Fake Economies in Minecraft

I love Minecraft like to an unhealthy degree ask anyone have played on a server with and you'll see I've spent thousands of hours on this game and I'll likely spend thousands more before I'm done with it I've been playing for a decade and while my enthusiasm for virtual pubes has waxed and waned over the years I'm never quite finished with them can't ever seem to fully quit I like it because it's less of a game more of an art form you can build anything you want and people build all sorts of absolutely amazing stuff the only limits are your imagination and the time you're willing to sink into playing that's part of the reason I prefer survival mode where you have to fight monsters and continuously eat food and avoid falling off of cliffs you have to manually gather the resources you use to build you have to farm ingredients and explore the admittedly shallow world generation to gather better stuff and maintain your existing stuff really tricks the old dopamine receptors into thinking you're getting something done but you're not you're playing a video game but there's something even more embarrassing than my love for this baby game I spend a ridiculous amount of time watching other people play it for more than I spend actually playing it myself now any amount of time spent watching Minecraft Let's Plays is embarrassing but the amount of time that I spend watching them is mortifying in the early 2010's Minecraft Let's Plays were pretty much the only videos on YouTube you either made Minecraft Let's Plays or you made response videos to people playing Minecraft so you could piggyback off of their SEO and trick a bunch of horny people into clicking Anya minecraft is a children's game it is designed to be enjoyed primarily but by no means exclusively by preteens so the people who make Minecraft videos do so for the benefit of children today we are going to be going over five minecraft youtubers who've sworn so let's jump right on into the first one first up here spot number five we have a video of stampylonghead and stampy is playing some minecraft and he ends up getting hit by some lava and once this happens he goes on to say a word that he really did not mean to say and Here I am a grown adult in my mid-30s watching hours of this shit a week I don't know how to explain why I've find it so entertaining watching people build amazing stuff or play around in a world I'm so familiar with it's just really comforting to me and the freedom inherent to Minecrafts gameplay makes for some really creative videos where dozens of creators build and iterate upon ideas in new and novel ways often minecraft players will specialize in certain niches they'll work with redstone the game's surprisingly sophisticated coding tool they'll focus on aesthetics and becoming the best builder they can be they'll learn game mechanics really well to build the most efficient contraptions to farm resources one guy just walks as far as he can in one direction hoping to get far enough that'll glitch out the game seriously that that's all he does he's been doing this for almost a decade now he's made a seven hundred and seventy nine videos where he walks in one direction he's been doing this for so long that he can no longer update his game because the glitched out far lands he was walking towards were patched out in September of 2011 almost nine years ago he has close to half a million subscribers and all he does is walk in one direction in an almost decades-old version of a video game or take Pierrot Pizza a Japanese dude who took on minecraft without ever looking at the wiki and just following the game's in-game instructions that doesn't sound like it would be hard but oh boy it was fascinating to watch someone stumble over game mechanics that seemed so second nature to me and realizing that they're completely bewildered and alienating if he hadn't spent the better part of a decade immersed in the culture of this particular game for example part of the progression in the game is gated behind traveling to the nether which is basically Minecrafts version of hell in order to do that you have to create a frame of obsidian blocks that surrounds a vertical area that's at least three blocks tall and two blocks wide and light it on fire how the heck is anyone supposed to figure that out on their own but by far the best place to get Minecraft videos is from the hermit craft server a sort of who's who of Minecraft let's players or a bunch of the best minecraft youtubers all played together on a shared survival server hermit craft is unique in that all of the people playing on it are entertainers and they treat the server kind of like soap opera storylines come and go sometimes entirely scripted and sometimes emerging from gameplay but usually a mixture of the two every few months or in some cases a couple years the server is rebooted and all of the players start from scratch each time the server is rebooted it's referred to as a season and each season comes with special rules or unique play condition currently the server just started its seventh season though hermit craft players tend to be done with the minecraft early game within a few episodes of the season most of them have comfortably moved on to Megabass projects where they build enormous structures that take multiple videos to complete the beauty of this server is watching the players interact watching them form teams and rivalries Hurra crafts carries on a tradition from the previously most popular minecraft server mindcrack where