Mining and crafting. In reference to Minecraft, it might seem pretty simple what I’m talking about. Breaking the blocks, obviously. It doesn’t matter what blocks they were, they were broken, and for the most part, you were the one breaking those blocks. You made the active choice to break those blocks, for whatever reason you had, and from those blocks, you did something with them. When we think of crafting, we think of the crafting table immediately. That’s where we do the crafting, of course. This is true enough, we break the blocks to craft in order to break more blocks, but there’s more crafting to be done outside of the table meant for crafting. Yes, I mean breaking the blocks to place the blocks in a new arrangement, an arrangement that was not intended by world generation, an arrangement that you chose, for whatever reason you have decided upon. This is simply put, internalization and externalization within the context of Minecraft.
From a quick overview, this might seem pretty simple. Like, obviously, the game is about survival, at least in some sense, but how did we get there? There are a multitude of perspectives to take on when thinking about all the types of people who have played Minecraft, and in its modern state, what I say might not hold up, so I’m going to set a few parameters as to keep what I’m saying to have a logical backing and not to overextend the reach of my ideas. I’m talking about survival Minecraft, not creative, and it could be in multiplayer, but I’m going to keep my focus on singleplayer. Additionally, I’m not including any mods, but the mods are, for the most part, just enhancers of these two qualities that are the basis for the video game. With this new context, we can now dig deeper into both the internalization and externalization found in Minecraft, but a new question arises: why does it matter?
I don’t know if you’ve realized, but by doing anything that isn’t within your own mind, you’ve committed an action; an action on the external world. That’s pretty insane, isn’t it? To think you have the ability to do that, and then continually do it, at the cost of energy, effort, and time. As children, just a few years old, we were in awe of this fact. That we could do things, that we could have an impact on the external world, whatever that impact was. Any impact was fascinating and invigorating. However, as we grew, no longer was any impact enough, we wanted to be intelligent in how we acted, because we began to obtain abstract wants, whether it was: fame, money, knowledge, or whatever, we would have to use the ability to make an impact on the external world in order to achieve any of these goals. We would both have to use our ability to take in information and our ability to do something with that information in order to achieve, or work towards, reaching these goals.
Everything we do revolves around these things, whether we want it to or not. We can’t stop wanting, if we stop wanting, we stop functioning, and we die. Wants give us the fuel to act as beings who assign labels to things we want and we create systems internally that allow us to reason with ourselves as to why we should want to obtain specific labels. How we obtained those wants? Some have been in our control, some have not, and it’s difficult to ascertain their origination, but that’s not important right now. What’s important right now is the fact that, at our core, we let things in and we let things out. In fact, all things do.
Not on the scale we do, perhaps, for us it usually means something more complex than something merely eating something and then being eaten itself, or something eating and then excreting. However, even in that case, that is still something letting something in and then letting something out. We do this too, obviously, we haven’t lost that. We still eat and drink, and we still excrete the wastes, because we are far from perfectly efficient machines. Yes, we still have to do those things, but we are also capable of greater things, we can read and write, we can create various things, and we can destroy various things. We can understand many things, and be unable to understand many more. If these things are in our nature, then I would say, something that taps into this inherent nature would be of interest to us.
The majority of the world is beyond the hunter/gatherer stages of humanity. No longer must we fight and search for food. Instead, most of us do things on a higher level of abstraction. Some simply make food for someone else to eat, or some write novels for entertainment, while others write programs for varying purposes. We have extended far beyond from what was once necessary in order to survive, but we have created new rules and systems in order to deal with this change. Now that we’re a species of a higher abstraction, we no longer can kill things and reap the immediate reward. No, now we must play a game, and in this game, we commit to an action of a higher abstraction in order to receive an abstract reward: money. This money can then be used to purchase what is necessary to survive, the things we once directly had to obtain by direct means.
