This is the script for my video, “Why is Minecraft so Lonely?” Uploaded May 11, 2024
Please forgive any spelling or grammatical mistakes that may occur in this script as I originally wrote this for my own eyes and did a minimal amount of spelling and grammatical correction.
The script may not be completely accurate to what I say in the video as I often improvise as i’m reading the script in the recording stages of video production.
For other creators,
This script is subject to copyright and I’m mainly including this as a free resource for inspiration- I love it when people take inspiration off my videos and I’m very lenient on plagiarism. I often take inspiration from other creators and honestly don’t mind if you take heavy inspiration from my scripts.
INTRO
Minecraft-
It’s a game that most of you watching this video have undoubtedly played, to many, it's a great, freeing game with limitless possibilities, it is widely known as a cheerful, mostly positive game. But despite this, there is one aspect of minecraft that goes wildly unnoticed by most of the `minecraft community, it's an unexplained feeling of emptiness that most people experience whilst playing minecraft, a strange, almost burning loneliness that has somehow prevailed throughout most people’s minecraft experiences. The feeling that has left most people playing minecraft fundamentally lost, drifting through this vast, open, empty world that is minecraft. This emptiness is the realization that every single minecraft player in every single of the quadrillions of minecraft worlds that could ever be created, is essentially isolated, aimlessly wandering without any final destination. It’s also the realization that minecraft is secretly a horror game, no, not because of some looming threat built within the game, not because of some myth or some legend that someone has made up about minecraft- the horror lies within the very fundamental nature of minecraft itself, although it may not seem like it, we've all experienced it in some way shape or form, it is a hole that just grows larger and larger as the encroaching emptiness of minecraft begins to swell, every understandable aspect of minecraft slowly fading away until there’s nothing left, nothing except this entity that somehow lies within every players minecraft world, it’s the unexplainable, inescapable existential dread of the minecraft experience that is both the reason why minecraft has been so impactful,and the reason why minecraft has left such a mark on modern culture that no other video game ever has. It's the reason why millions of people constantly revisited minecraft over the years, in a shroud of nostalgia, it’s the reason why minecraft is the biggest and simultaneously the most lonely game ever made. It’s a direct result of minecraft being fundamentally infinite, timeless, having no bounds, minecraft is something simple enough that it could be enjoyed by a toddler and also something so complicated that literally no human is capable of understanding its true impact. The main idea of this video is the great, timeless loneliness that has prevailed through millions of peoples minecraft experiences, it is also something that most people have coined as:
{Title card}
{Musical buildup to next section}
To really capture my argument in an understandable manner, we need to go back to an experience that most, if not all of us share, something that most of the minecraft community has buried at the very back of their minds, the first playthrough of minecraft.
{Dip to black for dramatic effect}
You’re suddenly thrusted into this new, strange world, simple in nature, yet, everso complicated, you as the player or the “host” of this radically new landscape are given the task to mold it in any way you desire, you are given the freedom to break, place and manipulate almost every single aspect of this world, do almost everything that comes to your imagination.
