User Generation looks at people who use video games to create something for themselves. The subject for this week is Keith ‘Bagline’ Blank,
“Detail is usually the first thing that people notice. That is, whether it’s there or not,” Keith tells me. “When I design something in Minecraft, I like to start with the most important feature. What will people be looking at first or most often? You get that looking as good as you can, or as close to the source material as possible, and base the rest of the scale for the build around that.” Having worked on projects as vast as a recreation of the Mines of Moria, scale is something that Keith knows a thing or two about.
Like many people who contribute their own content to video games, Keith got started making maps for PC games back in the 90s, with Duke Nukem 3D, Starcraft and the Team Fortress Classic mod for Half-Life being some of the games that he cut his teeth on. However, it’s clear that Minecraft is the title that Keith is most at home creating in. “If I were to look back at everything I’ve made to date, parts of Moria and my yet unfinished Pandemonium Cathedral are by far the best,” Keith says. “Both are, of course, in Minecraft.”
Minecraft, like Lego, is something that can entertain a child for hours whilst simultaneously being a very powerful tool in the hands of a master builder. The sheer scale of a project like recreating the version of the Mines of Moria depicted in Peter Jackson’s film adaptations of the Lord of the Rings was more than reason enough for the project to be picked up on by a range of media outlets back in 2012.
“Moria as it exists today consists of several smaller projects, the first of which was the largest by probably 1.5 million blocks,” Keith says of the project. “After that was done we bit off many smaller chunks and tried new things to keep the project interesting. Small is, of course, a relative term here, the first hall that we dug out is 206x206x50 at bedrock, and we had three other halls that topped 400,000 blocks.” The pragmatic way that Keith talks about it doesn’t quite get across quite how very massive this project was. If you’ve ever dabbled in Minecraft, you’ll know just how great an achievement making your first small shack is, never mind something that’s made up of hundreds of thousands of blocks. Creativity and technical ability were key to this project — but so was the necessity of teamwork and leadership.
CASE STUDY: Organizing Moria
Whilst the classic image of user generated content is the lone superfan slaving away by themselves, a game like Minecraft makes it easy for a team to work together building something in the same environment. You might think that the only way that a project as vast as Moria could even get off the ground is by having a group of people working together — but orchestrating such a team effort is quite the undertaking in itself.
As you might expect, Keith was not the first person to happen upon the idea of recreating the Mines of Moria in Minecraft. “I found a daily video series on Youtube by Kane Hart who was running a server called Godcraft,” Keith tells me. “I was fairly interested in joining the server until he did a video showing off the first Moria project and I knew right then that was the thing I wanted to help with.”
However, this stab at the sizeable Moria project was simply not to be, with server resets in the early days of Minecraft leading to the team having to restart the project from scratch more than once. “The original Moria project leader, who I knew as Feta, decided not to attempt it a third time.” However, Keith was eager to continue on with the project. He gave himself two weeks to dig into Fallout: New Vegas and then returned to Minecraft with renewed vigour to restart the project by himself.
“After a week I had some progress to show, so I wrote up the first draft of the project thread and posted it on the forums to see if anyone else was interested in helping me.” People certainly were interested, with names like Bodydrag, Doublenum, Jokers2, Flupperz, and Nevada2000 just a few of the many contributors that Keith reels off when asked about who else was involved.
As the number of people involved with the project grew, Keith found his own role in proceedings begin to change. Whilst in the early stages of the project, his primary concern was managing resources and keeping ideas flowing, it wasn’t long before his pioneering of the project as a whole put pressure on him to act as a leader. “I was always open to hearing ideas and comments from people on how to make Moria better, but few people actually contributed plans,” he tells me. “I think most people were just intimidated by the scale and reputation of the project. I know I would have been if it wasn’t already my baby.”
“As far as leading, I never really liked it,” he continues. “I much preferred the slow weekends when I could just turn on Netflix on my second monitor and dig peacefully until two or three in the morning, chatting occasionally with others on the server. There was something oddly cathartic about that. When things got busy or when I wasn’t online I relied heavily on the people I’ve mentioned to help me with coordinating the efforts of new volunteers.”
So, in the end, even though the project had many willing volunteers, what it really needed was those that were willing to lead. Interestingly, Keith seems to think that, at least in the form that the game is in today, good enough leadership can eliminate the need for a large workforce in a large-scale project such as this. “Teamwork is critical if you have a team, but a team itself isn’t critical to creation in Minecraft,” he says. “Obviously something the scale of Moria done legit required help, but it could have easily been done by a single person if you allow yourself all the available creation tools such as Voxelsniper, Worldedit, or MCEdit.”
Whilst the Moria project was no doubt an interesting experiment in what could be done in Minecraft, the ‘trap’ of any such in-game recreation is where to stop. Indeed, when a project like this is deemed ‘complete’, there’s not very much to do other than look back on your handiwork. However, the project that Keith is working on now circumvents this problem quite neatly; he’s building the sets for Molten Head, a machinima series that plays out inside Minecraft.
“Keith is a very smart builder,” says Evan Warner, the man behind the Molten Head series. “He observes, he plans, and he delivers. By constantly monitoring the world of Minecraft, he looks to see what sets certain builds above the rest, and incorporates those techniques – along with his personal flair – into his own. His builds consistently feature depth, variety, scale, and detail, staples of all the best builds.” It’s clear that Evan is a fan of Keith’s work, and going by the sort of locales that are on show in the trailer for the show, it’s easy to see why.
With a plot that follows a group of characters from different time periods being forced to band together and survive in the hellish Nether, Keith has been pushed to design different sets for both
the individual characters’ time periods and the Nether itself. “We have one character from 1920’s New York, so we have a few blocks of Manhattan replicated and interspersed with historically accurate buildings and fictional buildings to fill in the gaps, or as needed by the script,” Keith tells me. “I actually spent a great deal of time googling photos of what the original grand central terminal looked like in the 1920s. Unfortunately sometimes you have to fill in the details because there’s literally only one angle that building is ever captured from.” Keith’s process is certainly in-depth, but you’d certainly expect so based on the sort of thing he’s producing.
Evan has more of an insight into just how in-depth Keith can get. “ I’ve personally seen graveyards of his prototypes. Every last block has purpose and thought behind it,” he tells me. “He works out every last detail, so that nothing seems out of place or thrown together. He may attempt a specific component of a build 5-10 times before he settles on the best design.” It makes perfect sense, then, that when Evan wanted someone to build the sets for a series as ambitious as Molten Head, he’d turn to Keith for help. “His dedication and drive are unrivaled. Who else could have dug out the entirety of Moria, block by block?” says Evan of his friend and collaborator. “His builds always wow the masses. I consider myself a good builder, but Keith is in a class above the rest.”