We also have a lot more time on our hands. I mean this as a general rule, there are obviously, billions of people who don’t have this time, but as you may have guessed, I’m speaking to you, the one with time, so you must have some amount of time to expend. With the new arrangement of abstraction and specialization, each individual can hold a distinct purpose, and receive the abstract good, money, in order to purchase and receive necessities, but in many cases, there is a surplus. This surplus could be used for a plethora of goods that would not be considered a necessity. Some might actually try to save this surplus in the case that their means of receiving money ceases. Others might do both, depending on the amount of money they receive. Much of the developed world operates this way, and because of this, much of the developed world creates many things that have little to do or nothing to do with the necessities required.
At one point or another, with enough technological prowess, we started to create further abstractions of the things we would consider fun. No longer must we interact with others in physical reality in order to have fun. Volleyball? Basketball? Baseball? Yes, they still exist, and yes, they have large followings, but instead of these physical sports, games if you will, we moved into a digital landscape in which you could commit to these games without having the physical aptitude, these being video games. Video games allowed anyone with a computer the ability to play a game, and with further time and increased technological ability, the abstractions of our games increased and the computational requirements to play many of these games became only more affordable. This meant that more people than ever are able to play video games, and an insurmountable variety of video games are available for any one person to play.
How is it then, with all these video games, and the ability to play many types of video games, that we ended up, in the year 2024, having Minecraft as the most sold video game, with over 300 million sales? How could this be possible? Obviously, there are a variety of variables that enabled that particular video game to currently be considered number one in sales. We might think of things like the internet, which enabled the spread of information, especially this particular video game, to become more known. We could consider variables already mentioned, like the affordability of computational power. There are other things, like the normalcy of video games, as video games became less new, they became more a baseline to the minds of people, and so a video game was no longer such a big deal, which meant trying one or talking about one would be the equivalent to talking about a sport in the past. With more people playing video games, a thing that hasn’t changed, the willingness to interact with others, would play a part in getting more people to play video games, because if one friend wanted to play a game, the other would follow, despite what the game might actually be. Of course, something that matters, alongside all of those other variables, and other variables that do not come to mind, would be what the video game actually is.
If you ask someone why they play a game, they probably can come up with a couple reasons. Like how fun it is, what they find enjoyable, and they can relatively compare it to other video games. They might include things like their ability to play with their friends, or if we increase the level of abstraction; their ability to mod or adjust the game to their own specific interests. Obviously, there are more reasons for playing a game, but the point is: there has to be enjoyment had in order to continue playing. Why? Otherwise, the person will go off and play a different game, unless they’re being held hostage due to the fact their friends are playing the game. So then, what makes a game like Minecraft so fun? Why would so many people want to play the game?
Many would use the reasons I’ve described to you already, even the more abstract one, because it has many options for the user to manipulate the game to their needs. But, at its core, what’s there? As you might have guessed, it is that internalization and externalization that is fundamental to our existence and our ability to do just about anything. If you have a keen mind, you might notice that, well, all things must have fundamental similarities, they must all have this universal truth held within them. This is true! Similarly, you might notice that not all things are equally, within your mind, worth internalizing or externalizing. Even as something as simple as a drink. You could internalize water or soda, this is a physical choice, and both exist to hydrate you, but you would choose the soda because of a preference in flavor, or you might choose the water because you dislike the taste soda offers, or the detriments in health it brings. We are going to rationalize our choices based on our own personal likes and dislikes, levels of enjoyment, and also what we believe must be done above all else. How we get there, is not my goal, but instead, the fact that we are choosing is my focus.
We choose what we want, within whatever limited confines we’ve set within our own minds and the limits of the environments we’re in. The choices though, at their fundamental level, aren’t all that complicated. “I need to drink” or “I need to eat” are automatic responses to what we’re feeling. What we choose to drink or eat does matter, but it only matters relative to what we consider to be worth drinking or eating, or at what cost the thing we consume is. Fundamentally, it is simply committing an action to survive. We might have abstractions for the things we want to do with our entire lives, like being a lawyer or a physicist. However we got there, those are pretty abstract things, and we might like the things held within those career paths, but the reality is, we want to receive a monetary reward as a result of spending our time doing whatever it is we do within those things so that we survive. That’s, at the rudimentary level, what we want. We want to live.
