How to Be a Professional Minecraft Historian

Hello greetings welcome and good morning my name is stoney and i help run the stoneworks minecraft server it is a minecraft server that among other things is focused on world building and history making so we have towns nations wars religions role-play events all of that fun jazz it’s a ball

And one of the biggest and most important parts of this whole civilization simulator is that we actually keep track of its history really well so today i’m gonna show you how we do that and how to be an actual video game historian in the awesome events of the stoneworks minecraft server You can join the stonework server today make a nation fight wars write your character lore and make friends just use this ip play.stoneworks.gg and check below for the links to our discord server store and awesome server hosts at argonne hosting links are in the description down below i love you enjoy the show

Now before i begin i just want to shout out a fundraiser that a friend from the server is hosting it’s to send medical supplies to an impoverished community in cambodia i know it’s legit because i contacted the professor that was running it it’s a great cause from some great people

So to start off i just want to say that i am a history student in college right now and i just finished a really really good class on historiography the study of how history is actually written done and theorized about so a lot of this will be based on my interpretation of

Those theories and everything that i learned you should also like and subscribe because as a student i’m also very lonely and i want more friends to play minecraft with so many of you watching this may have seen my other videos you know when minecraft nations went to war over gold resources the saga

Of the cubist prophecy and there’s a bunch of others so let me show you the process for researching and writing these important events now minecraft history is kinda hard to do because there’s very few proper historians researching and writing history in an academic sense like i’m

Trying to do when i write a video then there is very rarely someone who already went in and investigated the truth of an event that happened already so i need to do a lot of investigating myself to figure out what actually happened and how to write it into a proper story but

This takes a lot of steps first usually i make a general timeline of the most important events for the history that i’m writing for this video i’ll use the example of what’s called the trillium war the first world war in stoneworks minecraft since i’m currently researching that for a video when

Writing a timeline of important events there are some very very important questions to consider at the very beginning why am i writing this history what themes am i focusing on how am i going to decide if a part of the story is included vaguely mentioned or excluded entirely real events are not

Linear step-by-step processes like books and movies show them there are massive things involving the individual perspectives of crowds of people which then get tied together in a certain way when we call it the trillium war or the cubist prophecy history is a way of recapturing the past in a way that you

Can make it understandable in people’s minds but there’s a certain cost to that where you have to discard a lot of information and a lot of different narratives that are not essentially tied to what your goal is now pertaining to that there’s multiple kinds of histories

Defined by what they choose to focus on the most common and traditional kind of histories are political histories they focus on the leaders the wars the decisions the interesting narratives but later on you get the development of things like marxist history which focus on people’s economic and labor

Incentives or history of the analyse school which focuses on making a whole big picture that integrates economics sociology military politics and geographical history or even things like black queer and feminist history which focuses on centering certain groups that are largely excluded from other mainstream narratives for the trillium

War though i’m going to focus only on the political history i want to explore the story of the leaders in this world war how a huge coalition of nations came to war with what’s called the trillium alliance and why the main players being bardonia yamu aodal asharia and the

Silver coalition were all such big deals in world politics and finally to answer the very first question i posed i’m doing this for the sake of entertainment in a video that’s my medium that’s what i do so this history will not be highly analytical or complex or trying to break

Ground in any way but instead it’ll be a linear story that emphasizes the more dramatic and narrative side of all of these events you see that there’s kind of a sacrifice to be made here in what is in and out of my historical narrative so first let me write a very general

Timeline of some of the most important events of this story luckily for us we have a system for this on our games wiki link in the description it’s really cool and the system for this is the chronicles of rathnir and the chronicles of eldum every day we catalogue the most

Important geopolitical and role play events and they get recorded with their dates i pay a few of my friends in game to continuously update this page getting the happenings from the daily announcements that national and religious leaders posts in our discord this is one of my favorite parts of the

Minecraft server it’s a passion project of mine and let me make clear that the chronicles are open for anyone to add on to so long as you don’t delete other players additions you stay pretty objective and accurate to what actually occurred in game and you don’t add small

Frivolous things like you went mining and found a villager named dave i personally kept the chronicles of rathner for its first year so i am fairly confident in my own understanding that these dates for the trillium war are fairly reliable now that i have the preliminary most important events to

Structure the story i need to fill it in with extra information that allows me to see who was involved how they got into this huge mess and the most important themes that seem to be brought up over and over in different events so to do

This i need to go over and read tons of pages of sources that explain what actually happened in this minecraft world war and this is where we run into our first real big block for how to write a good history we need to be very very critical of the sources that we

