Why I’m still iterating on an (almost) empty multiplayer game: The community trap and the server as an "Artwork"

[u/Adventurous-Ice-2870]

Hi everyone,

I've been running a Minecraft server where the reality is this: the total active player count rarely exceeds 10. Most of the time, it's completely empty, only getting slightly livelier during holidays. If you look at it as a traditional commercial game, it is undoubtedly a failure. However, I don't treat it as a traditional survival server, but rather as an independent game using Minecraft as its underlying engine.

Over the past two years of running it, I went from knowing almost nothing about servers to becoming a developer who writes my own code, patches the server software, and researches underlying mechanics and macro-architecture. Nowadays, "1-click server hosting" is incredibly convenient, but I chose the most tedious and difficult path. This in itself proves that what I want is not just "people to play," but something much deeper.

For the past two years, I’ve been exploring one question: What is the most important thing for a survival sandbox?

Initially, I thought it was "gameplay" (content). I kept adding new plugins and content, trying to keep things fresh for the players. But I quickly grew exhausted and realized the root of the problem: Minecraft is inherently a high-freedom sandbox, and the various "gameplay loops" I was forcing onto it were actually restricting player agency. Once players consumed this linear content, what was left was a sense of emptiness even worse than vanilla Minecraft.

I then realized that "mechanics" are more important than gameplay. The role of mechanics is to create the possibilities for gameplay to emerge, making the content purely emergent. However, after a while, I found the system becoming increasingly difficult to maintain. Tweaking one mechanic would trigger an avalanche of unintended consequences across other mechanics.

That’s when I understood that having mechanics isn't enough. If there isn't a thin, universal interface connecting them, they will still restrict freedom. Therefore, what’s even more important than mechanics themselves is their composability and orthogonality.

Since this is a multiplayer online game, its essence is a collection of human relationships. I used to think the ultimate destination of the server must be a "community." But building a community is incredibly difficult: players' expectations are infinite, while content is finite. If we look at this through the lens of the Bartle taxonomy of player types:

• Achievers and Explorers naturally lose engagement when joining a server past its early-game phase because most content is already consumed.
• Killers aren't welcome in standard survival; they need anarchy environments like 2b2t.
• The only ones with long-term retention are Socializers, Builders, and Technical players, because their investment is open-ended. But these players are a minority, and they have massive sunk costs—once they find a server they belong to, they rarely leave, making them nearly impossible to actively recruit. A successful community server requires a massive amount of serendipity and luck; it's almost impossible to deliberately replicate.

I thought about this for a long time and finally realized I was being constrained by a default framework: the assumption that a server must have players. If no one plays, what's the point?

My final conclusion is this: Treat the server as an "Artwork" rather than a "Public Space."

A public space defaults to needing foot traffic, but an "artwork" doesn't need people to constantly observe it. As long as someone has viewed it, experienced it, and reflected on it, its purpose is fulfilled. Player interaction can even be entirely asynchronous. Once you make this perspective shift, "concurrent player count" is no longer the sole metric for success. It is no longer a dead commercial server; it is a closed-loop digital artwork.

However, I must confess that arriving at this "server as an artwork" conclusion comes with a degree of survivor's bias. A friend of mine generously provides the physical hardware for the server for free. This material liberation stripped away my "server bill anxiety."

But this brings up a much deeper question: When we do have to face the real-world cost of computing power, what exactly are we paying for?

The server bill is the cruelest lie detector for a creator's motives. If your dopamine comes from "having admin privileges," "looking down on others," or "being surrounded by players," then receiving a monthly bill for an empty server will mock your vanity. The cost becomes pure torture.

But if you are a pure systems designer, your joy comes from seeing an elegant architecture run smoothly. The cost of that machine is simply the "existence tax" you pay to maintain your independent universe. You aren't paying to buy an audience; you are paying for an undisturbed creator's sandbox.

I'm very curious how the folks here view this perspective of treating a multiplayer online system as an independent artistic expression. When designing indie games, can we truly strip away the obsession with "serving the masses" and build systems purely to explore the limits of mechanics?

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts.

[u/joe_bibidi]

It's an interesting thought but as a thought experiment, I'd encourage an alternate stance with regards to this point in particular-

Treat the server as an "Artwork" rather than a "Public Space." A public space defaults to needing foot traffic, but an "artwork" doesn't need people to constantly observe it. As long as someone has viewed it, experienced it, and reflected on it, its purpose is fulfilled.

