#public minecraft smp servers 2021

[antimony-medusa]

Current letter to Ao3, am I leaving anything out.

Hi!

I was wondering if it would be possible to fix the situation that is going on with the Video Blogging RPF and the Minecraft (Video Game) tags and the creators who work in that industry? Currently there are a couple of problems with the tags, and the archive is not functioning effectively for these fandoms, specifically as it comes to minecraft content creators.

1) there is no distinction made between character-based roleplay (including scripted roleplay) and rpf of the streamers/content creators doing the roleplay, to the point that character tags are redirected to the performer's real name, even when creators never use their real names in public (Bdoubleo has gone by that name for ten years of content creation, and I only learned his legal name was John from the tag, same thing with Technoblade, who I believe had to be doxxed for his legal name to be released). I am aware that mineraft roleplay is closer to RPF than a lot of other forms of storytelling, but to use Dream SMP as an example (as probably the biggest fandom causing this problem), Philza the character on the dream SMP canonically has wings that were injured in an explosion and is married to a goddess, while Phil Watson is a streamer from the north of England who is married to a fantastic woman who does not raise the dead. Charlie Slimecicle does not have bones and is an ageless being who identifies people via where they're from, while Charles Dalgleish is an american comedian. Tubbo Underscore is a blond married former president of a destroyed country who invented nuclear weapons, while Toby Smith is a brunet 17 year old college dropout who owns a saxophone. These are very different story beats and when I am looking for one or the other the tags are no help whatsoever. Other forms of storytelling are not treated this way, as for example there is a different tag for My Brother My Brother and Me (Podcast) (64), The Adventure Zone (Podcast) (10600), and Polygon/McElroy Vlogs & Podcasts RPF (733), or between 山河令 | Word of Honor (TV 2021) RPF (1488) and 山河令 | Word of Honor (TV 2021) (3616).

2) Everyone in the entire industry is collected into one tag, with no distinction between if the people involved interact at all, in story, in work, or in real life. You have to manually exclude character tags (such as the 20+ popular streamers on the Dream SMP) if you are trying to find stories from other creators, because the tag is so cluttered with the popular people, despite the fact that Last Life SMP has no crossover of creators, much less storyline, with Dream SMP. This is roughly analogous to every Real Play D&D podcast being in the same tag because they're in the same industry of improvised roleplay, and as unsustainable. Even other RPF does not have this issue, as you will note there are different canonical tags for Anthony Bourdain: Parts Unknown RPF (2) and 

Anthony Bourdain: No Reservations RPF (10). Reality TV is not all in the same tag. Cooking With Jack Show (Web Series) RPF  is separate from Bon Appétit Test Kitchen (Web Series) (192). Political RPF is separated by country and era. Broadway Casts are separated by play. The only other RPF category that I can find that works this way is sports, and even those are separated by which league they play in, i.e. American Football RPF (531) vs College Football RPF (27).

3) Creators play different characters across different servers, but the tags mash them all together. Grian (hermitcraft) and Grian (last life) have different lore and different loyalties, but these stories are all collected together (under the creator's real name, along with RPF). Again, I know that the line between characters is thinner than it might be for say, to use the Real Play example again, Marisha Ray's season 1 and season 2 Critical Role characters, but the distinction is important to the creators (for example Scott S Major | Scott Smajor uses different minecraft skins if he's on the Last Life server, the Origins server, or the Empires server, distinguishing his characters) and it is important to the fandom. Fan art for different servers will have radically different designs, characters will have different personalities (Ranboo is a married amnesiac half-enderman on dream smp and a spoiled end prince on origins SMP), lore will follow different plots, and occasionally different names (Ranboo’s regular dream SMP character is named Ranboo, and his Tales From The Smp character is named Ran, uses a different skin, and has a different backstory. They are synned together). The tags, again, actively confuse the issue, and again, other forms of storytelling are allowed to make distinctions between characters, and between character and content creator, for example Master Firbolg (The Adventure Zone) (149), Taako (The Adventure Zone) (6070), and Justin McElroy (81).

4) There is no distinction made between stories using the lore and mechanics of the video game (Steve and Alex, the abandoned mineshafts, the End) and stories using minecraft as a storytelling and acting medium (Dream SMP includes revolution, public executions, mind-controlling eggs and a prison that's a big human rights concern, Last Life SMP has a curse that causes you to kill your friends or die, Empires SMP has a demon who's infested the server who is romancing (or is it) one server member). It is literally almost impossible to find actual video game fic, as you have to manually exclude the dozens or hundreds of creators who have ever told a story in minecraft or publicly played the game. Other video games do not have this issue, as for example there is a canonical tag for 原神 | Genshin Impact (Video Game) (39962), and for Halo (Video Games) & Related Fandoms (1482). 

5. These are huge tags to the point of being unusable, because of all the issues mentioned above. At the time of writing Video Blogging has 158,262 fics and minecraft has 73,087, by far the largest RPF categories other than Real Person Fiction as a major category. The nearest fandom in size is Men’s Hockey, that has only 27,866. It requires a huge amount of work and technical know-how to manually sort these tags for any of the reasons alluded to in other points. The only way to find things in Video Blogging is to search by character, but again, there remains the problem of RPF and character-based fic being synned together, so that for example if I want fic about TommyInnit I have to sort through the 42,147 works in the TommyInnit tag using his Dream SMP character, his Origins SMP character, his 30 Day SMP character, his SMP Earth character, and RPF about Tom Simons the streamer and vlogger. The tag’s aren’t working.

At present the fandom almost exclusively works off of manual fic recs hosted outside of Ao3 and bookmark cruising from trusted archive readers (effectively canonizing taste-makers for the fandom). Ao3 is simply not functioning as a good archive for this fandom.