Read for anyone who wants to get involved in history our job is to reconstruct the past using information that is available to us which comes in the form of reading and interpreting certain sources a source is anything that gives a bit of information from the

Past it could be a book a newspaper a coin a fossilized pit of trash there’s a huge diversity in the information about the past that can survive into the present which we can then interpret and make into historical knowledge and there are special ways that we can look at and

Interpret these different types of sources first primary sources primary sources are items or texts written by people that were actually at the event or time period that we’re studying if we find a sword buried underground in a battlefield that’s a kind of primary source if we have a

Letter written by someone who was on the titanic that can be a primary source for that they have first-hand experience with whatever is being studied primary sources are pretty much entirely what we’re working with in minecraft history these are mostly books in game discord messages that we can look at for

Evidence wiki articles written by present players etc easily the best primary sources we can get in minecraft are videos or full recorded replays of events because then you can actually go through and track what happened thoroughly and we get a really good understanding of it that’s why i have a

Playlist of like 200 minecraft videos from the stonework server alone that are just history it’s my minecraft history sources playlist but we do get a few secondary sources where people look at the primary sources and use those to create a history of their own now again

We don’t get much of that most of the histories that minecraft players write are primary sources because they’re usually focused on the events they witnessed and experienced within their group now there’s also tertiary sources which compile the secondary sources information and analyses into small summaries like a textbook would do and i

Got into a fight with my professor about this i think what also counts here are history memes you heard me i’ll fight you on this tool Now obviously me saying that not all sources are created equal so we need to be very very critical of our sources and try to understand where they will be incorrect about things first let’s talk about material artifacts physical objects that we can interpret information from from things like its

Composition its creation its location that kind of thing in minecraft this could be any leftover structures from the trillium war contemporary signs left around towns or ruins or any pieces of armor or weapons or memorabilia that were kept in museums nowadays material artifacts like this generally do not explain things or make complex

Claims but through interpretation they do show certain important bits of information for example let’s look at three old bases of the trillium war it’s clear that the side that built these three bases found the vertical strategy successful for their goals and that they expanded upon it probably making it more

Effective in each iteration material culture needs to be put heavily into historical context for it to make sense so one cannot get too much information out of these alone but it’s still very important next we have written testimonies and this is where things get really complicated because people have a

Lot of control over what they say and how they say it when they’re writing things down they’ll export all of their biases misrememberings and artistic changes into the source that they write these textual sources for stoneworks minecraft will usually be found in three main places the wiki the discord servers

And the game itself let’s start with the wiki because it’s made for players to record history and lore there the written sources on the wiki tend to be a mix of primary and secondary sources usually players write history wiki pages about the events that they witnessed primary sources or about events their

Group was involved in and getting the information through asking the players that were involved secondary sources but even on a single page because multiple players can collaborate in dumping all of the information in for one event it’ll be a mixed bag of who adds what so

The wiki is a little tricky to work with because it can be hard to know who added what parts of the text where they got that information from and if that information is verified with other people to make sure it’s factual i’m gonna say that 95 percent of the time

Nobody verifies it with outside sources so let me give you just a few key guidelines for reading these kinds of textual sources that one should know when trying to do history first let’s talk about bias everyone who writes a source has biases they like certain things they don’t like

Other things and they have motivations for why they would portray an event or person in a certain way people who are involved in events that they’re recording tend to be more biased because they have a personal investment and an emotional connection to that event and its portrayal in a certain way

This means that it’s better to have a third party source a source written by someone who is neutral or disconnected to the events that happened however this does limit the amount of information that the source writer can provide and this is more likely than not going to be

A secondary source based on interviews hearsay all of that kind of thing but still there will still be biases in a more neutral source and again this is due to what the writer personally experienced with the event who they talked to what they believe and why they’re writing their account of the

History and that includes me i’m generally a neutral source in minecraft history but i still have my biases about i want it to be entertaining i want it to be satisfying all of that kind of thing and finally biases can often create contradictory or competing claims in the historical record

Sources frequently do not agree on key facts or subjects so you’ll have to do a lot of comparison investigating and note keeping to see what is true what people think is true what’s a bold face lie and what’s just plain stupid to give a good example let’s say that there’s a

Minecraft war the great golden war that i already made a video on and if you watch it i will kiss you tenderly on your forehead when one side loses a major war like this immediately after there’s always the question of why did it go down the

Way it did you need someone to blame you need something to learn for the next time if you’re a rank-and-file soldier on the losing side you may be inclined to say that the organization and the leadership of your side sucked especially if you personally witnessed things like bickering indecisiveness and

Bad tactics it only makes sense even if indecisiveness and bad tactics were in reality not that important to why the loss happened if you’re a rank and file soldier on the winning side you’re probably gonna say that it was because you’re super cool and you’re really good