Okay, well what does this have to do with Minecraft? Well, I assigned parameters to Minecraft so that it makes sense within this context, and those were that it would be in the survival mode, and in singleplayer. I chose these because that’s how the game began, ignoring Minecraft Classic and some esoteric early versions of the game, and I’d like to imagine that’s because the game was attempting to target that innate human interest. Whether it was or not, I don’t actually know, and I probably won’t ever know, and it probably doesn’t matter, because whether it was done intentionally doesn’t matter, because it’s been done. The point is: the game is fundamentally about survival. That’s what we’re fundamentally about, too. We love to survive, that’s what we’re all doing right now, if we’re not surviving, then we’re dead, and then we can’t have fun surviving anymore. Life has to be inherently enjoyable to some extent, in some way, or we have to convince ourselves to live, otherwise, we’d die. In the modern day, or, in most of the developed world, it’s a lot easier to obtain a means to live, like said already, we don’t have to be hunters and gatherers. I mean, many of us can sit on our computers and type code for a few hours, five days of the week, and be able to live.
Yet, there must be something missing. We want to feel whatever that feels like, we like that feeling. We want to feel like we have to put everything on the line, we want to feel like we have to do something or else we’re going to die. That excitement, too, can be abstracted. A career choice I think of that has voiced its feelings about that excitement would be police officers. Many officers have described the excitement they feel, the rush, and not all officers are like this, of course not, but to identify that as something that even a minority of people wish for is something worth taking note of. Eventually though, they grow old, and no longer want that. They’re tired of that rush, and want to relax, and in many cases, they either retire or obtain a level of power, no longer having to put themselves in situation where they might actually lose their life.
What if what I’ve described to you has been present in Minecraft for years and is only truer today? It might just be a video game at its core, but we are capable of becoming immersed in things that are so obviously not reality, there’s no reason for this to be an exception to that. It’s about survival, and you must survive, and you want to survive, because that’s what you’re always in a state of wanting, and something that taps into this will probably be of huge interest to you. But wait, many games are about surviving, just their forms of surviving are different. A first-person shooter is about killing as many enemies while surviving the longest, wouldn’t this tap in this same interest? Yes, it would, and it wouldn’t invalidate what I’ve said, either. Both can stand on their own, and while both have the goal of tapping into the interest of survival, both don’t go about it in the same way. Your FPS game doesn’t have a hunger bar, nor do you have to kill pigs in order to heal health. Minecraft is one of the most fundamental survival games, and because of when it came out, when it gained popularity, it became notable, but that’s still not enough to make it something like the best-selling video game. There are other survival games now, and have been for years, whether it was Terraria or ARK: Survival Evolved, on the basis of being just a survival game, that would not be enough to make it stand out, or, still to this day, be notable.
No, that would be because of the external and internal aspects of being that actively take place in Minecraft. Sure, it happens in every other game, it’s unavoidable, but Minecraft becomes notable because of the rudimentary form it brings these two aspects. We are literally breaking blocks, to craft tools to break the same and more blocks, in order to break even more blocks, to craft tools and more types of blocks, and to, of course, place the same or adjusted blocks! This, alongside with being a game fundamentally about surviving, makes it notable. We want to survive, and we want to have an impact on the world around us, and Minecraft enables us to do both. We have to kill things, with violence, in order to survive, and destroy the world around us, to build and create a world that fits to our needs, and there’s only the bad monsters that come out at night, or in caves, to stop us.
We break blocks, thus internalizing, to craft within our internal worlds, new blocks and means of crafting new blocks and tools, and then using these, in the external world, do we continue the destruction and construction of the external environment we’ve spawned in. Isn’t this so absolutely human? Isn’t this what humans are fundamentally about? In the game you have to survive, but after a certain amount of time, that becomes easier. You can grow food; you can force animals to mate within your own created pens and have unlimited food resources. You can craft armor and tools in order to kill the monsters better, faster, and to protect yourself from death. With the better tools you’ve created from harvesting resources from the Earth, you can destroy it at an accelerated rate.
