The Loneliness and Nostalgia of Minecraft

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 this somehow prevailed throughout most people's Minecraft experience es the feeling that is 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 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 Bill within the game not because of some myth or 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's a hole that just grows larger and larger 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 player's 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 consistently revisit Minecraft over the years in a shroud of nostalgia it's the reason why Minecraft is the biggest and simultaneously most lonely game ever made it's a direct result of Minecraft being fundamentally infinite Timeless having no bounds Minecraft is something simple and 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 throughout millions of people's Minecraft experiences it is also something that most people have coined as [Music] [Music] 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 [Music] you're suddenly thrusted into this new Strange World simple in nature yet ever so 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 anything that comes to your imagination most of us perform tasks such as Gathering resources es 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 [Music] night the actions previously described are probably some of the experiences you've had on your first night exploration Discovery 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 some of the harder difficulties of Minecraft in a way almost too peaceful because even at the most stressful of situations you hear 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 Dawn on you how inherently nostalgic and lonely this game feels even if it's your first time playing [Music] 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 a human except the only noise this creature can make is and the only value can provide you is maybe a mending book and Beyond multiplayer there's almost nothing the game throws at you that can even remotely imitate a humanlike interaction you will also soon find that this world 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 sort of border to this world some point where generation ends or distance from Spawn when 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 new things 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's something missing some unexplained emptiness that goes throughout your head is you continue with your seemingly meaningless set of tasks chop trees mine breed animals all of this working towards some arbitrary goal you set for yourself with none of the things you do dramatically changing your world there's really no wrong way to play Minecraft nothing the game is objectively forcing you to do or not to do it's like having a blank canvas being put in front of you and just being told to paint without any prior instruction on exactly what to paint you is the artist without any prior knowled know 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 Minecraft's Nostalgia aspects are something that have been widely talked about by both the YouTube and Minecraft communities combined with Nostalgia being defined as a Sentimental longing or wistful affection of the past typically for period are place with happy personal associations seeing the experience of Minecraft I.E the past is a better thing than it actually was that feeling when you remember playing Minecraft in its prime often associated with playing it in multiplayer or with friends or even playing it in more favorable times of 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 that really know the subtle sub conscious elements of the game that mean so much to us few people that know the true nature of [Music] Minecraft I think it's safe to say that the statement Minecraft Nostalgia is a thing that greatly contributes to the game's success is a statement that is simultaneously correct and wildly incorrect now what what 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 2010s this went to the extent that people were even claiming that Minecraft was dead or was actively State decline as overall interest in the game continued to nose dive through 2018 to early 2019 as most of the gaming community's Focus shifted over to other more popular 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 the most sensible player would do in the world whilst others began to see Minecraft is kind of cringe or outdated for its time the this wasn't until late 2019 when Minecraft miraculously became relevant again of course to say Minecraft's Revival was miraculous isn't really what happened as it was because of a number of easily predictable things but I think the most notable causes of this Spike and popularity was Minecraft's [Music] 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 playing 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 going through rough times since 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 nostal at least when it comes to Minecraft is something much different than the Nostalgia often described with other games or more popular Trends from the past Minecraft seems to have a much larger more lasting impact on its players to where 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 the time this Nostalgia just emphasizes the loneliness of Minecraft and magnifies those previously felt feelings of sad 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 of the phrase a direct result of Minecraft's game design and meticulously planned by the gamees developers this feeling of emptiness I previously described in the video is closely tied with the game's Nostalgia you could even say that Minecraft's Nostalgia and its feelings of emptiness are essentially the same thing Minecraft's emptiness is something that is especially unique to Minecraft whether it's due to Minecraft soundtrack which does have a place later on in this video or Minecraft 16x16 blocking nature or even things like Minecraft's classic terrain generation or gameplay structure whatever aspect of