Game Theory: The Murky History of Minecraft's Underwater Gods

ah the ocean a beautiful blue crystal and this cuboidal planet we got home home two sea creatures large in smooth they majestic squid the playful doll today on game day hello Internet welcome to game theory where today we're engaging in a very mature 13-plus critical analysis of a fun for all ages game minecraft does that cover me not gonna get hit by any FTC fines right here let me throw in some big words just in case entrepreneurship antidisestablishmentarianism defenestration rampant consumerism hey of rampant consumerism and that twenty twenty cops merge if you want to help protect this channel well also showing your theorist pride and staying cozy this winter season brand new theory where is available right now right below this video we've got everything from a glow-in-the-dark t-shirt to new lounge pants a Nintendo switch case an awesome new flight jacket that combines a windbreaker and a hoodie and even this little tube tumbler guy you try to push him over you can't knock him over anyway items are starting to sell out so if you have a theorist in your life that you want to get a cool holiday gift for or if you just want to show your theorists pride yourself check them out right now to ensure that you get yours in plenty of time before the holidays also since we're doing quick update stuff just a reminder that December 3rd is our big charity livestream in honor of st. Jude Children's Research Hospital which helps cure kids of cancer while also being a world leader in cancer research even though the stream might be happening on a Tuesday it is going all day so whenever you want to tune in we'll be there waiting for you and the big reveal of that new finale ms happening during the usual livestream time a 4 o'clock p.m. Pacific so I hope to see all of you there at least at some point throughout the day Scott coffin literally just revealed on reddit that the game is gonna continue to get this a half a million dollars for us to find if we find it and claim it then he'll donate it to st. Jude so basically the gauntlet has been thrown down for Doc Oh markiplier and I and the pressure is on for us to form the thing is gonna be a blast and all of it is in honor of an incredible cause so please please try and make it so we can make the holidays just a bit brighter for some amazingly brave kids out there fighting for their lives all right with all that housekeeping out of the way let's talk some minecraft shall we today we're getting our Little Mermaid on and going down where it's wetter down where it's better under the sea in Minecraft the underwater biomes just don't seem to get enough love sure everyone is always excited to make songs dedicated to the fiery death plains of the nether or to discuss the otherworldly void of the end but the watery depths of the overworld offered just as many breathtaking sights unusual creatures and head-scratching mysteries and yet no one really seems to care it's kind of like art imitating life because here in real life were so focused on space exploration that most of our undersea biomes here on earth have gone completely unexplored I think we've only seen like 5% of them so today I'm gonna change that not the 5% thing heck no that water is cold no I'm just gonna sit on my butt and talk about oceans in a video game for about 18 minutes what's the deal with the Guardians and the elder Guardians where did they come from are they just giant fish creatures that really liked hanging out in ocean monuments did they build the ocean monuments seems pretty unlikely and speaking of those buildings what's the deal with those massive underwater mazes how did the Drowned fit into all this what are these trident wielding merpeople or they just zombies that fell into the water get ready to take the plunge because today and next episode we're diving straight into the deep end we're starting down the path of ocean mysteries were the guardians and they're bigger granddaddy's the elder Guardians from a mob standpoint I mean sure they're giant sea creatures with one eye and spikes nothing super weird they're right off the bat but what initially got my theorists senses tingling was the way that they attacked with a literal laser beam an underwater eye beam that requires time to charge up before it launches at you and causes massive amounts of damage that's uh that's pretty weird for a fish or any sort of natural organic living creature I mean minecraft is a game full of fantastical creatures don't get me wrong but attacking with a laser cannons just felt out of place for me so I just kept swimming just kept swimming and stoned across an even more unusual detail their inability to die you see if you take a guardian or elder Guardian out of the water it just flops around on the dry land like a cubic Magikarp but why this matters is what doesn't happen you see it doesn't suffocate when exposed to the air it literally just keeps flopping around until you carve it up to make sushi well it's just a video game mechanic I hear you saying and you'd be right if only other fish behaved the same way for every other fish in the game you take it out of the water it flops around and eventually dies take a squid out of the water it suffocates and dies take a salmon out of the water it suffocates and dies take a puffer fish or a cod out of the water they suffocate and they die if you can't tell there are a lot of cuboidal animals that were harmed during the production of this video anyway the guardians and the elder Guardians are the only undersea creatures that can live indefinitely on the land so between that and the laser eye thing there was just something as pardon the pun fishy about them or actually that's completely the wrong pun because it was something that didn't feel fishy about them something that felt a bit less like an animal and a bit more like a machine