players engage in highly elaborate pranks on one another sometimes covering each other's bills with ugly blocks sometimes building effigies of players atop their bases sometimes just straight-up murdering them with pre-constructed death traps herma craft members known as Hermits also engage in server wide competitions and storylines like a pretend civil war where each hermit arbitrarily joined one side of the conflict which resulted in one enormous confrontation with a bunch of wacky traps and improvised weapons where the death games where each player competed to be the last one to go without dying in game but as each player died in game they began to set up traps for the living until the whole server became dangerous to navigate and going afk meant potentially finding yourself irredeemably screwed the biggest collaboration though is the shops tons of shops almost all server members spend a lot of time building and managing in game stores selling items or services for diamonds and they will go way over the top with it last season a group of Hermits built a fully automated system where people could order in game from a catalog and have the items delivered to them each season a district is set up where players build a majority of the servers shops and in that district they compete with one another for other Hermits attention they build the big signs run advertising campaigns run sales they make cold calls Hermits routinely cover huge swaths of land and pixel art just to advertise their shops just so they can display the art on maps throughout the server that's just a matter of course now it's shockingly similar to how actual business is advertised by design virtually every item in the game is commodified in the shopping district you can pay to just buy rocks and sand two of the most easily accessible blocks in the game and people do by the bucketload because it's too tedious to gather by themselves each hermit wants diamonds and each has to find a way to get other people to fork them over and that doesn't seem to make a lot of sense for a couple reasons firstly after a certain point diamonds become useless in Minecraft you can use them to make a few items armor tools and chanting tables beacons but after that you don't really need them they only become useful in the pretend economy for their trade value which is double weird because minecraft already has an in-game currency emeralds which can be traded to in-game villagers to buy items problem with emeralds though is that Hermits have learned how to exploit the game to get infinite emeralds making their use as a currency pointless there'd be no incentive to sell anything to get emeralds because you can just generate infinite emeralds whenever you wanted but all resources in Minecraft are technically infinite you can always get the things you want in Minecraft there is no possible scarcity except for like one useless item some things might be more scarce than others but everything is infinitely renewable if you have the patience to go gather it even diamonds one of the rarest resources in the game generate everywhere throughout the infinitely generating map below a 16 on the y-axis what makes diamonds rare is that it takes a lot of time to mine them which keeps the market from being saturated with too many diamonds originally I had wanted to call this video the capitalist realism of Minecraft but that feels really strange to say because this fake economy isn't really analogous to capitalism in Minecraft your play is the means of production such as it is there isn't really private property I mean usually if you play in a cool server people won't build stuff too close to your stuff if you don't want them to but you don't have to work for anyone you don't have to sell anything you don't have to make money you just walk into the woods and start your own little society or you can just log off you can go do something else you don't have to play but that makes it even weirder to me that these market dynamics reproduce themselves in the way that these people play a video game a video game that makes the entire premise of a market economy fall apart why would you spend hours building a business and trying to attract customers in a video game so that you could get access to a virtual currency that you could exchange for the things you could have gathered on your own and since everyone wants diamonds it means they have to find ways to offer value to the other server members you can't just sit on exclusive access to a resource like in real life there are no precious metal mines in Minecraft the precious metals are everywhere and everyone has equal access to them not everyone has the technical know-how to build an iron firm because that involves in-depth knowledge of game mechanics and precise timing or you can you know follow a YouTube tutorial like I do whenever I want to build one that's something other Hermits might be unable or unwilling to invest the time in and also having too many farms would like the server meaning there's an upper limit to how many could exist at one time so you could sell iron or some other farmville material but you couldn't charge so much that people would just find it easier to just go mine it themselves that makes each transaction in the game voluntary in a way that real-life transactions can't be you pay however much they charge for food because without buying food you die you can't go gather up wild chickens and set up a chicken grinder and even if you could there's no free land around to do that on but in