Most of us perform tasks such as gathering resources, building a basic shelter, and exploring around this newly generated world- probably looking for a place to build a house, or just exploring for the sake of it. Nonetheless, most of us ended up building a small structure or carving out a mountain to survive our first night. The actions previously described are probably some of the experiences you’ve had on your first night, exploration, discovery and and overall, an overwhelming feeling of serenity. As a player you begin to experience the discovery, limits and challenges of this new, interesting, but in some way, almost empty world. Things are often dramatically peaceful, even when playing on the some of the harder difficulties of minecraft, in a way, almost too peaceful- because even at the most stressful of situations you hear: [MINECRAFT MUSIC], and are suddenly subdued, it is only after a rather short amount of time that you begin to realize how devoid of life this new world is, despite having tons of animals, monsters and even creatures that somewhat resemble humans, it dawns on you how inherently nostalgic and lonely this game feels, even if it's your first time playing it. This will also come with the revelation that there are absolutely no other intelligent life forms beyond yourself in this world. Nothing, the closest thing you could possibly find to a sign of intelligence is maybe a villager, and even then it's still so empty, the only value a villager provides to you is maybe some resources, just like everything else in this world. A villager is clearly meant to be an off- pseudo representation of another human, except the only noise this creature can make is {villager noises} and the only value it can provide to you is maybe a mending book. And beyond multiplayer, there's almost nothing this game throws at you to even remotely imitate a human- like interaction. You will also soon find that this world that just seems to go on and on forever with a seemingly infinite amount of new things to see, new structures to explore, and new challenges to face, i'm sure most of you have tried to find some border to this world, some point where generation ends or a distance from spawn to whence the game will not let you go any further. Besides some of the old console or mobile versions of minecraft, you could go on for hundreds of hours and still find some new thing to see. It is only by now that most people have begun to feel this strange, almost burning feeling at the back of your heads, almost as if there is something missing, some unexplained emptiness that echoes throughout your head as you continue with your seemingly meaningless set of tasks, chop trees, mine, breed animals, all this working towards some arbitrary goal that you have set for yourself, with none of the things you do dramatically your world. There is really no wrong way to play minecraft, nothing the game is objectively forcing you to or not to do- it's like having a blank canvas being put in front of you and being told to just “paint”, without any prior instruction on what exactly to paint, you, as the artist, without any prior knowledge to anything outside the canvas, will just paint the canvas itself. This feeling only strengthens as you sink more and more hours into minecraft. This is when you, as a player, are truly lost.
{glitch effect as screen dips to black}
NOSTALGIA
Minecrafts nostalgia aspects are a thing that have already been widely talked about by both the youtube and that minecraft communities combined, with nostalgia being defined as “a sentimental longing or wistful affection for the past, typically for a period or place with happy personal associations”, seeing the experience of “minecraft” i.e past as a better thing than it actually was, that feeling when you remember playing minecraft in its prime, often associated with playing it multiplayer or with friends or even playing it in more favorable times in your life. Although this aspect of minecraft has gained wide notoriety in recent years, there have actually been very few people that actually understand “why” minecraft feels so nostalgic, few people people that really know the subtle, subconscious elements of the game that mean so much to us, few people that know the true nature of minecraft. I think it's safe to say that the statement “Minecrafts nostalgia is a thing that greatly contributes to the games success” is a statement that is simultaneously correct, and wildly incorrect- now what do i mean by this? For you to understand the significance of this quote, we need to go back to the year 2013, a time when minecraft was reaching the end of its prime, reaching the end of the time where it was considered the most actively played and talked about game, in the world, after this relatively short period of time that lasted about 2 years, minecraft as a game had seemed to fall off in the coming years after this date. People gradually just became disinterested with minecraft for a multitude of reasons with interest gradually shifting over to other, more popular games in the mid to late 2010’s. This went to the extent that many people were even claiming that minecraft was “dead” or was actively on a state of decline as overall interest in the game continued to nosedive going through 2018 to early 2019 as most of the gaming communities focus shifted over to games like fortnite, to most, it seemed like minecraft was beginning to become a thing of the past, most people just didn't find minecraft fun anymore, with said people having completed the basic progression curve of minecraft- doing everything that most sensible people would do in their world whilst most others began to see minecraft as kinda “cringe”, or outdated for its time. This wasn't until late 2019, when minecraft “miraculously” become relevant again, (of course, to say that minecrafts revival was “miraculous” isn't really what