with the revelation that the entire quest that Parrot and Wifies had gone on had been nothing more than Spoke’s revenge plot.

As discussed in “Failure to Reappraise: Malevolent Creativity is Linked to Revenge Ideation and Impaired Reappraisal Inventiveness in the Face of Stressful, Anger-Eliciting Events”, by Corinna M. Perchtold-Stefan, et al., “Higher malevolent creativity was independently associated with a higher propensity for revenge-related ideation during intentional reappraisal of negative social situations. This relationship indicates that individuals highly capable of producing malevolent ideas for the purpose of revenge when explicitly asked to do so may also spontaneously employ their malevolent ideation as a strategy when trying to use reappraisal for coping with provocative events.”

Spoke feels he has been wronged by Parrot, and in turn creates an elaborate revenge plot to take out his emotions on him.

He is also proven to act impulsively as well, both in the past and in the future episodes to follow, as in a later episode, he claims that he hosted the scavenger hunt for Parrot and Wifies “because he was bored and wanted to take his anger out on someone.”

As Unstable Universe progresses, Parrot and Wifies’ dynamic only evolves further.

Interpersonal conflicts bring clashing morals to light and later become a source of conflict between the two.

As Tumblr users randomminecraftguy, saiintvalentiine, and mellohiizz discuss in one post on the subject, Parrot has a very clear hero complex.

He believes that every fight is his and his alone, and does all he can to keep Wifies uninvolved, because every time Wifies has gotten involved, he’s gotten hurt.

By doing this, though, Parrot is self-sacrificial to his own detriment; he pushes his allies away and isolates himself, as well as taking away Wifies’ agency, and in turn, this leads to Wifies beginning to see himself as nothing more than a liability to Parrot.

It’s through audience interpretation like this that the characters involved feel even more alive and fleshed out.

Audience interpretation is so important to a series within a medium like Minecraft roleplay.

As the story and its actions are acted out within the game, many things can be left ambiguous.

As a game with not much detail, it is up to the creator and audience to converge on an interpretation, and sometimes, unsurprisingly, these interpretations can clash.

As Tumblr user Q-Nihachu discusses in a post on Minecraft roleplay and its reliance on shared interpretation between creator and audience, “We know if one character hits another, but we don't know what that means. It could be nothing, or it could be a deep betrayal.”

Audience interpretation has always been important within Unstable Universe, as while it does focus on a lot of meta, in-game mechanics, it is still a scripted series that is telling a story.

There are obvious pushes for the audience to interpret parts as they see fit with time skips between episodes, but there are also instances in which the audience must interpret small things, such as how a character shuffles through the items in their inventory as they talk, what broken armor can represent other than just one less gear slot filled, and what limited in-game motions, such as crouching and hitting must mean.

[Conclusion:]

In conclusion, Minecraft roleplay series like Unstable Universe rely heavily on audience interpretation to convey the narrative within the series. Everything from setting the scene, to narrative elements, to character motivations is made to be seen by the audience and left up to each audience member to interpret themselves.