Minecraft you attribute it to it's there and it's a direct result of Minecraft's a Minecraft world is 60 million by 6 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 it the number 60 million is ironically not an accurate representation of the true scale of a Minecraft world considering that a Minecraft block is equivalent to one real life meter just the Overworld section of one Minecraft world is about seven times the size of the Earth of course this figure isn't even accounting for the nether the end and the fact that a Minecraft world also has a depth of 384 blocks going up and down and I didn't even mention the fact that this is just one m inecraft World we're talking about this doesn't even include the other two to the 48 possible Minecraft worlds on just one version of Minecraft there are hundreds of 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 one Minecraft world per second for billions upon billions of years and still have not even seen a fraction of the total number of Minecraft worlds there will almost always be more to see even this isn't even considering that it would take eons just to explore one Minecraft world let alone truly get to know it change it mold its landscape actually leave a mark and one more thing 60 million by 60 million isn't even the theoretical limit of Minecraft's generation as some experienced modders have found more ways to break this number bringing that maximum World size up to over 9 quintilian blocks going in Only One Direction with a total of 18 quintilian blocks from end to end with this mod which I will link in the description below and which only works on some versions of Minecraft Minecraft is able to unlock its full generation distance essentially deleting the world border allowing players to travel up to Minecraft's long integer limit which is a 64 character number that goes both in the negative and positive directions a around 9 quintilian in the positive direction and 9 quintilian in the negative direction as well as all the numbers in between and for those who don't know what a long is it among the other values bite 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 30 2 bits of course it may seem like this would only double Minecraft's generational limit as this is only double the amount of characters as the previous number but this isn't quite how it works is by doubling this one value it gives Minecraft the ability to reliably generate blocks for light years this new value for Minecraft 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 you to travel to the int value which is roughly 19 years old without break to travel to this long value it would take you roughly 810 million centuries it would take you a little under 2,000 light gears to go from one side of the world to the other a light gear is how long light traveling this fast takes 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 Minecraft world it would take you an unimaginable amount of time just to 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 but trapped by how big it is you are but a mere raindrop in the ocean that is a Minecraft world hopefully now you're beginning to grasp my point everything you ever 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 this is and yet you still feel confined but this value also feels too big again even without mods it would still 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 factor 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 were given the privilege to see your own unique Minecraft world in the sea of trillions of others that exist your Minecraft world being almost entirely unique to the rest 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 is a game seems to have its odd sort of memory to it nothing ever seems to be forgotten by a Minecraft world nothing seems to ever Decay or even slightly Changed by most definitions of the word [Music] change you could build a house in your Minecraft world and come back to it in 10 years and I don't mean close the game and come back to it in 10 years I mean 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 your 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 game's difficulty to Peaceful or placing a lightning rod near your house nonetheless your world would be fundamentally the same this fact is only reinforced by the fact that 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 other games which have things like natural disasters are 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 Minecraft's 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 in your immediate landscape and of course this could be easily stopped by just putting your game on peaceful mode or lighting up your surroundings despite the infintely small chance of events like this happening Minecraft is effectively still immovable without the influence of a player which simultaneously makes a player so important to a Minecraft world and yet so unimportant as the player is effectively meaningless to their world because of its sheer size but again the world is effectively meaningless to the player without the player's influence but this may not actually be true as when we look at other parts of Minecraft's landscape it clearly wasn't always this way is the 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 we often completely brush 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 made by the developers of Minecraft but does it really even matter we you never really know as a player what the true nature of a Minecraft world really is never really understand the meaning of this stuff why it's here it's almost as if this world that just doesn't seem to forget has somehow forgotten the entire Minecraft experience in some sort of way is to try and understand its meaning why it's here what is really the point of all of this this landscape has almost no meaning to it besides just to amuse me for a couple hours there's got to be some explanation to this these thoughts that I just explained are simply just a feel attempt in trying to retain information that simply isn't there of course there have been attempts to uncover the quote