minecraft you can survive for as long as you want just clicking wild berries it's annoying but you could do it indefinitely the only reason to buy food in-game is if it offers you a genuine convenience furthermore you don't really need the money to survive either so it's no big deal to hand it over whereas in real life you need to hold on to as much of that sticky icky cash as you can in order to pay rent and other costs of living and that's when it struck me the hermit crabs economy isn't capitalist not real capitalism anyway it's the version of capitalism that and caps and conservatives imagine but before we go any further I'd like to bring you this special message in these unprecedented times we have to come together our communities our neighbors our families we all have to do our part for untold eons the eyeballs have been there for you through thick and thin now more than ever it's time to submit to the will of Lord aculon while we may find ourselves distant from one another the eyeballs are never far from you and they're here to help you transcend this feeble mortal flesh join us won't you hello and welcome to the eyeball zone here in the eyeball zone we reduce small leftist projects to a lifeless husk consuming their life force and growing imperceptibly stronger Hey look this is a video about Minecraft I got to do a silly one if you're watching this video a time of release you're stuck inside like the rest of us because the world is ending it makes it difficult to socialize and keep up with your pals and there's no better solution to that than tabletop RPGs you can just gather your friends into a discord call and do all the RPG ting you want and there's no better time to get started because what you got something better to do why not check out moon punk and anarcho-punk RPG about fighting moon fascists do I need to say a second sentence okay how about this second sentence it also includes training material on real life direct action to fight the real-life moon fascists here on earth if that isn't up your alley you're in the wrong alley follow the link in the description below to buy moon Punk moon Punk do you have a small project you'd like to place on the profane altar send no more than one email to thought slime editor at gmail.com with the word eyeballs somewhere in the subject line and burden and details like your pronouns and maybe you will find yourself trapped here in the eyeball zone when loony lefties like me complain about capitalism the thing we specifically don't like is the power dynamics it creates boss and worker Landlord and Tenant rich and poor these categories of people are inevitable if some people are allowed to own something that everyone in a community requires to be an alive person if you let people own multiple homes some people will buy more than they need and rent them out for profit if you let people own a steel mill they'll pay a few people to work on it and pay them less than the value that they produce keeping the surplus for themselves if a person is allowed to have billions of dollars many thousands of people will have no dollars but if you could imagine a world where everyone had equal access to the resources they needed to become rich and being poor had no real drawbacks beyond mild inconvenience it wouldn't be a big problem I mean it it'd still be unfair but only barely so and in a way that anyone sufficiently determined could overcome a capitalism like that doesn't sound so bad if that was how the world worked in real life I could kind of see how you would trade the temporary annoyance of not yet having a lot of domani for iPhones and Starbucks and Netflix but in and I and I feel like I shouldn't have to point this out real life is not minecraft and also could not be the material conditions of Minecraft can't be replicated in real life even going beyond the magic elements the real world is finite there's not enough space for everyone to have as much land as they want and even if there was there's not enough time for everybody to learn how to do all the things you can do with a couple of button clicks in Minecraft you start minecraft by punching a tree that gives you logs which you can use to make planks which you can assemble into a crafting bench which you can then use to build a pickaxe out of wood all of that takes about a minute or less in real life if you had to do any of those things it would take you the better part of a day and it wouldn't work nearly as well as the videogame you couldn't use a handcrafted wooden pickaxe to mine out hundreds of one meter cubes of stone for example in real life there is gravity in real life one person alone cannot survive very easily if you managed to pull it off your life would be brutal and most likely sure you need to rely on the labour of hundreds of other people and if you want a modern standard of life you need to rely on the labour of hundreds of thousands of other people you can't build the jet engine by yourself and have time left over to do your own dental surgery you probably couldn't do either of those things I bet I bet nobody watching this can build a jet engine admit it you don't know how to build a jet engine but at the same time viewing capitalism through the lens of Minecraft ooh yep that's a sentence I've decided I wanted to say today pardon me well I have a brief moment of self-awareness about how incredibly silly a video this is and it's gone anyway viewing capitalism through the lens of Minecraft kind of makes me understand the capitalist mindset a little bit better the