happened as it was because a number of easily predictable things), but i think the most notable causes of this spike in popularity was minecraft's nostalgia, minecraft, a game that most people were playing in the early formative years of their life was being remembered fondly by said people, causing the game to once again be picked up by the mainstream, people suddenly started to play minecraft again as minecraft content on not just youtube- but all over the internet began to thrive, Until, it started to slowly fade back into the darkness, getting us to where we are now. Now, I wouldn't necessarily say that minecraft is currently “dying”, or is even currently going through rough times as it has gained a significant amount of notoriety as of recent, but we definitely aren't where we were in 2020, in terms of cultural significance. Aside from that, the most likely reason for this almost miraculous revival is the fact that this feeling of nostalgia, at least when it comes to minecraft is something that most people have described as something much different than the nostalgia often described with other games or popular trends from the past, minecraft seems to have a much larger, more lasting impact on its players to wherest millions of them would go back to a game they haven't played in years, just because of this feeling of nostalgia, this fundamental human desire to revisit the past and revisit those memories that have since been lost to time. This “nostalgia” just emphasizes the loneliness of minecraft, and magnifies those previously felt feelings of sadness, happiness and… overall… emptiness first experienced in the more formative stages of playing minecraft. This nostalgic aspect of minecraft coupled with its fundamental, lonely nature is most likely, by most terms or the phrase, a direct result of minecrafts game design, and meticulously planned by the game's developers. The feeling of emptiness I described previously in this video is very closely tied with the games nostalgia- you could even say that minecrafts nostalgia, and its feelings of emptiness are essentially the same thing. Minecrafts emptiness is something that is especially unique to minecraft whether it's due to minecrafts soundtrack which does have a place later on in this video, or minecrafts 16x16 blocky nature or even things like minecraft’s classic terrain generation and gameplay structure. Whatever specific aspect of the game you link it to, it's there, and it's a direct result of minecrafts-
{GAME DESIGN}
A minecraft world is 60 million by 60 million blocks. On paper this number seems unimportant, almost obscure. This is only because 60 million is just a number, a representation of something that is inherently much larger in nature, something so big we couldn't possibly comprehend it, the number “60 million” ironically is not an accurate representation of the true scale of a minecraft world. Considering that a minecraft block is equivalent to 1 real life meter, just the overworld section of 1 minecraft world is about 24 times the size of the earth, of course, this figure isn't even accounting for the nether, the end, or the fact that a minecraft world also has a depth of 384 blocks going up and down, and i didnt even mention the fact this is just one minecraft world were talking about- this doesn't even include the other 2^48 possible minecraft worlds on just one version of minecraft- there have been hundreds of different versions of minecraft, with all of them having trillions of unique seeds to one another, a seed being a 64-bit number that determines the layout of every single minecraft world, this even goes to the extent that you could generate 1 minecraft world per second for billions upon billions of years and still not see even a fraction of the total number of minecraft worlds, there will almost always be more to see, this isn't even considering that it would take eons to explore just 1 minecraft world, let alone truly get to know it, change it, mold its landscape, actually leave a mark. One more thing, 60 million by 60 million isn't even the theoretical limit of minecrafts generation, as some experienced modders have even found more ways to break this number, bringing that maximum world size up to over 9 quintillion blocks going in only 1 direction with a total of 18 quintillion blocks from end to end. With this mod (which I will link in the description below, and which currently only works on some versions of minecraft), minecraft is able to unlock its full generation distance- essentially deleting its world border, allowing players to travel up to minecrafts LONG integer limit which is a 64 character number that goes in both the negative and positive directions, around 9 quintillion in the positive direction and 9 quintillion in the negative direction, as well as all the numbers in between- for those that don't know what a “LONG” is, it, along with the other values- “byte”, “short” and “Int” are base- two numbers that control basic minecraft values like the highest possible potion effect strength, highest render distance, and other values associated with other processes within minecraft. What this mod does is it switches minecraft's world generator over to this “LONG” value- previously being on the INT value which is only 32 characters, of course it may seem like this would only double minecrafts generational limit as this is only double the amount of characters as the previous number. But that isn't quite how that works as by doubling this ONE value, it gives minecraft the ability to reliably generate blocks for light years. This new value for minecrafts size is another number that we will never quite be able to grasp, the amount of time it would take you to traverse this LONG world, compared to the amount of time it would take to travel to the INT value- (roughly 19 years without break)- it would take you roughly 810 million centuries.