unquote lore within Minecraft throughout the years but it doesn't seem like Minecraft's lore is much of a code to crack just an incomprehensible mess of structures mobs and random landforms and events that just go on into what is effectively Infinity there's no order in this mess this is what Minecraft's really missing order every possible feature of a Minecraft world is simply random chance created by a number generated by some lines of code code known as a seed that defines the orderly chaos that is a Minecraft world and then there's you a player the one that have found themselves in one of the septian of possible Minecraft worlds you the one that have 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 has created the illusion of trillions upon trillions of vast deeply complex worlds that don't really exist they are just mere representations of Worlds that we as a species will never really understand or explore in some way it reminds me of this website called the babble image archives probably one of the most intriguing websites on the [Music] internet so what's so special about this website and how is it related to Minecraft and the discussion we're having here well what if I were to tell you the this website contains an image of you yes you the person watching this video in fact it 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 will never 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 a about 4,90 to the 266,000 640x 416 pixel images with a range of 496 colors I can guarantee you that every single image on your computer and everything you have ever laid Your Eyes Upon is somewhere deep inside this website a low resolution version of those said photos and experiences and of course all these statements I've been making would be completely arbitrary if I didn't loop back to this number this number is so big that it would take you trillions of years just to type it let alone see even a tiny fraction of the actual images it represents it would take you 10 to the 96174 years just to watch the universal slideshow this is the number 10 with 961 th000 zeros after it even if I wanted to show you this number without any scientific notation in this video this video would 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 functiona 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 anyone besides yourself I highly recommend checking out the babble image archives I could sit here explaining the true magnitude of this website for hours on end but it would probably just be better for you 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 you're looking at your image surrounded by probably millions of other images that contain an incoherent mess of random randomly colored pixels learn 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 babble image archives and thus [Music] 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 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 they once played on years ago and once again grasp the true nature of how fundamentally trapped they are inside it despite this all these mechanisms work independently of what is probably the biggest contributing factor to Minecraft's 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 is still an element of Minecraft's game design that I doubt any of you who have ever played Minecraft haven't experienced or have at least thought about what I'm talking about as the final and possibly most impactful section in this video what I'm talking about [Music] is 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 creat ated 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 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 Minecraft truly wouldn't be the same without it Minecraft's music greatly contributes to the feel feelings of loneliness and Nostalgia often experienced within Minecraft the tracks are so Timeless you can play Minecraft for hundreds and sometimes thousands of hours and the music will still have the same effect this is likely because of how well Minecraft's music represents Minecraft as a game it perfectly captures those feelings of loneliness and Nostalgia I previously described most likely because of how inherently simple it is Minecraft music is rarely more complicated than a Bas piano track accompanied by maybe a synthesizer or some other instruments its simple nature perfectly matches the stylistic Simplicity of the game in which It's associated with it perfectly captures the 16x 16 pixel feel when traversing your Minecraft world Minecraft's music also perfectly captures The Emptiness of a Minecraft world and how it can be so freeing yet so confining it's hard to describe exactly how it accomplishes this task besides stating that it mimics mine Simplicity the biggest thing that differentiates from other video game soundtracks is mainly that Minecraft's music can play at literally any time in almost any place within the game it doesn't matter whether you're chopping trees mining or have just lost hours of progress to a skeleton the same set of randomized songs will play there's no specific song for mining in caves traversing mountains or even chopping trees Minecraft's music runs independent of the game circumstances the curtain mood is often dependent on what tracks are playing this is the main reason why Minecraft music is also so nostalgic it captures the timelessness of Minecraft this is mainly because there's no set time period in which Minecraft story takes place and no time period in which we can trace back 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 Wester games you may hear a more string or vocal based soundtrack whil games that are set in the Middle Ages may include more orchestral instrument choices Minecraft soundtrack is primarily based on piano which isn't often associated with any specific time period by most people this further reflects Minecraft's Timeless nature this instrument choice is just furthered by the fact that again Minecraft's music doesn't have a specific time in which it's played again running independently of what's happening in the game these two combined factors are the reason why Minecraft's