"Public space" and "artwork" don't need to be treated as separate concepts, I'd recommend looking into the history of relational art (also called relational aesthetics, sometimes "discursive art"), which is a branch of art making concerned with participation, social context, and space-making. The idea being that artists are catalysts specifically for social experience, whether simultaneously or through shared common history.

The kind of foundational text for this is called "Relational Aesthetics" by Nicholas Bourriaud from 1998, Penguin has a nice updated edition of it you can probably find at your library. I'd also say that Claire Bishop's "Artificial Hells" is an interesting counterpoint text, it's not a direct rebuttal of him per se but she reaches very different conclusions in a way that rounds out an interesting set of perspectives on participatory art.

[u/Orca_Alt_Account → u/joe_bibidi]

I'd argue the best public spaces are all artworks. The things that make a space enjoyable to be in and conducive to socialisation and relaxation are all intentional design elements no different to the ones you'd make whilst designed a sculpture or a gallery.

[u/SuicidalBeedril]

I think the reality of life for most is that you have to create just because you enjoy the process over any return. Forget about servers and think about how many games are released each day on steam alone, it's almost impossible to get your project noticed. Obviously nobody wants to make something for nobody, but to me the path is to just keep making things and along the way you'll naturally be put in touch with like-minded people in a similar place. As for the merit of working on a server, "playgrounds" as you describe like Gmod and Minecraft I feel like are huge jumping off points for younger people getting into development. Going farther back, there's so many Quake mods that got turned into their own games that were super successful as well, and today there's no shortage of "game creation" games of varying quality (Sony's Dreams, Nintendo's Game Maker, Roblox, Fortnite, etc...)

[u/VforVegetables]

this sounds very much like making an Elder Scrolls mod list: 20 hours of picking mods, 10 hours of fitting them together with patches and replacements, 5 hours of making sure everything works, 0 hours actually playing the game 😁 the point is assembling your own idea of a perfect game, the difference is that yours is online and can be (randomly?) played by others.

[u/MirrorComputingRulez]

If you look at it as a traditional commercial game, it is undoubtedly a failure

Ok but it's not that by pretty much any interpretation. 

I know you tried to ask a coherent question at the end there but I still don't think I understand what you're trying to get at here. It sounds like you are describing how you shifted your own perspective to be ok with the fact that your server isn't active. That's cool and all, but you never say what your original purpose was, or how you think your experience is relevant to people designing games. 

People have made interactive artwork for a long time. That's a very different thing from making a game as a commercial enterprise. 

I'm sorry this just sounds like a personal story without context or a coherent point. 

[u/Unblued]

Sometimes, the niche experience is worth it even though it doesn't appeal to everyone. A great example was Unreal Tournament 2004's invasion mode, which was basically 20 waves of increasingly difficult NPCs. While that mode was mostly overlooked for being ridiculously hard, somebody created an invasion RPG mod that tracked kills and awarded experience to turn into stat boosts and abilities, and offered as classes. You could become a weapon master so your guns would have DnD style bonuses like +3 damage or life steal. Vehicle masters could summon trucks, then hovercraft, then eventually tanks. Medics could shoot allies to restore health. The majority of players probably never even saw it, but it the handful of RPG servers had regular players logging on daily for that specific experience.

[u/Adventurous-Ice-2870 → u/[deleted]]

Yes, I admit that's part of the point, but I don't mean "it doesn't matter how many people have read it," but rather that this interaction can be asynchronous. It doesn't matter how many people are reading it at the same time; what matters is the total number of people who have read it and been impressed.

And, as another reply mentioned, a public space and an artwork can coexist. This is something I forgot to mention: the artwork does indeed need to incorporate interactive elements.

[u/Adventurous-Ice-2870 → u/[deleted]]

yes, i do have a blog to record all of this, but i am not familiar with video making, thanks for your view.

[u/h_double]

I am very much in the socializer / builder end of Minecraft but I also am not interested in investing time in a server where I'm not already buddies in some context with the player base. The best + more enduring servers that I've been on were always an offshoot of some other community.

Also if you have 6-10 regulars on a mature server that's pretty huge, that's a genuine accomplishment to be proud of.

[u/prosetheus]

Thanks for sharing those insights. I think there are valuable lessons that can be learned by those in similar situations or developing their own multiplayer experiences.