It would take light a little under 2000 years to go from one side of the world to the other, this is how long it takes light traveling this fast to traverse a minecraft world, let alone the amount of time it would take a player that can only travel this fast, with this mod, it is now actually impossible to explore a minecraft world, it would take you an unimaginable amount of time to just see a fraction of what minecraft beholds, let alone fill it up with somewhat meaningful structures. You are so incredibly small in even a regular minecraft world- not freed, rather trapped by how big it is. You are but a mere raindrop in the ocean that is a minecraft world. Hopefully now you are beginning to grasp my point, everything you will EVER do or could ever do is essentially insignificant in the grand scheme of things. It doesn't matter how much space you build, mine, or even destroy, there will always be more… Even with all these representations I've thrown at you, it is still nearly impossible to grasp the sheer amount of empty space that this is and yet… you still feel confined- it still doesn't seem to be big enough, but this value also feels too big- again, even without mods it would take you decades just for you to get to one side of the world border in a regular minecraft world. Minecraft is truly unexplorable.
The size of a minecraft world is probably the biggest contributing factors to a player's loneliness, there are again millions upon millions of blocks of wilderness that nobody in the history of humanity has, or likely ever will lay their eyes on, you are given the privilege to see your own, unique minecraft world in the sea of the trillions of others that exist, your minecraft world being almost entirely unique to the rest. This is just one of the reasons why minecraft feels so lonely and thus, so nostalgic- because there's this other eerie thing baked into the bounds of minecraft, minecraft as a game it seems to have this odd sort of “memory” to it, nothing ever seems to be forgotten by a minecraft world, nothing seems ever decay or even slightly change of most definitions of the word “change”- you could build a house in your minecraft world and come back to it in 10 years, and i don't mean to close the game and come back to it in 10 years, I mean to leave your minecraft world open for 10 years, constantly running, day in and day out, and assuming you were in a safe location, your minecraft world would be almost exactly the same. Sure, some blocks may be moved or missing depending on the materials you made the house, and immediate landscape out of, and this is only because of natural minecraft processes like enderman moving blocks or lightning striking your house, and of course- these things can be easily mitigated by just changing your games difficulty to peaceful or just placing a lightning rod near your house. Nonetheless, your world would fundamentally be the same. This fact is only reinforced by the fact that most computer systems can't even render more than 32 chunks of a minecraft world at a time, meaning that most of your world is essentially frozen in time. This timelessness of minecraft perfectly illustrates how dreadful the minecraft experience can feel compared to most other games, which have things like natural disasters or events that can alter the landscape of your gameplay experience. But not minecraft, it would take upwards of trillions upon trillions of years, just to see the most minute change in minecrafts landscape, this is only possible through extremely complex processes that can occur in your minecraft world, such as an event where a creeper would have to be hit by another mob (most likely a skeleton) and blow up, destroying a couple blocks of your immediate landscape, and of course this could easily be stopped by just putting your game on peaceful mode, or lighting up your surroundings. Despite the infinitesimally small chance of events like these happening, minecraft is effectively still, immovable without the influence of the player, which simultaneously makes the player so important to a minecraft world, and yet, so unimportant as the player is effectively meaningless to their would because of its sheer size, but again, the world is effectively meaningless to the player without the players influence. But this may not actually be true as when we look at some other parts of minecrafts landscape it clearly wasn't always this way as a player may find seemingly man-made like structures throughout their world, these structures whether it being an ocean monument, jungle temple, or even a desert well have had to be placed by someone, most of us don't realize it, we brush often completely off the fact that there are these random, strange unexplained structures dotted throughout our minecraft worlds, maybe they were made by some long forgotten civilization that has since been wiped out in some horrible way, or maybe just intentional game design by the developers of minecraft- but does it really