At fighting and your muscles are huge and you have so much testosterone and estrogen in your body that you are unresistible i’m a dork if you’re one of the leaders on the losing side you might say that the other leaders weren’t good that the rank and file didn’t listen to your

Orders or that the other side was amazingly good if they cheated in their bunch of now these claims can all be true at once or they can all be a hundred percent biased nonsense at once sometimes things are just left to pure chance and one of the real problems is there’s hardly ever

A way to pin down what the real truth is so do you see what i’m getting at the interpretation of why an event happens in a certain way is heavily dependent on who’s writing it down and where their interest lies in explaining the event in that certain way people do not accept

Blame where they don’t need to very frequently that’s just my personal experience talking maybe people are more respectable than i give them credit for but they can get away with it because there’s hardly any authority on stoneworks minecraft or in real history to say what’s actually true and false so

When i’m reading about the trillium war i need to be careful of accusations that people are cheating or commanders were incompetent bias is a very powerful factor that we have to look at in our sources that are in the historical record however if we find multiple sources that agree on particular parts

Of the story that is a good indicator that that story part is factual especially if those sources are coming from different or competing sides that would have independently recorded the same thing another factor here is memory it’s decently well known that the human memory is not usually a perfect

Recounting of things that happened it’s really the brain’s attempt to reconstruct events over and over again using relevant information the problem is that over time the brain loses much of that information and as we talk about the past with those people around us the information and language they use can recode and

Recontextualize our mind’s way of thinking about it so the longer after an event happens generally the weaker the memory will be of it especially its minor details and strict timelines now that’s for an individual person but it also works on a larger societal level too if something gets passed down

Through word of mouth from person to person by oral retelling the longer the story is told after the actual event and the more people that it goes through the more room you get for the story to be added with poetic narrative elements cultural tropes moral and religious

Lessons and changing the story to new social contexts it’s hard to say if this is accidental or purposeful in my opinion it’s a bit of both it’ll go from a pretty accurate history in its early years and decades after the events to a legend to maybe even mythology where

Kernels of truth might be kept but it’s gotten very changed over time this is a natural thing to happen in all societies because if you’re not working with the modern sensibilities of history stories changing over time keeps them relevant and important to a society so that’s how they actually stay around so

For both of these cases the closer that a textual source is written to the event that happened the more accurate it will tend to be that’s how personal and societal memory factors into this and lastly you should be aware that nobody ever has perfect information on everything that goes down

In a certain time period even if they are central to that historical event in the middle of something historical that’s happening you usually don’t have thorough and good explanations of what is actually happening and why coronavirus is a great example of that just because it’s a big thing that’s

Happening and it affects people’s lives there was heated debate over everything like this and it was very difficult to come to a consensus about what was true politics baby it’s only afterwards that a full story of what happened can really be reconstructed because when the event

Plays out and then ends you see more of what people wanted how they tried to get it what things corresponded with what actions etc this isn’t to say that primary sources that come from during event are useless no they do an amazing job at explaining how the source writer

Would perceive the world around them at that moment but their stories are going to be pretty small slivers of the actual event and anyone who tries to make a whole cohesive history of what’s currently going on is probably trying to sell you some bullsh this segues into how i research on

Discord discord holds nearly all of our chat room discussions about the minecraft server and it’s amazing for history because almost every message in the game and on our forums is saved and recorded from me to research because i’m a sleuthy booty kind of boy these discord messages are like a mix of

People’s attempts to explain whole events as well as their perspectives during the events and the things that they find funny or ironic in the current situation if someone asks for example why did player carpiscus declare the war between yamu aodal and asharia people will probably give vastly different

Answers based on what they were told who they trust and what they think might be morally right etc carpitius wanted to reclaim the throne of yamu aodal from zika ost who was trying to usurp it she was going mad because the chaos got his entropy was whispering in her ear where

She just wanted a minecraft world war because that’s an awesome idea when i do research for minecraft videos i spend hours on discord trying to track down what certain players said during specific time frames any images or memes that they posted relating to it or who

They were talking to at the time if you can learn how to properly use the search function on discord it’s an extremely useful lens into the past and lastly for textual research there are in-game books minecraft books here tend to be like wiki articles but are strictly a source written by one

Single person they tend to not be very edited or polished because minecraft books are notably difficult to write in so this makes it so that the history that’s written down isn’t highly revised afterwards so i like using these they’re kind of raw but they end up giving a lot