music and thus Minecraft is so nostalgic so Timeless and so fundamentally empty this music creates memories within the game and also within our lives music has been scientifically proven having an enormous power in invoking memories Minecraft 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 perfect Ally 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 Minecraft soundtrack is the perfect thing to wrap up this video as my initial intention on writing 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 the very nature of my inecraft 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 unpacked 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 [Music] [Music] Minecraft these videos often take hundreds of hours to make and I would really appreciate it if you would support the production of these videos by subscribing it's free I also opened up memberships on this channel so if you'd like to see some exclusive behind thes scenes content or just some other random stuff or if you want to support the production of these videos and is me as a Creator you know make him come out faster please consider joining it's literally under a dollar I'm sure you have more than that in your couch thanks for listening to my Yap session bye [Music] [Music]

Minecraft it&#39;s a game that most of you watching this video have undoubtedly played to many it&#39;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&#39;s an unexplained feeling of emptiness that most people experience whilst playing Minecraft a strange almost burning loneliness this somehow prevailed throughout most people&#39;s Minecraft experience es the feeling that is 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 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&#39;s also the realization that Minecraft is secretly a horror game no not because of some looming threat Bill within the game not because of some myth or 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&#39;ve all experienced it in some way shape or form it&#39;s a hole that just grows larger and larger the encroaching emptiness of Minecraft begins to swell every understandable aspect of Minecraft slowly fading away until there&#39;s nothing left nothing except this entity that somehow lies within every player&#39;s Minecraft world it&#39;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&#39;s the reason why millions of people consistently revisit Minecraft over the years in a shroud of nostalgia it&#39;s the reason why Minecraft is the biggest and simultaneously most lonely game ever made it&#39;s a direct result of Minecraft being fundamentally infinite Timeless having no bounds Minecraft is something simple and 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 throughout millions of people&#39;s Minecraft experiences it is also something that most people have coined as [Music] [Music] 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 [Music] you&#39;re suddenly thrusted into this new Strange World simple in nature yet ever so 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 anything that comes to your imagination most of us perform tasks such as Gathering resources es 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 [Music] night the actions previously described are probably some of the experiences you&#39;ve had on your first night exploration Discovery 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 some of the harder difficulties of Minecraft in a way almost too peaceful because even at the most stressful of situations you hear 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 Dawn on you how inherently nostalgic and lonely this game feels even if it&#39;s your first time playing [Music] 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&#39;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 a human except the only noise this creature can make is and the only value can provide you is maybe a mending book and Beyond multiplayer there&#39;s almost nothing the game throws at you that can even remotely imitate a humanlike interaction you will also soon find that this world 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&#39;m sure most of you have tried to find some sort of border to this world some point where generation ends or distance from Spawn when 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 new things 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&#39;s something missing some unexplained emptiness that goes throughout your head is you continue with your seemingly meaningless set of tasks chop trees mine breed animals all of this working towards some arbitrary goal you set for yourself with none of the things you do dramatically changing your world there&#39;s really no wrong way to play Minecraft nothing the game is objectively forcing you to do or not to do it&#39;s like having a blank canvas being put in front of you and just being told to paint without any prior instruction on exactly what to paint you is the artist without any prior knowled know 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 Minecraft&#39;s Nostalgia aspects are something that have been widely talked about by both the YouTube and Minecraft communities combined with Nostalgia being defined as a Sentimental longing or wistful affection of the past typically for period are place with happy personal associations seeing the experience of Minecraft I.E the past is a better thing than it actually was that feeling when you remember playing Minecraft in its prime often associated with playing it in multiplayer or with friends or even playing it in more favorable times of 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 that really know the subtle sub conscious elements of the game that mean so much to us few people that know the true nature of [Music] Minecraft I think it&#39;s safe to say that the statement Minecraft Nostalgia is a thing that greatly contributes to the game&#39;s success is a statement that is simultaneously correct and wildly incorrect now what what 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 2010s this went to the extent that people were