even matter?. We will never really know as a player what the true nature of a minecraft world really is, never really understand the meaning of this stuff and why it's here, it's almost as if this world that doesn't seem to forget, as somehow forgotten, the entire experience of minecraft, in some sort of way, is to try and and understand its meaning- why is this here, what is really the point of all of this, this landscape has no meaning to it besides to just amuse me for a couple hours. There's gotta be some explanation to this! These thoughts are just a feeble attempt at trying to retain information that simply isn't there- of course there have been attempts to uncover the quote on quote “lore” within minecraft throughout the years, but it doesn't seem like the minecraft lore is much of a “code to crack”, just an incomprehensible mess of structures, mobs and random landforms and events going on and on into what is effectively infinity. There's no order in this mess, this is the thing minecrafts really missing, order. Every possible feature of a minecraft world is simply random chance, created by a random number generated by some lines of code known as a seed that defines the orderly chaos that is a minecraft world and there's you, a player, the one being that have found themselves in one of the septillions of possible minecraft worlds, you, the one that has found themselves caught up in one of mankind's miracles, the ability to seemingly create something out of what is effectively nothing. It's almost as if Notch- the creator of minecraft has somehow cracked the code, or somehow, has broken the universe in a way, somehow have created the illusion of trillions upon trillions of vast, deeply complex worlds and don't really exist, they are just mere representations of worlds that we as a species will never truly understand or explore, in some way- it reminds me of this website called the babel image archives, probably one of the most intriguing websites on the internet- so what's so special about this website, and how is it related to minecraft and the discussion were having here? Well, what I was to tell you is that this website contains an image of you, yes you the person watching this video, in fact, its contains many images of you, even ones that don't exist, it contains an image of your funeral, every meaningful experience in your life, even ones that don't exist yet, or never will exist. This website contains images that have never been taken, never been drawn, never been seen or even thought of once by anyone. This website contains literally every single image that could ever exist… It contains about 4090^266240 640x 416 pixel images with a range of 4096 colors. I can guarantee you that every single image on your computer, and everything thing you have ever laid your eyes upon is somewhere deep inside this website, a low resolution version of those said photos or experiences, and of course all of these statements i have been making would be arbitrary if I didn't loop back to this number, this number is so big it would take you trillions of years just to type it let alone see even a tiny fraction of all the actual images it represents, It would take you 10^961748 YEARS just to watch the universal slideshow, this is the number 10 with 961000 zeros after it, even if i wanted to show you this number without any scientific notation in this video, this video would have to be hours long. The conceptual size of this website is incalculably larger than the size of every single minecraft world combined, let alone just one, and yet- it still feels the same, these numbers don't really mean anything to most of us, they might as well be infinity. Minecraft is infinitely large. There's this functionally infinite world at your disposal, limitless possibilities, and then there's you, the player. Again. Alone, lost, drifting without a direction in this canvas of a world minecraft has given you, it's like watching the universal slideshow on that website, you will never really know what will come next, there's just so much to explore, to do, to conquer that there effectively isn't anything to do that is even remotely meaningful to anything and anyone besides yourself.
I highly recommend checking out the babel image archives, I could sit here explaining the true magnitude of this website for hours, but it would probably be better for you just to experience it for yourself, upload some random images from your computer, anything, and see them pop up with some ridiculously long number underneath, learn what is surrounding your images, learn the true chaotic nature of what your looking at, your image, surrounded by probably millions of other images that contain an incoherent mess of random, randomly colored pixels, how unlikely it would be for anyone to stumble across this image without you actively searching for it. This is the closest you will ever get to truly understanding the scale of the babel image archives, and thus, minecraft.
