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deliciousobservationbird · 2 years

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Parrot, Pangi, The NPPP, and Protest Humour

In 2009, in a seminal piece of work named after a particular study on the power of humour as an act of rebellion, Robert Darnton confessed that “There is no better way to ruin a joke than to analyse it or overload it with social comment.”

So, sorry NPPP. I’m going to take your joke and, not only analyse it, I’m going to charge it with social commentary, symbolism, and also meaning. Consider it, an act of rebellion, of protest, provoked by your faction name.

What is the NPPP? Who are Parrot and Spoke? To answer those questions I must say: Welcome to the Lifesteal SMP. A server where if you die, you lose a heart. Lose all your hearts and you get banned.

Within the opening days of Season 4 there was the expected primordial chaos, which was then followed by the expected still-chaotic ordering and solidifying of alliances. Two players, both alike in their goals, quickly found themselves at the opposite ends of the Lifesteal SMP hierarchy:

The first (Pangi), had many hearts and many allies. He was able to achieve the goal of most Lifesteal players by gaining 20 hearts and was one of the first to do so.

The other player (Parrot) had a different experience. He found one main ally in Spoke but quickly found the initial phase of Season 4 to be a harsher climate than he had expected. He was low on hearts, allies, and he and Spoke had to skim-off the bases and resources of other players.

The weird almost-meritocracy based class and wealth system of Lifesteal SMP becomes quickly apparent. There’s material wealth in the form of bases, villagers, and farms, and then there’s the unique Lifesteal currency in hearts. Material wealth and heart-wealth are the two separate markers of a player’s status. It is possible (and interestingly, most common) to only have one of the two.

Take the “Three Hearts Trio” for example. It’s clear that they lack in heart-wealth, which would put them down at the bottom of the Lifesteal hierarchy; however, their base was a site of immense material wealth. It was the choice target of Parrot and Spoke’s “re-appropriating” of resources. Their material wealth allows them to rise in the hierarchy and gain a particular protection due to the important resources and exports their base is able to provide the server.

Pangi (the wealthy player mentioned before) from the beginning, had set his eyes on the ambitious target of becoming the most powerful player, of being the top of this ever-present hierarchy. He gains the heart-wealth early on in the server and, due to this strength, is able to take a comparative risk by setting up a base near spawn. He is able to spend time on decoration and aesthetics and by doing so, shows off his ascension to the top. Pangi gained both material wealth and heart-wealth and so established himself as part of the ‘upper class’ of Lifesteal.

So, within Lifesteal Season 4 there is already a sense of an established hierarchy and order. The heart-rich are able to get heart-richer and grind raids with ease, whereas the heart-poor become heart-poorer, dying to stray arrows, vexes, and creeper explosions. Dying to things that aren’t even a consideration the more powerful players would need to make. There comes a need (from at-least one end of the hierarchy) for some sort of upheaval, a reversal of this social order. There comes a need for a carnival.

By carnival, I refer to the concept of a traditional European Christian festivity (although comparable to Purim in parts) that stood in opposition to Lent. Carnival was a period of openness and freedom that was to be let out and acknowledged before the solemeness of Lent was to set in. Darnton says “Carnival was high season for hilarity, sexuality, and youth run riot-a time when young people tested social boundaries by limited outbursts of deviance, before being reassimilated in the world of order, submission, and Lentine seriousness.”

Mock trials were held and plays were produced where (within this particular context of carnival) dissent and acts of rebellion were almost encouraged. Established powers such as the pre-reformation Church were able to be challenged and the more personal enforced social norms were up-turned. As Marjolein't Hart puts it “[carnival] allowed the articulation of the idiomatic "world turned upside down", a funny and subversive way to play with established rules and hierarchies.”

She, and other historians, stressed the usage of carnival as a release of tension, a safety valve that allowed discontent people, usually at or near the bottom of their particular social hierarchy, a way of expressing their displeasure openly due to the fact it got masked or understood as a form of humour, often satire. By making these jokes, the possibility of a different reality gets aired. Elizabeth Hansot points out that “the joke is in the structures we create, structures that frame some individuals or groups arbitrarily at the expense of others.”

So, you may be thinking, that’s all well and nice but what have Parrot, Spoke and the NPPP got to do with some pretty old European folk customs?

Well, within Lifesteal there are several established structures that form the Lifesteal norm. Ideas that are taken for granted eg. that every player wants to achieve power in the form of material wealth and heart-wealth. Ideas that there is a correct way to go about this ‘inevitable quest’.

Steps for a successful Lifesteal experience:

Firstly, you want to gain allies. Don’t make enemies where you don’t gain from doing so.

Secondly, in order to gain heart-wealth, material wealth should be obtained beforehand. Either you, or one of your allies, should set up a secret base stacked with villagers and potions so you can gear up for step 3.

Now you can start to evaluate the position of each player and faction on the server. Who is poor enough to be an easier target, yet rich enough that you can gain something from the kill?

The NPPP take these pre-existing Lifesteal norms and use the framework of their alliance to protest and mock it. Their name “The No-Pants People Party” stands in opposition of former teams in previous seasons (“Men Of Battle” “People Of Gallantry” etc.) in its lack of grandeur and use of —what’s often considered— low-brow humour.

