A custom Minecraft game server acts as both a key meeting place and an immersive, philosophical art piece at the center of Milady Maker—one of Ethereum’s most popular and subversive NFT projects.

Built around rich theories on the modern world and micro-communities full of lore, the Milady Minecraft server or “Miladycraft” was created by holders of the Remilia Corporation NFT projects (like Milady Maker and Redacted Remilio Babies) for members to enjoy.

But it’s more than just a place to hunt for diamonds and build dirt huts in a blocky voxel environment. According to the server founders, Miladycraft is an art piece in and of itself.

In 2021, two community members wrote the “Milady World Minecraft Server White Paper” with the guidance of the collection founder, Charlotte Fang.

“Milady World might seem simple, as it is solely a Minecraft server—factually that is correct—but with it we wish to explore modes of sociality,” the white paper concludes. “With Milady World, we intend to harness human impulse unto inner fulfillment.”

It’s a rich document teeming with explanations of video game history, personal asides, and apparently sincere statements that might make readers crack a smile. For example, it asserts that Minecraft has “stimulated some of the greatest conversations in recent times known to man,” and that it “acts as the modern digital businessman’s golf.”

(It also imagines wild competitive success: “In another world, Milady could have been redefining esports, players whose caliber would be unmatched in the gaming world, forever; a golden age ushered in not by the mechanical greatness and artistic splendor of the games, but by the raw, unrelenting rockstars of gamers that could not seem to fail at succeeding, no matter what.)

In practice, the Miladycraft modpack and server have been used for social experiments, such as last month’s Second Annual Grand Remilia Ball. Intended to emulate the atmosphere of a real-world ball, the event was hosted in a lavish custom-built hall with attendees’ avatars dressed to the nines in virtual formalwear—and accompanied by a date.

“The purpose is, ultimately, because it’s fun and funny,” pseudonymous server co-founder and event organizer Scorched Earth Policy told Decrypt. “But deconstructed, a necessity for the structure is due to online events having a natural entropy towards chaos.”

As a result, the event organizers believe it’s important to enforce that every attendee must bring a date, and highly recommend that they be female—Milady NFT not required. In part, this is to reduce the risk of the event having no hint of a Y chromosome. But it’s also because they believe it reduces the risk of trolls and annoying jokesters.

“Said jokers would either be unable to find a date, or wouldn’t dare to incite such embarrassment upon their date either way,” Onno Morrison (who goes simply by Onno online), the server’s co-founder, told Decrypt.

“It’s just a fundamentally true principle that gender ratio will mathematically proportionately decide how fun your party will be,” Scorched Earth Policy claimed. However, the desired gender ratio was ultimately not rigidly enforced.

Some Milady community members scrambled for dates to enter the ball. However, the process of dating someone purely through the internet (called edating) is strictly prohibited by Milady creator Fang. As such, community members are encouraged to go out and speak to people in the real world to find a companion for the virtual ball.

Some attendees took long-standing partners, while others asked friends to join them—and a few indeed resorted to the internet to find a date, including DeGods and y00ts NFT project founder Frank DeGods, who tweeted out a request. One community member even set up a matchmaking Twitter account, although not a single match was made.

One attendee, who goes by the name Jeffortless, asked their date out by sending them a bouquet of flowers and a Hello Kitty Kuromi plushie. The pair have never met in real life, but Jeffortless insists that they aren’t an edater.

“It wasn’t romantic intent,” Jeffortless told Decrypt. “Sure, people can look at it that way or even practice courtship, so it sort of seems like dating. But I don’t, nor did I treat it like dating.”

Minecraft as art

To the creators, Miladycraft is more than a simple Minecraft server. It’s a work of art.

Scorched Earth Policy and Onno were having lengthy discussions about Minecraft back in 2021, itching to play the game again. But those conversations were effectively going nowhere until Fang prompted them to start documenting their discussions—like a modern day Socrates and Plato.

“Such a distraction could not be justified unless it was made applicable towards propelling Remilia’s financial or artistic merit,” Scorched Earth Policy explained. So the pair embarked on critiquing the state of Minecraft, modern gaming, and broader society in their elaborate white paper.

“Long after Miladycraft becomes defunct or forgotten, the white paper will go on to demonstrate the cultural significance of what we’ve assembled,” Scorched Earth Policy said. “The white paper is the art; the server is the work that makes it art and gives it reality.”

One of the white paper’s core arguments is that Minecraft is ultimately flawed due to Mojang’s mismanagement, steering the game towards children. It stresses that socialization in the virtual world is real and that the human experience is mirrored in the world of gaming.

Minecraft can serve as a sufficient metaverse, the white paper contends, and already has in many ways—but in their view, years of mismanagement prevented this vision from ever being fully realized. The team set out what it would take for Minecraft to match their own vision, and originally planned for the server to be free of moderators, but ultimately changed course there.

The white paper also goes into depth on how reality and the virtual gaming world connect. It stresses that socialization in the virtual world can feel just as vivid as real life, and that gaming is a precursor to an inevitable era of digitally simulated reality.

“[Minecraft] was the first truly open-world, open-possibility game ever created, and its existence marks an extremely important moment in history,” Scorched Earth Policy said. “Not just for video games, but for metaverses and the internet itself.”

With its creation, the server has played host to countless golden nuggets of lore and has been compared by players to the legendary 2b2t Minecraft anarchy server. For example, in Miladycraft, a seed phrase to a wallet containing 10 ETH (about $27,500 worth) has been hidden near the spawn point and has still to be found in a forever ongoing hunt.

Minecraft as philosophy

For many Remilia Corp. aficionados, Miladycraft links back to one of the core philosophical theories of the community: “network spirituality.”

This concept has been unpacked, evolved, and challenged by many, with a concrete definition still hard to come by. But at its most basic, it’s a spiritual network embedded in internet culture and memes; a rejection of the individual’s “meat-space ego” and the embrace of a connected digital being, with each person comprising a single node.

“Network spirituality is the collective prana of thousands of young artists channeling their artistic vision and manifesting it online,” one definition outlines, with prana meaning “breath” or “life force” in Sanskrit. “Network spirituality is the layer upon layers of user-generated sites,” another explains.

To many Miladycraft players, the server is an example of this in action. As the server lives, lore is created and memes evolve—contributing to the collective brain. One player, who goes by the name TylerIRL, told Decrypt that the evolution of network spirituality is the real art piece when looking at the Milady NFT collection.

“Miladycraft is network spirituality in practice,” Kabuki, a pseudonymous gamer who has played on the server for two years, told Decrypt.

“Nowhere else have I played with so many talented, bright, interesting, psychologically enigmatic, and spiritual individuals,” he said. “Truly, the Milady community must be one of the hotspots, in not only crypto but in the broader global culture.”

“Engaging with Milady is engaging with your innermost modes of being,” Kabuki added.

As the dust settles on the second annual ball, the network’s hive mind has only grown stronger. Lore will be passed down by collectors, tales will be told by gamers, and the Miladycraft metaverse art piece will continue to transform.

Edited by Andrew Hayward