The scale of a minecraft world coupled with its timeless nature also likely contributes to the nostalgia aspects of minecraft when you really think about it. All these things I've been talking about are all connected in some sort of way, which is why I decided to include them all in this video, they all share many of the same attributes of loneliness, timelessness, and nostalgia with a player being able to revisit a world they once played on years ago, once again grasp the true nature of how fundamentally trapped they are inside it. Despite this, all of these mechanisms work independently of what is probably the biggest contributing factor of minecrafts loneliness, even if you don't know the true scale of a minecraft world, don't know how many possible minecraft worlds there are or have just come to terms with its limitless reality, there's still an element of minecrafts game design that i doubt any of you who have played minecraft haven't experienced or at least thought about. What I'm talking about is the final, and possibly most impactful section of this video. What I'm talking about is…
MINECRAFTS SOUNDTRACK
{Fade in music}
You cannot talk about the loneliness of minecraft without mentioning its soundtrack, it's something that most of you watching this video have undoubtedly heard or know of in some sort of way, the 54-song composition created by german musician, daniel rosenfeld(most commonly known as C418), is by far the most widely known video game soundtrack ever made. Most don’t realize it but Minecraft’s soundtrack has accompanied you throughout your entire Minecraft experience, it was there when you built your first house, when you found your first diamond, and when you first died…, its true impact often goes unnoticed by most people, but Minecraft truly wouldn’t be the same without it. Minecrafts music greatly contributes to the feelings of loneliness and nostalgia often experienced within minecraft- the tracks are so timeless, you could play minecraft for hundreds and even thousands of hours and its music will still have the same effect. This is likely because of how well minecrafts music represents minecraft as a game, it perfectly captures those feelings of loneliness and nostalgia, most likely because of how inherently simple it is, minecrafts music is rarely more complicated than a base piano track accompanied by maybe a synthesizer and some other instruments, it's simple nature perfectly matches the stylistic simplicity of the game in which its associated with, it perfectly captures the 16x16- pixel feel when traversing your minecraft world, minecrafts music also perfectly captures the emptiness of a minecraft world and how it can be so freeing, yet so confining- its hard to describe exactly how it accomplishes this task besides stating that it mimics minecrafts simplicity. The biggest thing that differentiates it from other video game soundtracks is mainly that Minecrafts music can play at literally any time and at almost every place within the game, it doesn't matter weather you are chopping trees, mining, of have just lost hours of progress to skeleton- the same set of randomized set of songs will play, there's no song for mining in caves, traversing mountains, or chopping trees- minecrafts music runs independent of the games circumstances, the current mood is often actually dependant on what tracks are playing, this is the main reason why minecrafts music is so nostalgic, it captures the timelessness of minecraft- this is mainly there is no set time period in which minecrafts story takes place- no time period in which we can trace most of the main instruments, you see, most other games which have a set time period often have instrumental choices in their music which reflects the musical technology available in said time period, in more westerney games you may hear a more string, or vocally based soundtrack whilst in games that are set in the middle ages may include more orchestral instrument choices. Minecrafts soundtrack is primarily based on the piano, which isn't often associated with a specific time period by most people, this further reflects minecrafts timeless nature, this instrumental choice is just furthered by the fact that, again, minecrafts music doesn't have a specific time in which its played- again, running independently of what's happening in the game, these two combined factors are the reason why minecrafts music, and thus minecraft is so nostalgic, so timeless, and so fundamentally empty. This music creates memories within a game and also within our lives, music has been scientifically proven to have an enormous power of evoking memories, minecrafts soundtrack is by far the most nostalgic, most empty, most lonely composition ever conceived, although daniel rosenfeld was but an amateur at the time of creation, he perfectly understood what made minecraft so impactful to its player base and used his underlying knowledge to craft one of the greatest soundtracks in video game history. Minecrafts soundtrack is the perfect thing to wrap this video up as my initial intention on the writing of this script was to create a gloomy almost sad and depressing atmosphere for you , and i hope I accomplished my initial goal to an exceptional extent- but I want to leave this video off on more of a high note…
CONCLUSION
The very nature of minecraft is double sided, those who only focus on the negative aspects of the game we’ve all come to know as “minecraft” often forget the fact that minecraft is still the most popular game ever made, and for a reason; its vast imaginative nature makes it suitable for literally everybody, minecraft has touched the hearts,minds, and souls of undoubtedly millions of people and has impacted modern culture in ways I couldn't even explain, I think it's safe to say that despite all the alleged drama currently surrounding minecraft, I think it's here to stay... There will likely never be another game like minecraft.
POSTSCRIPT
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