let's look closer at the design of the guardian notice the colors of its flesh and the cracked patterns across its body it's nearly identical to the prism erine blocks that formed the ocean monument around him coincidence I think not and that isn't just my observation either in Minecrafts official mob bestiary the in-depth guide written from the perspective of an animal researcher in the Minecraft world they specifically allude to this fact quote their skin is cracked as if carved from some ancient rock and their single white eye is somehow both unknowable and cruel unquote ancient rock you say like perhaps prismarine the very same stone that serves as the primary building block for all ocean monuments the only place in the game where they spawn further supporting the idea that the guardians aren't made of flesh but rather of prison marine stone is their drop behavior when killed The Guardian has a 40 percent chance of dropping prismarine crystal which for a fish doesn't make a whole lot of sense I mean if you kill a sheep it drops you all if you drop a cow it drops you like cow flesh but if you're a non organic creature built from the nearby rocks and minerals well that could certainly explain a whole lot and speaking of their drop behavior the mob bestiary does a drop of its own another interesting tidbit about the guardian's quote again elder Guardians will also drop a water absorbing sponge if killed by an adventurer and if it doesn't drop a prisoner in Crystal one will find raw fish of some kind in its place some scholars think that this is evidence that its diet consists of fish and other natural watery food stuff but Guardians have never been seen to wander far from their temple homes to catch them so we cannot be sure end quote it's an odd detail to include there at the end right to specifically call out a they drop fish meaning that they might eat fish but you know considering the fact that they never leave the ocean monuments they spawn in they probably don't eat the fish again all the evidence seems to be pointing to these creatures not being animals as I'm sure we've all assumed them to be rather some sort of artificial creation a defense mechanism built of the surrounding materials somehow mixed with real-life fish or real-life fish DNA to protect the very monument that they spawn inside even the creatures anatomical design inside the my bestiary seems to contain some level of Secrets for most other mobs in the game the book has this incredible illustration of their inner workings the dense skeletons of the creeper the humanoid brains of the Enderman but for the elder Guardian we get ourselves a piece by piece dissection of the eye with components that look kind of like wires leading to panels meant to charge up its laser and underneath that thick rocky skin nothing much a thin layer of pink with a brain area that appears to be stoned certainly not any sort of bony structure it's not anything that resembles the inner workings of a fish and it's certainly not anything that looks remotely organic lastly it's worth noting that the elder guardians I will still have the ability to track a player who is invisible seeming to suggest that this mob is dealing in the thermal spectrum tracking your heat signature rather than any sort of visual sign of your movement patterns so again another weird interesting detail about these creatures I mean even the name seems to allude to it Guardian considering they only spawn inside ocean monuments and they're called Guardians if they were indeed man-made but clearly they were made to act as sort of security mechanism but then what are they supposed to be protecting well displayed ocean monuments being massive complexes there's really only two unusual rooms worth calling out inside of um the sponge room and the treasure room the first is fairly self-explanatory it's the sponge room it is a room full of sponges there's not much more to say there I'm personally more of a loofah man myself but still it's odd that whoever built this enormous building deemed it necessary to dedicate a room to this one oddly specific item more on that in a minute because it's the treasure room that I I think the Guardians want to focus on you see while every monument may not necessarily contain itself a sponge room all monuments do contain themselves a treasure chamber a central area with a tall ceiling and eight gold blocks located in the middle gold blocks that are encased or hidden behind a layer of dark prism and it's this right here that is perhaps the most oddly specific design choice hidden in the entire game here we are in the middle of this massive underwater complex made entirely of one material just varieties of prismarine everywhere that's it and yet smack in the middle the designers decide to include this massive golden box all right that alone would make some kind of sense I guess displaying your prized treasure like it's a core to the entire building but it's the fact that the gold is hidden under another layer that the gold is literally encased within a box of dark prismarine within a box of another stone hidden away that really strikes me as noteworthy here and it's those details coupled with the overall design of the structure that leads me to believe that the ocean monuments were made to be religious buildings first let's just start by looking at the overall design of the ocean monument it's a classic ziggurat structure a staircase like building with wide flat landings that get narrower each level up basically it's like a big pyramid but with some stopping points as you get higher whereas a more traditional pyramid like those in Egypt consists of a smooth continuous line all the way to the peak ziggurats were famous in ancient Mesopotamia basically the first place you learn about in world history class and never fully understand or hear about cradle of civilization have no idea what