At first, it might have been purely for your survival, you had no choice but to do these things in order to survive. You couldn’t just sit in a hole and wait; you would eventually starve to death. You had to begin having an impact on the world for your own survival. You had to mine, and you had to craft, otherwise you would die, and in a game about avoiding death, that wouldn’t be ideal. After enough time, you wouldn’t have to do the same amount of mining or crafting though. You may have created a house, with lighting, a bed, and you might have a farm. Now you can just wait around, being arguably idle, and you still can survive. Yet, you don’t do that, most do not stop there. That’s not enough. Just surviving isn’t enough. However, it was only until the point we were able to survive with ease were we able to finally take on tasks with varying levels of abstraction.
We might fundamentally assign our meaning of life to surviving for as long as possible, perhaps even spreading our genes to have another generation that contains an aspect of ourselves. However, unless we’re actively always in a state of focusing on this fact, that we must survive, and we have to plan for the next action to take place in order to survive, we have “free-space” in our minds. Instead of focusing on surviving or creating the next generation that will survive, what should we focus on?
There a couple ways of going about this, and it depends on the type of person you are, and you’ll probably incorporate bits and pieces of many different things. Many of us are born with the privilege of going just about anywhere we want with what we want, becoming whatever we want, and spending our time on that thing. Within some obvious confines, like how much money we have to earn in order to learn the thing we want to be, or whether or not the rest of society considers it valuable, and our ability to do thing within whatever environment we are in. Despite these confines, and many other confines that are fundamental to existence, we are in a sandbox. We are in a sandbox to do what we want, when we what, for whatever reasons we want to come up with. Despite this reality, many of us don’t actually think in this way, or we’ve been taught not to think in this way. Yet, we still have the urges of having an impact, more than an impact than we already do, so what should we do about these urges, these feelings, these wants?
Minecraft, in case you didn’t know already, is a sandbox game. There is nothing you have to do or don’t have to do. You don’t have to survive if you don’t want to, you could die. You could run around and die over and over again. You could punch a tree down, build a pillar, and jump from it, and then promptly die. Or, you could push beyond the survival aspects, and no longer have to focus on them. Once you have the necessary tools and resources to shift your focus from the reality of survival to the sandbox at your fingertips, you can begin to act in abstract ways. Maybe you’ll begin exploring further, obtaining more blocks, or maybe you’ll hoard resources for the sake of having resources, or maybe you just like mining and want to continue mining until you’re bored. Maybe you’ll collect blocks to create structures, structures that you consider beautiful, and continually do so, until you run out of blocks, and you’ll collect more blocks to do it all over again.
These days, there are some things you can progress to, but you’ll only progress to them after you’ve reached a baseline of survivability, like slaying the Ender Dragon, or the Wither, or whatever, and the purpose for doing this varies. You might do it for the sake of doing it, just killing to kill, or you might want the resources available in the End, or the XP from the Dragon, or you want the Wither Star from the Wither, and you want these things in order to achieve a goal, whatever that goal is. None of these things you’re doing at this point are required in order to survive, you’re just doing them to do them because you can or to complete a goal that’s abstract. Maybe you want the blocks in the end to build something, or you want the XP so you can quickly enchant many pickaxes so you can mine faster and receive more resources for the more valuable blocks, or you want to prove to your friends that you’re capable of killing the Ender Dragon.
This is just like real life in many parts of the world. We don’t have to do more than the baseline to survive, but because we have the time and energy, and obviously mental incentive, we do. What that incentive is, depends on the person. Maybe you program for your job, and on your own time, you automate the most boring and basic parts of your life, in order to have more time for something else, whatever that something else is. Maybe you’re a teacher, but at home, you spent your time painting, and it is only because you have that mental drive, that interest, and the availability of time, that you spend your time painting instead of doing things in order to further enhance the longevity of your survival. It is because we have confidence in the fact that we will continue surviving that we can go on doing these other things. At this point, especially in these two examples, we’ve set layers of abstraction upon one another. Aside from these, there are also those who do the thing, whatever it is, to obtain money, their means of survival, and then spend their free-time obtaining more money to ensure their chances of survival, or to obtain power, to once again, ensure survival, and they can set whatever carrot in front of their vision to deceive themselves into doing the thing.
