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In his chapter in What Writing Does and How It Does It (Bazerman & Prior, 2004), “Intertextuality: How Texts Rely on Other Texts”, Bazerman presents an extremely helpful method of understanding and describing intertextuality, defining six levels of intertextuality ranging from directly quoting an argument to use of a common vocabulary and style of language. Unfortunately, his examples within the piece are, in a word, dull. As I am interested in using this terminology to communicate my own ideas regarding intertextuality shown within my interests with friends, who are not writing studies scholars, and I know I cannot force them to read and understand Bazerman’s original text, I have taken it upon myself to define Bazerman’s six levels of intertextuality in the way I know best: through videos that involve storytelling through the medium of world-famous videogame Minecraft, as posted to Youtube.
Most of these examples draw upon Skyblock Kingdoms (SBK) a collection of edited videos and livestreams from 20 different creators who all play together on a server based around the premise of “Skyblock” a popular format of the game that leaves players on islands in the sky. In its first 6 months, the server has formed the basis of 142 edited videos with over 2 days of cumulative watch time, not to mention the number of streams on the server. The videos function in both a documentary way—recording the actions of players on the server, ranging from building using Minecraft’s game mechanics, to interacting with other players in often humorous ways, to exploration of the world, to playing games built by other server members, among others—and a narrative way—telling a fictional, pre planned story using segments filmed on the Minecraft server, sometimes with additional animations, storyboards, music videos and pre-scripted acted scenes as well—and often blur the lines between the two. Ratios of narrative storytelling vs documentary focus shifts from creator to creator and video to video, with a variety and many creators drawing upon past projects of theirs in the stories they are telling within Skyblock Kingdoms.
Level one, the most direct form of intertextuality, involves using statements of outside piece as definitional- as Bazerman says “as a source of meanings to be used at face value” (86). One example is how here, I am using Bazerman’s ideas of levels of intertextuality as a fact without questioning or interrogating their practicality. Another example is present in Skyblock Kingdoms, when multiple players constructed a recreation of the set from the Parkour Civilization series by Evbo, also on Youtube. Following the construction, players used a system shown in the series to assign themselves ranks of “Noob”, “Pro”, and “Master”. These assignments, their meanings, and the test which assigned them, were taken directly from Evbo’s work and are treated as fact and the basis on which further conversations and understanding is based, but they are not investigated in any way. The texts taken from Evbo stand on their own as the point themselves.
Level two is more complicated. Bazerman defines it as “draw[ing] explicit social dramas from prior texts engaged in discussion” (87), like quoting opposing views on a social divide or issue which are already in referencing each other, and in doing so, illustrating a vision of the conflict. The disagreement/conversation may preexist the text, but by bringing them together, the new text creates the idea of the two (or more) sides being at odds. Court cases are an example of this, drawing together the arguments of plaintiffs and defendants and placing them in proximity to create a direct confrontation. In Skyblock Kingdoms, Avid sues Birch, Please (a company consisting of SadMilkman and Fool) for their shady business practices and the questionably legal terms and conditions in the contract he signed. The trial brought together evidence and quotes from all parties, often consolidated by Avid’s lawyer, Vintage. This confrontation was physical and active, but Bazerman’s definition does not require that.
Level three is when texts are used as “background, support, and contrast” (87) according to Bazerman. It is still in the world of explicit quotations, but they are not quoted for their contributions to the arguments and controlling purposes of the paper and are instead functioning as informational. This may seem less common in fiction, and, indeed, Bazerman’s examples focus on statistics and data, but this shows up in Skyblock Kingdoms as well. As stated, creators often both livestream on and make edited videos from their time playing on Skyblock Kingdoms. In conversations within the community discord server, Marma1ade and Anathra both commented that in their opinions, livestreams function differently to videos. There is an interactivity with the chat and viewers and a lack of editing which means they predominantly serve different purposes. However, sometimes clips from streams make it into videos, often visually different due to face cameras, the presence of chat on screen, and alerts popping up, generally because an action happened during them that the audience must know about and see which changes the course of the episode. For example, during a tag game organized by SadMilkman, Avid was tagged while he was streaming. Because this changed the goal of his episode from “avoid getting tagged” to “tag somebody else” and necessitated an outfit change due to the rules of the game, Avid included the stream clip of the tag in his edited video. Because this clip was referenced solely to convey the background for those changes, rather than as any argument, it is an example of level 3, despite similarities to level 1.