The NPPP takes one of the key beliefs of Lifesteal, that the natural desire of players is to gain wealth and power, and turns it on its head. They take the armoured leggings (which offer the second most armour points within an armour set) and refuse to wear them. They take the pre-established order of allies-gear-hearts and stand outside of it. The NPPP are able to acknowledge the expected course of action and satirise it. They make enemies with powerful allied players, they refuse to set up their own permanent base for grinding, and they mock the caution of powerful players by using The NPPP’s circumstantial group identity as players with few hearts to emphasise their refusal to ‘play the game’, to drive home the mockery they make of Lifesteal norms by not wearing trousers.

In doing so, they are effectively protesting the expected hierarchy of Lifesteal from the bottom of said hierarchy. They are not acting on game theory or rationalism. The NPPP act in defiance of the norms, they challenge players like Pangi who have more allies and have more wealth and are able to wield their unique privileges (gained from stepping outside the expected frame) to force an upheaval in the previously-solid social structure.

Just as the jester is able to mock the king due to their station, the eccentricity of the NPPP allows them the privileges of being underestimated and allowed to carry on their humorous protest. As Hansot says, it also allows them “To make a claim for oneself with a note of humour, i.e. to establish role distance, can save face in advance by creating a self that will not be discredited by lack of success or ignored by being predictable”.

They can use this open defiance of norms and loud satirising of established Lifesteal structures to weaponise every outcome. When The NPPP clash with players like Reddoons, Woogie, or Pangi, each victory is symbolic of the great upheaval The NPPP caused and also celebrates their ‘underdog story’. It both defies structures and also reinforces them. The inherent humour and absurdity of basing collective group identity on a refusal to wear trousers also endears them to the viewers of the Lifesteal SMP as well as endearing them to each other.

The NPPP are able to very quickly establish this collective group identity due to the obvious visual markers that differentiate themselves from their enemies. They characterise “pants-wearers” as being greedy, untrustworthy, and as natural enemies to the NPPP. They signify which social group they belong to, through their choice in armour wearing but it’s the use of humour that helps keep the group together and help promote collective action. In an article regarding the usage of humour within the workplace Hansot remarks that “[humour can be used] as a way of marking ethnic or kinship boundaries or of channelling hostility and mobilising solidarity among people who are forced to interact frequently and intimately.” The NPPP usage of humour regarding their faction acts as a way of signalling who does or doesn’t belong in their group as well as helping to strengthen the bonds between established members.

The NPPP use this humour and make jokes (often crass ones) about their circumstances to the extent that they can even deny their own losses. Each NPPP loss is considered as a fruitless victory for their opponents as they still exist within the Lifesteal norms, where the resources and time taken to win are a loss in a season wide battle of attrition. The viewers are also more likely to be sympathetic and supportive of The NPPP as Hart notes that “Jokes often weaken the defences of an audience and render the listeners more amenable to persuasion.” The NPPP use this humour and are able to joke with the audience such that the audience sees their refusal of norms are interesting, engaging, and charming and will make up for the backlash The NPPP get from refusing to follow the given path within the Lifesteal SMP.

So when Parrot and Spoke decided to defy expectations by refusing to wear a useful piece of armour and making penis jokes, they were (unintentionally) mimicking the European tradition of Carnival and humorous protests and defiance of established social practices and structures. Their usage of humour as a tool of persuasion for viewers, a method of bonding for people within their group, and most importantly: their usage of humour as an act of opposition against more powerful enemies shows the oft-overlooked versatility and importance of jokes.

Maybe the NPPP was intended to be just a joke about not wearing trousers but its context gives it these extra connotations and meanings that support Parrot, Spoke, and whoever allies with them, in their open protest against the common ideals of Lifesteal culture.

Sorry NPPP! Hopefully I didn’t ruin your joke too much, but to be fair - you can’t use humour to engage and delight without inviting some (perhaps unexpected) consequences.

Disclaimers: I'm not a professional linguist and I'm also not an expert in mediaeval European folklore and traditions. There are more layers to it the more meta you get, so I mainly stuck to within the Lifesteal canon to avoid complications and to avoid making this even longer. A point could be made about how the status of an admin can be understood within Minecraft and how that contributes to the carnival-like warping of hierarchies but that was *insanely* meta. Also I had the idea for this and started writing it at 1/ 1:30am thinking it would take like 20 minutes max. I awoke from a trance where I opened my eyes to 5 pages of text with citations at 5:20am. I slept before posting to make sure it’s coherent but at this point it’s as coherent as I can make it.

Sorry for being insane btw (:

#lssmp #Lifesteal SMP #Parrotx2 #Pangi #Spokeishere #The NPPP #The No-Pants PP #I also left out an entire section about sex jokes you're welcome #The No-Pants People Party #<- owe me thousands of dollars in reparations #tumblr essay ig #European Folk Customs #Humour #DM me if you want links to any of these papers #Also if you actually read all of this <3 #ty #Delibird talks history

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