pretend capital is ferma craft chops is a type of capitalism divorced from consequences a capitalism that's just pure competition and accumulation but nobody has really left out in the cold and that's fun as a game that's a fun game I mean think about it if there were no real consequences or actual risks wouldn't it be fun to try and run the most successful business you could wouldn't it be cool to compare your net worth with your buddies like a high score on the condition that they had just a good a chance as you did to become successful and nobody in the world suffered as a result of your actions I mean that would kind of kick ass right the thing is for the rich fucks the truly rich fucks that's what the world already is that's what they're doing all the time they know on some objective level that there are consequences to their actions they know that poor people suffer but it's not real to them it's not something they're in danger of ever experiencing to them poverty is kind of like an asteroid hitting the earth a dangerous scenario you should be afraid of but you probably can't do anything about and it doesn't really feel plausible to you even though you know it probably should and that explains so much about the conservative worldview they think the world is minecraft hey hey let me hit you with this one you ever complain about your job and some jackoff with a goatee tells you uh-uh you don't like it why don't you start your own business as though you could just will the startup capital for a business to exist that of thin air as though everyone on earth should be able to at the drop of a hat generate a stable business or else submit to perpetual servitude ever see someone tell a homeless person to get a job let's say they did they walk into the bank and they say one job please and the bank says right away sir and they make him Bank Lord to the king of all banks on the spot it's still gonna be two weeks until he gets a check so how's he gonna eat in the meantime is he just gonna punch grass until it gives him seeds and then use that to go three discreet chiefs of wheat to make a loaf of bread that's reading this aloud it's really fun to say three discreet chiefs of wheat three discreet chiefs of wheat if you just work hard you're guaranteed to be successful because there's enough for everyone to be wildly successful and the only limit how hard you work to get it as though hard work paid out in success units you click the block you get a block one to one every time if you want as many blocks as someone else you just have to click as many as they do and if they have more than you it's because they clicked more than you did but the real world only has so many blocks and everyone is forced to compete for them because the people who stand to lose nothing from this competition don't understand that this isn't a game nobody on hermitcraft needs diamonds after a certain amount they could take all these shops and let the other Hermits take as much of the resources as they wanted and they could take all they wanted from the shops of others and nothing in their lives would change all that much but they can play their game however they want you know as long as it's not hurting anybody thanks for watching another one of my very normal videos if you liked it you can click that like button you know that you can do that but I like to remind you because it it it's it's my way of pressuring you into doing it don't forget to subscribe to see more videos that are probably nothing like this one this is the only one probably that's gonna be about minecraft so just know that going in hey do you fight why why don't you put your diamonds into my patreon at patreon.com slash thought slime where where you can go is the website that I ask people to give me money at that's the website where you can do that don't forget also twitch.tv slash thought slime where i live stream every 8 p.m. Eastern Standard Time sometimes extra ones as well right now been having a lot of fun playing that Animal Crossing game where you make a virtual dollhouse that's what it is that's the game if you want to see more videos from me and who could blame you check out youtube.com slash scaredy-cats TV my second channel where i talk about spooky movies those are all my calls to action that i say at the end of every video thanks for listening to them I know it's it's a lot there's just a lot of things that I want peep to do for me hey have a great have a good weekend however have a great time

Channel: undefined

Views: 291,524

Rating: 4.8048615 out of 5

Keywords:

Id: kpSVG3PyWv0

Length: 20min 46sec (1246 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 24 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/Jasper1984]

https://www.minetest.net/ it's, like, not Microsoft-owned. Microsoft didn't pay 2.5G$ for it.

[u/BlackHumor]

This was really good, but in the second half of the video I had an overwhelming desire to scream "THAT'S MUTUALISM, NOT CAPITALISM".

[u/LordNoodles]

top 10 crossover episodes you never saw coming

[u/Johnchuk]

I love me some thoughtslime.

[u/cloake]

Diamonds are basically Stones of Jordans from Diablo 2. You don't really need them but, they're rare enough to be a currency.

[u/fggh]

Check out r/civrealms

[u/BuckTootha]

Don't flame me but I actually don't like Thoughtslime all that much. I think he takes way too long to say way too little, and his presentation, language, etc. isn't appealing to me, it's pretty uninspired and boring.

Maybe that was a bit harsh, but it's how I feel