Materialist Ecomodding and Picopower Logics: The Case of SunBlock One, a Solar Minecraft Server

Bart Simon with Ella Noyes, Stuart Thiel, Mario Gaudio, Shahrom Ali, Don Undeen

TAG Minecraft Bloc, Milieux Institute, Concordia University

In this paper I discuss the research-creation roadmap for the SunBlock One solar Minecraft server. SunBlock was devised as an ecomodding project that simultaneously addresses two major issues in energy transition research. The first, is the relatively unaddressed yet significant contribution of personal computing and especially gaming to the global carbon footprint and the second, on the role of popular and moddable sandbox games in fostering shared alternative energy imaginaries. We do this by extending ecomodding practice to include the material conditions for gameplay itself.

SunBlock One is a Forge modded Minecraft 1.20.2 Server running on an Intel NUC computer powered by a 12v LiON battery attached to a 100W solar panel. Solar, power and temperature data are visualized in the Minecraft game interface providing players with a real-time sense of the relative energy costs of their gameplay.  Here, I will report on the work accomplished so far and open a discussion of how the project might progress over the summer as we develop new mods that might operationalize real-time energy data as game mechanics as well as thinking about larger questions around the potential for our system to counter-game Minecraft which is otherwise understood as a game about colonialist extractivism and neoliberal sensibility.

Finally, the paper will introduce the idea of picopower logic as a model of local small scale engagement with alternative energy futures that may slide under the radar of dominant neoliberal logics of energy transition. The relative innocuousness of picopower systems is their very strength in enabling necessary post-capitalistic climate futures.

April 12th, 2024