that is let's just get to ancient Greece and Egypt already those are the cool ones or at least that's what I felt when I was learning those units so I went back refreshed myself and all that information and let me clear it up Mesopotamia back in the day was where modern-day Iraq and part of Syria are today so basically it's an ancient civilization located in the Middle East that is where he would find structures like the one that we see depicted here in Minecraft so knowing the real-life structure that these monuments are based on it can start to get clues as to what their intended use was in the Minecraft war you see in ancient Mesopotamia ziggurats main purpose was religious it was meant to connect heaven and earth they're thought to have been built to literally house the gods as such only priests were allowed to get inside of the ziggurats and this hypothetical religious use seems to be supported by minecraft you see one other key feature of the ocean monument is the fact that underneath the monument are 23 giant pillars that stretched down to the ocean floor and it's always 23 unless of course there's some weird spawn hang up but that 23 number I've said it so many times this episode it seems so oddly specific right it has got to mean something and wouldn't you know it I think it does you see the number 23 is just one of those numbers that's considered to be really important to humans it's a prime number which already makes it special it's the number of chromosome pairs that we have in our body it's basketball star Michael Jordan's number there's a really bad Jim Carrey movie all about the number 23 so you know really important stuff here but all joking aside there's even something called the 23 enigma essentially a belief that the number has some sort of magical or mystical significance because of how much it shows up in our day to day lives so when it comes to numbers 23 is kind of a big deal just behind top 10 lucky 7 and I guess unlucky 13 and when it comes to religion 23 is an even bigger deal you see in the Islamic faith there's the Quran it's the Islamic sacred book just like Christians have themselves the Bible and Judaism has the Torah the Quran is believed to be the Word of God as dictated to the Prophet Muhammad and it took at this 23 years for the entire book to be revealed to Muhammad it's also Muslim belief that the first verses of the Quran were revealed to the Prophet Muhammad on the 23rd night of the ninth Islamic month so again in the Islamic faith the number 23 matters a lot meaning that those 23 pillars in the Minecraft ocean monument could very easily be read seeing important pieces of religious architecture found around the Middle East no ziggurats aren't mosques where Islamic faith is currently practiced but they are connected by geographic region and religious connotation now here is where everything comes together if minecraft social monuments were indeed places of religious significance where an ancient race of people believed gods could come down onto the earth and live it could explain the box of gold encased in dark prismarine with sea lanterns in each of its corners but to understand why you have to be familiar with the Kaaba the Kaaba is a black cube building at the center of Islam's most important mosque the Great Mosque of Mecca it is the most important place in the Islamic faith so important that practitioners of Islam are almost required to take a pilgrimage to see this once in their life and give worship there why well it's thought that the Kaaba is the house of God the sacred house the connection between heaven and the earth the Kaaba is a sacred place with an inside of gold and marble but on the outside it appears to just be a large black cube of dark granite just like we see in the game with the dark Prisma rain beam on the outside of those golden cubes in each of the corners in Minecraft is a sea lantern and which know it each corner of the Kaaba also has itself a special symbolic significance most often pointing to one key location from Islamic history so could it be that the guardians of Minecraft are protecting the most sacred treasure of all the location or at least the perceived location of God himself it sounds crazy but remember the ending of Minecraft does indeed have to godlike figures speaking with each other about your gameplay the fact that gods exist in the canonical universe of Minecraft is an established part of the Lord I mean a lot of the details really line up here the ziggurat structure connects us to the Middle East and Islamic tradition the 23 pillars and their importance to Islamic faith covering up the golden important interior of a building with a dark stone exterior just like the Kaaba the perfect cubic shape of both of those structures the importance of each of the corners the need to have the guardians protecting this place at all heck even the name this is the ocean monument it isn't a ruin it's not a temple it's um monument monument is a word used to honor a place of historical significance a place of the Dead or an important figure like a god you don't call the building that houses your sponge room a monument oh yeah and it's worth mentioning here is one last final note the one practical function of the ziggurat was actually to serve as just a high place on which the priests could escape rising water that would flood the Mesopotamian areas every year rising water huh maybe the underwater monuments weren't quite so underwater so we have ourselves the heat-seeking laser shooting fish that might have been man-made to protect an underwater monument dedicated to what may or may not be an ancient God now the only question is who built it why is it here underwater and that my friends is explained through two words the drought but that theory will have to wait for another day in the meantime remember that's just a theory a game theory thanks for watching you