even claiming that Minecraft was dead or was actively State decline as overall interest in the game continued to nose dive through 2018 to early 2019 as most of the gaming community&#39;s Focus shifted over to other more popular games like fortnite to most it seemed like Minecraft was beginning to become a thing of the past most people just didn&#39;t find Minecraft fun anymore with said people having completed the basic progression curve of Minecraft doing everything the most sensible player would do in the world whilst others began to see Minecraft is kind of cringe or outdated for its time the this wasn&#39;t until late 2019 when Minecraft miraculously became relevant again of course to say Minecraft&#39;s Revival was miraculous isn&#39;t really what happened as it was because of a number of easily predictable things but I think the most notable causes of this Spike and popularity was Minecraft&#39;s [Music] 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 playing 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&#39;t necessarily say that Minecraft is currently dying or is even going through rough times since it has gained a significant amount of notoriety as of recent but we definitely aren&#39;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 nostal at least when it comes to Minecraft is something much different than the Nostalgia often described with other games or more popular Trends from the past Minecraft seems to have a much larger more lasting impact on its players to where millions of them would go back to a game they haven&#39;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 the time this Nostalgia just emphasizes the loneliness of Minecraft and magnifies those previously felt feelings of sad 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 of the phrase a direct result of Minecraft&#39;s game design and meticulously planned by the gamees developers this feeling of emptiness I previously described in the video is closely tied with the game&#39;s Nostalgia you could even say that Minecraft&#39;s Nostalgia and its feelings of emptiness are essentially the same thing Minecraft&#39;s emptiness is something that is especially unique to Minecraft whether it&#39;s due to Minecraft soundtrack which does have a place later on in this video or Minecraft 16x16 blocking nature or even things like Minecraft&#39;s classic terrain generation or gameplay structure whatever aspect of Minecraft you attribute it to it&#39;s there and it&#39;s a direct result of Minecraft&#39;s a Minecraft world is 60 million by 6 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&#39;t possibly comprehend it it the number 60 million is ironically not an accurate representation of the true scale of a Minecraft world considering that a Minecraft block is equivalent to one real life meter just the Overworld section of one Minecraft world is about seven times the size of the Earth of course this figure isn&#39;t even accounting for the nether the end and the fact that a Minecraft world also has a depth of 384 blocks going up and down and I didn&#39;t even mention the fact that this is just one m inecraft World we&#39;re talking about this doesn&#39;t even include the other two to the 48 possible Minecraft worlds on just one version of Minecraft there are hundreds of 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 one Minecraft world per second for billions upon billions of years and still have not even seen a fraction of the total number of Minecraft worlds there will almost always be more to see even this isn&#39;t even considering that it would take eons just to explore one Minecraft world let alone truly get to know it change it mold its landscape actually leave a mark and one more thing 60 million by 60 million isn&#39;t even the theoretical limit of Minecraft&#39;s generation as some experienced modders have found more ways to break this number bringing that maximum World size up to over 9 quintilian blocks going in Only One Direction with a total of 18 quintilian blocks from end to end with this mod which I will link in the description below and which only works on some versions of Minecraft Minecraft is able to unlock its full generation distance essentially deleting the world border allowing players to travel up to Minecraft&#39;s long integer limit which is a 64 character number that goes both in the negative and positive directions a around 9 quintilian in the positive direction and 9 quintilian in the negative direction as well as all the numbers in between and for those who don&#39;t know what a long is it among the other values bite 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&#39;s world generator over to this long value previously being on the int value which is only 30 2 bits of course it may seem like this would only double Minecraft&#39;s generational limit as this is only double the amount of characters as the previous number but this isn&#39;t quite how it works is by doubling this one value it gives Minecraft the ability to reliably generate blocks for light years this new value for Minecraft 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 you to travel to the int value which is roughly 19 years old without break to travel to this long value it would take you roughly 810 million centuries it would take you a little under 2,000 light gears to go from one side of the world to the other a light gear is how long light traveling this fast takes 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 Minecraft world it would take you an unimaginable amount of time just to 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 but trapped by how big it is you are but a mere raindrop in the ocean that is a Minecraft world hopefully now you&#39;re beginning to grasp my point everything you ever or could ever do is essentially insignificant in the grand scheme of things it doesn&#39;t matter how much space you build mine or even destroy there will always be more even with all these representations I&#39;ve thrown at you it is still nearly impossible to grasp the sheer amount of empty space this is and yet you still