Level four is where it shifts from direct quotes to more nebulous concepts. Here is when texts draw upon “beliefs, issues, ideas, statements generally circulated” (87) from directly identifiable sources or not. Skyblock Kingdoms draws upon many different SMP and youtube series set in Minecraft that have come before it, in how it sorts the more serious storytelling aspects into “lore” and “canon” outside the more common dictionary definitions of those words. The way Skyblock Kingdoms differentiates between story and non-story modes draws upon ideas created in previous SMPs that the audience can be both watching the real person playing the game create the sets and builds and watch that same person act as a character and move through them, without active knowledge of the outside world or their role as a character in a video game. This foundation is fundamental to the understanding of Skyblock Kingdoms as a text, even if it is not directly referred to or explained, similarly to Bazerman’s example of an editorial in a newspaper that draws heavily upon the First Amendment to the US Constitution and “freedom of speech” even without directly citing it.
However, the best example I can think of comes from Evbo’s Parkour Civilization series, referenced back at the beginning. That series is not an SMP, instead a fully scripted and voice-acted series. Evbo opens the series with the oft-quoted line “You can do the one block jump for the chicken, or the one block vertical jump for the beef”. Instantly, those words are from the Minecraft community.
Parkour Civilization uses Minecraft terminology and phrasing throughout, from the opening scene to the very end of the second season. It allows Evbo to communicate worldbuilding details and information to the audience quickly; even in a series notorious for info-dumping monologues and narration, a block as a unit of distance is not questioned, nor is the necessity of saturation or hearts. Even the titular parkour draws upon the Minecraft and video game understanding of the term, based on jumping between obstacles in a game, rather than the real-world art which is based on street freerunning and tricking, which both have unique communities. By aligning himself with the Minecraft community and using terms understandable to them and making it clear that the language used is with the understanding of the Minecraft community, Parkour Civilization is more easily able to convey its themes of class consciousness and its condemnation of the difficulty of social mobility, and to avoid the difficulties in establishing worldbuilding and context that many dystopian works struggle with.
Level 5 is broader yet, referring to “implicitly recognizable kinds of language, phrasing, and genres” (87), which convey knowledge and alignment/participation with certain social groups and settings. This can convey a tremendous amount of information and can sometimes be essential to understanding. For example, in this essay I am using terms from writing research communities but attempting to use more general language in addition to terms from Minecraft Youtube fan groups, to make it more accessible to the latter group. Another example is how Skyblock Kingdoms members all communicate using shared terms and understanding from their collective position within Minecraft user groups. A more specific example occurs during the video “NEW faces on the Server | Skyblock Kingdoms”, where Rubyco has been replaced by a clone who has been told he is the true Ruby, the clone achieves sentience/consciousness of his position as a clone. Now aware and wanting to develop his own individual identity, he chooses the name Rue and goes around introducing himself and apologizing to people he has previously interacted with under the (in his eyes, false and stolen) identity of Ruby. Despite being science-fiction in nature, Rue uses language common to the stereotypical coming-out story of transgender individuals. Phrases like “everyone’s been naming me ‘Ruby’, calling me that and it didn’t feel right” (39:06) and “I need a new name – I want a new name – and it feels more like me” (41:08) are written by a genderqueer creator to draw parallels between the fictional ideas of the video and the real experiences of transgender and queer individuals, using language to do so.
Level 6 is perhaps the simplest and most complex of all the layers, fundamental and omnipresent. Bazerman describes it as how all language usage draws upon the “available resources of language” (88) to form the meaning carried within it, while not specifically referencing any particular text or drawing attention to this intertextuality. Language changed over time and with context, and this level refers to how texts exist within their particular contexts of language, even when the setting is not intentionally used or commented on. Minecraft Youtube content has a lot of genre-specific language, as mentioned above, but so does the internet more broadly, and this point in time. Phrases used within Parkour Civilization and Skyblock Kingdoms come from this context and reference countless other pieces of text in doing so, carrying their own histories with the words to the final product. These two pieces of media are firmly anchored in their time because of what language they use and what ideas they echo. Even when not consciously done, clips and examples from either work are identifiable as Minecraft videos from the 2020s due to the language used.
And with that, all of Bazerman’s levels are described-- from the most specific levels of direct quotation as argument, to the most vague and unnoticeable context and environment of language used.