Why Minecraft “Civilizations” Don’t Actually Exist
In Ish’s 1,000 Players Simulate Civilization: Rich & Poor video, we are promised a microcosm of the world—a window into how society is constructed, in this case, block by block. Videos of this genre have invaded the Minecraft content space, with people remaking the event with twists or trying to replicate it. Now, the title itself suggests a petri dish of society, a place where we can watch, over the course of seven real-life days, the “authentic” rise and fall of empires, the flow of progress and innovation, the brutality of war. Comments will often point out parallels between the players and real historical figures, commenters the impression that the video accurately portrays elements of history, citing one of the players, Schpood, as “an actual Julius Caesar.”
As the 154-minute epic unfolds, however, it becomes apparent that this is no simulation of history.
In Minecraft, a basic civilization—farms, shops, houses, even trade—are easily achieved within the first day. You can get wood by punching with your bare fists, and get out of the Stone Age within minutes—a period which, in the real world, took more than three million years. Not to mention the lack of physical efforts needed to build a civilization. People don’t get tired, don’t need to sleep, don’t need to sit down and eat. Minecraft is still a video game.
A lot of smaller conflicts, ones that would be significant in real life, are also overlooked in favor of all-out wars and grand assassination plots. Most laws simply do not exist. Any crime less severe than murder goes unpunished. The issue of worker’s rights is brought up repeatedly, though never addressed. It seems like, because currency, safety, and health is so insignificant in Minecraft, the workers don’t exactly mind the unpaid labor. Things like the press and media also seem to be glossed over, though it would play a major role in delivering information across borders in the real world. Fake news runs rampant through the event. To assume that civilization can be accurately built here, in a video game, is silly.
In the real world, the struggle to stay alive, especially in a primitive world, consumes every waking hour; in Minecraft, the struggle is nonexistent. 1,000 players now have an abundance of dangerous free time. All that energy has to be put somewhere, and it inevitably—and evidently—flows towards the audience.
At the end of the day, the video is to be published to millions of people. And hundreds of people will get screen time. If you want a speaking part, that number dwindles to a couple dozen. Some people will never appear in the video at all. It is natural to vie for your 15 minutes of screen time. This, in turn, creates the biggest issue with Minecraft civilization.
In a real civilization, stability is the ultimate goal. You want to establish sources for sustenance, start a family, and not get killed by the Vikings next door. Stability is the basis for progress. In Ish’s world, however, stability is a death sentence. Not many people want to watch a 2-hour long video to begin with, even less so if that video consists of mostly people building dirt houses. And…shepherding livestock. If you want your place in the video, you have to earn it. So who gets that screen time? You would assume it to be the most influential, most powerful players: the one with the most diamonds, the one with the biggest business. For the most part, this is true; leaders of nations frequently get their part in diplomacy talks or when war is waged. But what the people get wrong is that they should be competing for a different type of power, one completely unrelated to strength: narrative power.
Take, for example, the player Sidefall. He ran a small newspaper business with questionable ethics. Professionally, he spreads propaganda and runs fake sensationalist stories to the entire server. In his free time, he gets paid off by other nations. Everyone understands that he is a fraud, and he’s treated much of the time as a joke. He is, by no means, a “main character.” And in the grander scheme of things, the backdrop of nations collapsing and entire cities evacuating, Sidefall is irrelevant. And yet, he appears as a major player in the event, all because he plays a character with a unique personality. He has that power over the event, that is, his ability to make it into the video at every turn, because he’s fun to see. It’s what the audience wants.
The same is true for Lingulini. As you can maybe infer from his name, he plays the part of a very, very Italian man. He puts on a Mario impression, and runs a mafia of merchants and businessmen with the intention of making friends and getting rich. Like Sidefall, he doesn’t get all this screen time because he’s the strongest (though, Lingulini does have quite a bit of actual power in the video, his mafia still pales in comparison to the other empires that prop up). Both of them are there only for comic relief, and it’s obvious—they are powerful in the sense that they keep the audience engaged, and that’s what the video needs.
The two, along with many other players, I’m sure, have understood that the point of the event is not at all what it seems. The server isn’t a world to be conquered, but a stage on which to perform. This creates a feedback loop of absurdity where players are encouraged to make strategically stupid decisions, but ones that will make it into the final cut regardless. Ish confirms it himself, saying: “At the end of the day, it’s a video game. People are bound to take it about 1/20th as serious as real life.”
Ish’s experiment doesn’t document the rise and fall of a civilization. What it does successfully document is a performance of people masquerading and creating chaos under the lens of a camera. Unlike the real world, this performance is fueled by a fear of being boring, not appearing in the video, rather than the fear of being conquered. These empires aren’t built to last; if anything, they’re built to collapse at just the right moment, just enough of a spectacle to make it into a 15-second cinematic sequence. In Minecraft, when the consequence for death is nothing and the reward for wreaking havoc is potentially becoming internet-famous, it’s the most rational move to try and burn everything down and attract attention. In the end, the “Rich” and the “Poor” aren’t those with the most diamonds, but the ones that commanded the camera and those left behind in the unedited footage.