feel confined but this value also feels too big again even without mods it would still 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 factor to a player&#39;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 were given the privilege to see your own unique Minecraft world in the sea of trillions of others that exist your Minecraft world being almost entirely unique to the rest is just one of the reasons why Minecraft feels so lonely and thus so nostalgic because there&#39;s this other Eerie thing baked into the bounds of Minecraft Minecraft is a game seems to have its odd sort of memory to it nothing ever seems to be forgotten by a Minecraft world nothing seems to ever Decay or even slightly Changed by most definitions of the word [Music] change you could build a house in your Minecraft world and come back to it in 10 years and I don&#39;t mean close the game and come back to it in 10 years I mean 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 your 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 game&#39;s difficulty to Peaceful or placing a lightning rod near your house nonetheless your world would be fundamentally the same this fact is only reinforced by the fact that computer systems can&#39;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 other games which have things like natural disasters are 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 Minecraft&#39;s 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 in your immediate landscape and of course this could be easily stopped by just putting your game on peaceful mode or lighting up your surroundings despite the infintely small chance of events like this happening Minecraft is effectively still immovable without the influence of a player which simultaneously makes a player so important to a Minecraft world and yet so unimportant as the player is effectively meaningless to their world because of its sheer size but again the world is effectively meaningless to the player without the player&#39;s influence but this may not actually be true as when we look at other parts of Minecraft&#39;s landscape it clearly wasn&#39;t always this way is the 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 we often completely brush 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 made by the developers of Minecraft but does it really even matter we you never really know as a player what the true nature of a Minecraft world really is never really understand the meaning of this stuff why it&#39;s here it&#39;s almost as if this world that just doesn&#39;t seem to forget has somehow forgotten the entire Minecraft experience in some sort of way is to try and understand its meaning why it&#39;s here what is really the point of all of this this landscape has almost no meaning to it besides just to amuse me for a couple hours there&#39;s got to be some explanation to this these thoughts that I just explained are simply just a feel attempt in trying to retain information that simply isn&#39;t there of course there have been attempts to uncover the quote unquote lore within Minecraft throughout the years but it doesn&#39;t seem like Minecraft&#39;s lore is much of a code to crack just an incomprehensible mess of structures mobs and random landforms and events that just go on into what is effectively Infinity there&#39;s no order in this mess this is what Minecraft&#39;s really missing order every possible feature of a Minecraft world is simply random chance created by a number generated by some lines of code code known as a seed that defines the orderly chaos that is a Minecraft world and then there&#39;s you a player the one that have found themselves in one of the septian of possible Minecraft worlds you the one that have found themselves caught up in one of Mankind&#39;s Miracles the ability to seemingly create something out of what is effectively nothing it&#39;s almost as if Notch the creator of Minecraft has somehow cracked the code or somehow has broken the universe in a way somehow has created the illusion of trillions upon trillions of vast deeply complex worlds that don&#39;t really exist they are just mere representations of Worlds that we as a species will never really understand or explore in some way it reminds me of this website called the babble image archives probably one of the most intriguing websites on the [Music] internet so what&#39;s so special about this website and how is it related to Minecraft and the discussion we&#39;re having here well what if I were to tell you the this website contains an image of you yes you the person watching this video in fact it contains many images of you even ones that don&#39;t exist it contains an image of your funeral every meaningful experience in your life even ones that don&#39;t exist yet or will never 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 a about 4,90 to the 266,000 640x 416 pixel images with a range of 496 colors I can guarantee you that every single image on your computer and everything you have ever laid Your Eyes Upon is somewhere deep inside this website a low resolution version of those said photos and experiences and of course all these statements I&#39;ve been making would be completely arbitrary if I didn&#39;t loop back to this number this number is so big that it would take you trillions of years just to type it let alone see even a tiny fraction of the actual images it represents it would take you 10 to the 96174 years just to watch the universal slideshow this is the number 10 with 961 th000 zeros after it even if I wanted to show you this number without any scientific notation in this video this video would 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&#39;t really mean anything to most of us they might as well be Infinity Minecraft is infinitely large there&#39;s this functiona infinite World at your disposal Limitless possibilities and then there&#39;s you the player again Alone lost drifting without a direction in this canvas of a World Minecraft has given you it&#39;s like watching the universal slideshow on that website you will never really know what will come next