Channel: The Game Theorists

Views: 6,627,568

Rating: 4.9199362 out of 5

Keywords: minecraft, elder guardian, guardian, underwater biome, the drowned, minecraft guardian, minecraft the drowned, minecraft underwater, minecraft lore, minecraft update, nether update, minecraft underwater city, minecraft underwater fortress, minecraft 1.16, minecraft nether update, minecraft ending, minecraft science, minecraft theory, minecraft steve, minecraft building, minecraft on my mind, game theorists, game theory, matpat, game theory minecraft, matpat minecraft

Id: hHPLAItTLiA

Length: 16min 14sec (974 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 01 2019

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[u/MrSavageWalnut]

As a Muslim, something was brought up to my attention.

Matpat had stated that the golden block monument was of significance like the Kabbah which is a very good theory to point out but he also said that it would be referred to as God himself. In Islam, we believe that there is only one god which is Allah and he cannot be associated with anyone like in Christianity on how they refer to him as three parts which are God, Jesus his Son and the Holy Spirit. He can also not be referred to as a man-made object which many people thought that the Quran was Allah himself. I am just trying to say that, yes obviously he was right it makes total sense but I just wanted to let him know that the Kabbah is not referred to as God

P.S: I love your vids and I can't wait to see the charity live stream because I have been a Fnaf fan since you started the series. Also, I tried to be as respectful as I can to other cultures

[u/not_supercell]

Yay!

[u/thinker227]

This is actually a really good theory, but that connection to the number 23 was just a bit too far in my book.

[u/masonph]

Sooo since a clip of Minecraft: Story Mode was used in this episode, I'm gonna use this as an excuse to say that hey! MC:SM actually supports this theory in a way, because the characters first meet "God" in an Ocean Monument! Sure the monument didn't look like the regular ones you find in Minecraft, but it had guardians and everything in them. There were also runes/writings inside written in a language that only a Villager could read, so that too can support the idea that Villagers might have had a hand in building those temples (even though imo God was the one who built that specific temple)!

I know MC:SM isn't really considered canon when theorizing on Minecraft itself, but a lot of things MatPat had theorized about line up really well with what happens in Minecraft: Story Mode, so I just wanted to share that. That's it!