Origin Essay

This is where it all started, and this is the real why of it all. There's nowhere like Minecraft.

Minecraft is the Loneliest Game Ever Made

There are many games that attempt to evoke loneliness. Survival horror, as a genre, can in many ways trace its success by the degree to which it accomplishes it. Games like The Journey work towards the kind of ‘alone together’ vibe which creates a unique spin. They all have one fundamental flaw, however, and that’s that there’s always the sense of something out there. The world is populated. There's always the sense that, if you were to walk far enough, you would find people (or sentient people-analogs) living out their lives. If they aren't present in the game, you can assume that this is a function of the game's limits; you can’t grab a ship back to Cape Town in The Thing, but it’s presumably there and if you went it would have people in it.

Minecraft is unique in its ability to evoke that sense of loneliness. You are, without exception, the only mind in the world of a single-player Minecraft game. The world is within pissing distance of infinite; as long as you still have hard drive space to populate, you can continue to walk in one direction for the rest of your life and you will never, ever find another intelligent being. The only things you'll ever find are single-function automatons doing the one thing they know how. You can dig to the center of the earth, build a tower above the clouds, spelunk every cave in a thousand mile radius, and swim to the bottom of the ocean, and there's nothing there but space and loneliness.

This is the world into which you are dropped at the start of a game of Minecraft. There’s no tutorial; no one tells you that you need to go punch some trees to craft a pick, or even that there are trees or picks or punching. You simply show up there one day. Perhaps you don’t figure all that out your first day, and you go into the night armed with nothing but dirt and despair. Then you find your first enemy, and become aware that there are hostile creatures in the game. What does it do? It attacks you, immediately, without pause for thought. This is not a mind; it’s just a mob. It kills you, because you still haven’t figured out how to make a sword, and you wonder what will happen then.

You reappear precisely where you began with no explanation given. This process can continue without abate indefinitely. Eventually, you would figure out what you had to do to make a pick of wood, then a pick of stone, then a house, a garden, a door, a sword. You would figure out that killing pigs gives pork, and pork means not starving to death. You might briefly wonder why it mattered, when death was simply a return to your original starting point, but you’d dutifully gather that pork and eat because it seemed like the thing one does.

You would continue to do things until you realized that it was all happening for its own sake. You’re just there. You can’t escape, you can’t seek guidance. You can only live an endless sequence of ageless lives in a world where time is evidenced only by light and dark. You never need to sleep, you never need to drink, starvation just means reappearing where you began; you’re faced with the existential crisis which is at the core of the human condition, but amplified by permanence.

So you’ll begin to do things for their own sake. You'll build grand castles, dig enormous chasms, build reproductions of landmarks from memory, seek desperately and aimlessly for some sort of meaning or purpose to it all, but that won't change the fact that you have been reborn into a purgatorial pocket dimension in which you are the one and only mind.

The addition of villages and villagers adds the final piece to this puzzle. If you do things just right, you can create men in your own image. They will look like you, they will walk like you, and in some ways they will approximate what you think of as your own behavior. What they will never do, though, is engage with you. They’re not people. Not even in the sense that the marines in Halo or the turrets in Portal are people. They don’t talk, they don’t Mine, they don’t explore. They’re merely pale facsimiles of self, the creations of an immortal with no purpose but that which he ascribes to himself attempting to draw life out of a lifeless universe.

What Minecraft is, then, is the first true god game. The first game in which one knows what it feels like to be a creator, the crushing loneliness of being not just at the top but the only one in the race. No matter what you build, no matter how many lifeforms you bring into the world, you’ll never see another Miner… and what would you say if you did?