there&#39;s just so much to explore to do to conquer that there effectively isn&#39;t anything to do that is even remotely meaningful to anyone besides yourself I highly recommend checking out the babble image archives I could sit here explaining the true magnitude of this website for hours on end but it would probably just be better for you 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 you&#39;re looking at your image surrounded by probably millions of other images that contain an incoherent mess of random randomly colored pixels learn 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 babble image archives and thus [Music] 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&#39;ve been talking about are 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 they once played on years ago and once again grasp the true nature of how fundamentally trapped they are inside it despite this all these mechanisms work independently of what is probably the biggest contributing factor to Minecraft&#39;s loneliness even if you don&#39;t know the true scale of a Minecraft world don&#39;t know how many possible Minecraft worlds there are or have just come to terms with its Limitless reality there is still an element of Minecraft&#39;s game design that I doubt any of you who have ever played Minecraft haven&#39;t experienced or have at least thought about what I&#39;m talking about as the final and possibly most impactful section in this video what I&#39;m talking about [Music] is you cannot talk about the loneliness of Minecraft without mentioning its soundtrack it&#39;s something that most of you watching this video have undoubtedly heard or know of in some sort of way the 54 song composition creat ated by German musician Daniel Rosenfeld most commonly known as C418 is by far the most widely known video game soundtrack ever made most don&#39;t realize it but Minecraft 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 Minecraft truly wouldn&#39;t be the same without it Minecraft&#39;s music greatly contributes to the feel feelings of loneliness and Nostalgia often experienced within Minecraft the tracks are so Timeless you can play Minecraft for hundreds and sometimes thousands of hours and the music will still have the same effect this is likely because of how well Minecraft&#39;s music represents Minecraft as a game it perfectly captures those feelings of loneliness and Nostalgia I previously described most likely because of how inherently simple it is Minecraft music is rarely more complicated than a Bas piano track accompanied by maybe a synthesizer or some other instruments its simple nature perfectly matches the stylistic Simplicity of the game in which It&#39;s associated with it perfectly captures the 16x 16 pixel feel when traversing your Minecraft world Minecraft&#39;s music also perfectly captures The Emptiness of a Minecraft world and how it can be so freeing yet so confining it&#39;s hard to describe exactly how it accomplishes this task besides stating that it mimics mine Simplicity the biggest thing that differentiates from other video game soundtracks is mainly that Minecraft&#39;s music can play at literally any time in almost any place within the game it doesn&#39;t matter whether you&#39;re chopping trees mining or have just lost hours of progress to a skeleton the same set of randomized songs will play there&#39;s no specific song for mining in caves traversing mountains or even chopping trees Minecraft&#39;s music runs independent of the game circumstances the curtain mood is often dependent on what tracks are playing this is the main reason why Minecraft music is also so nostalgic it captures the timelessness of Minecraft this is mainly because there&#39;s no set time period in which Minecraft story takes place and no time period in which we can trace back 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 Wester games you may hear a more string or vocal based soundtrack whil games that are set in the Middle Ages may include more orchestral instrument choices Minecraft soundtrack is primarily based on piano which isn&#39;t often associated with any specific time period by most people this further reflects Minecraft&#39;s Timeless nature this instrument choice is just furthered by the fact that again Minecraft&#39;s music doesn&#39;t have a specific time in which it&#39;s played again running independently of what&#39;s happening in the game these two combined factors are the reason why Minecraft&#39;s music and thus Minecraft is so nostalgic so Timeless and so fundamentally empty this music creates memories within the game and also within our lives music has been scientifically proven having an enormous power in invoking memories Minecraft 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 perfect Ally 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 Minecraft soundtrack is the perfect thing to wrap up this video as my initial intention on writing 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 the very nature of my inecraft is double-sided those who only focus on the negative aspects of the game we&#39;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 unpacked modern culture in ways I couldn&#39;t even explain I think it&#39;s safe to say that despite all the alleged drama currently surrounding Minecraft I think it&#39;s here to stay there will likely never be another game like [Music] [Music] Minecraft these videos often take hundreds of hours to make and I would really appreciate it if you would support the production of these videos by subscribing it&#39;s free I also opened up memberships on this channel so if you&#39;d like to see some exclusive behind thes scenes content or just some other random stuff or if you want to support the production of these videos and is me as a Creator you know make him come out faster please consider joining it&#39;s literally under a dollar I&#39;m sure you have more than that in your couch thanks for listening to my Yap session bye [Music] [Music]

Transcript for:The Loneliness and Nostalgia of Minecraft

Transcript for:
The Loneliness and Nostalgia of Minecraft