These people spend all their time obtaining more and more money. Everything they do is for more money, the abstract thing that enables us to purchase the means to survive, and allow our offspring to survive. Logically speaking, wouldn’t we all want to be like this? Maximizing our abilities to survive as much as possible? You would think so, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. There are very few that have the interest to obtain as much money as possible, and thus power, and thus survivability, assuming all structures and systems stay just about the same as they are now. Some might say these systems are close to breaking, or they’re already breaking, or they’re already broken but we pretend like they aren’t, but the point is, there are those who want power in the system, and will maximize their ability to obtain that abstract idea, money. In Minecraft, this isn’t all that different.
In Minecraft, it’s pretty direct. People with this type of mindset don’t require the fancy blocks for anything other than furthering their ability to survive. They obtain the resources necessary to increase the scale at which their farms operate, increasing the scale until their satiation, and then creating systems in order to automate the processes that otherwise would require their direct action. After one type of farm, like a wheat farm, they’ll move onto something else. They’ll continually do this until they have nothing more to maximize, nothing more to automate, until all the things they can maximize and automate has been done. At this point, this person might stop playing the game, but thankfully, there’s a lot to maximize and automate, and the quality of that automation usually increases with complexity, requiring someone to expend more time and energy to learn and understand how to build the thing, and then do this for all the various types of mobs and whatnot. Although, that’s all there is for that type of person, in this sandbox, they have chosen to create internal machines and apply these as external systems to do work for them, so they don’t have to act as hands or feet.
There are those who don’t act in this way. Instead, they collect blocks and items with their hands and feet, all manually, for the purpose of building. What they want to build, who knows, it’s up to the vision within their mind. They can build pixel art, or they can build a castle, or they can build an underground bunker… they can do whatever they want within the confines of the blocks accessible to them. Unlike the one who automates and maximizes, this person can go on forever. You have a limitation to what can be automated in Minecraft, and there’s a limit to the necessity of resources if they aren’t being used, but is there really a limit to creativity? No, I don’t believe so. This person can continue building, forever, whatever they want to build, whether they want to replicate things from reality or build new abstract structures that would only make sense within the parameter of the video game Minecraft, it’s up to them.
There are various types of people, and these were just two extremes of the type of person that would enjoy Minecraft, but the point is, they internalize what is available to them and then externalize based on all of that. After enough time surviving, we move onto the abstract, and sometimes, esoteric means of spending our time. The purpose? The purpose is made up, we make it up, and even in Minecraft, we make it up. We no longer have to spend our time thinking about survival. We still have to collect resources and that all comes at a cost, but this is the closest to Godhood we’re capable of being. To do whatever we want, when we want, for whatever reason we want, is playing God. We aren’t Gods, so we die, but within these limited frames of time, we are like demi-gods, we will die, and we don’t have all the powers of a true God, but we can impact the world in any way we want, and this is what we love. We want to be God. We want to get there by genuine means, and Minecraft offers us the ability to do this, in whichever way we’re willing to convince ourselves is the best.
This simply is what it means to be a human, and especially a human during this time and age. It’s been simplified in a video game, and because that’s what people want, that’s what people love, that’s what people are, it has grown in popularity, and I imagine it will continue to do so until we move onto something greater. Mining is truly that internalization, at a purer form than most can recognize, and externalizing, crafting within certain limitations, and building in the world available to them, is also plainly obvious. This is what we are. Beings that take in, and put out. We breathe in, and we breathe out, and we’ll continue doing so until we can’t. Minecraft embodies this, the simple action of taking in and putting out, and I think that is one of the most notable variables which has made it such a popular game in today’s world.