Of good information there’s whole genres of in-game books that are relevant here gameplay guides and manuals religious theologies entertainment treaties all of this stuff can show specifics about cultures pvp metas legal proceedings religious beliefs all of that they’re pretty fun to read and it’s why i keep

The largest library in the whole server in my bedrock box not to flex or anything but my minecraft library is bigger than your ocean yeah karma just got to me immediately okay so that’s all the written material which here is often not very subject to change because people move on to caring

About other new events pretty frequently but still be careful know the biases understand that people’s memories are subject to change keep all of that in your mind and textual sources are awesome so now let’s talk about interviews one of the most important ways i get info from minecraft history is by

Messaging people on discord with a bunch of questions to verify and fill in the gaps of the history that i’ve already read having a dynamic conversation about this history will give you a much much more detailed account of the minutia and on the ground happenings that these histories involved it’s weirdly

Difficult to write an accurate story with these low-level accounts as they inform the actual how things happened in the way that they did who said what who was where at this certain time what was your relationship like with these players that kind of thing key events and details that often don’t

Get written into the textual accounts because whoever wrote those down it wasn’t important for their purposes but now if you’re trying to recreate the history it’s important for your purposes it doesn’t have to be but for me it is but interviews themselves are also kind of tricky you really need to interview

Many people from different sides because people’s biases are often pretty strong and unrestricted when you’re talking to them it’s easier to verify text that you’re writing than the immediate words that come out during an interview there will be many places where the people that you’re interviewing contradict the

Facts that you’ve read or worse the facts that you found contemporary evidence for it is your job as a historian to try and determine which one is the truth or at least show in your history that there are competing claims i don’t like doing this second one

Because it’s not it doesn’t make for a good story but it’s really important because oftentimes there’s no way to tell who’s right but at the same time sometimes contradictory facts can be true in different ways what this means is that if someone tells you something that you don’t find true it’s not smart

To call on them and then start distrusting them completely in my opinion it’s best to engage your interviewee like they’re the expert if something contradictory is said ask more questions to understand what’s behind those claims and at least entertain it as a possibility that could overwrite your previous narrative if you don’t do

That then you’re kind of just interviewing people so that you’ll get confirmation that you’re already right even when you’re probably not but again you need to take into consideration that they will have biases that favor themselves and their groups but it’s still your history you need to decide

What’s real fake or vague as well as what’s important or side information for your story i talk to many many people during the research for these big minecraft events and oftentimes i need to reject their claims outright or try and merge their side with another one in

Order to make the most logical and consistent narrative it’s honestly work that requires you to be critical investigatory and creative it leaves me exhausted just reading minecraft histories and i often joke about that with my friends like oh you guys were doing computer science and coding all day yeah i was reading

Minecraft histories so that is how one does history particularly minecraft history make the basic timeline read the wiki research the discord messages interview several people on competing sides and finally start drafting up a linear narrative that you can tell at least if you’re doing a video like i do

Genuinely i have to end up like cutting 70 80 of the information that comes my way for a particular narrative i’ll do a whole interview that lasts like an hour and i’ll get like two three good facts that actually change what i need to do or confirm what i already have and that

Amount of info still leads me to writing stories that take half an hour to tell it’s crazy how much information gets dumped into a single topic and for me that’s genuinely why i love the stoneworks minecraft server it is so complex and everyone there has such awesome

Contributions to make to it even when they don’t think they are now i also want to just briefly touch on the topic of history making which is writing down those primary sources on the wiki for that i’ll just say please add your doings to the chronicles

Of raffenier and eldom again so long as you keep it relatively objective you don’t delete other people’s work but you add a competing point of view next to it don’t add small things that aren’t important like you found a villager named dave up on a mountaintop and he

Was sacrificing a chicken to the god lux also please please please do write as many wiki pages on the events that you have as possible this makes it much easier for us to make videos about you in the future especially if you add the real players usernames that are

Involved as long as the dates of the events that you describe so just to summarize how to do history in minecraft first you need to know what your purpose themes and methodologies are going to be when you set up your historical analysis get all sorts of sources material textual and oral interviews

And in these be sure to compare them all against each other try to identify people’s biases understand that memory is a slippery thing that gets affected by many different things around them and people by nature do not have perfect information on the historical events that they’re part of these are all why

We look at the million different sources to try to suss out what’s reality versus fiction versus propaganda now from a personal level from my soul to your soul my advice would be don’t get bogged down trying to find the answer to certain questions that are left conspicuously absent in the historical

Record if there’s no evidence for who did this what that border looked like just wing it and try your best and then if you can confirm your best with anything great if not then 99 of the time people will accept it as just a representation of the history not the literal 100 truth

But yeah you heard it here from the history nerd himself first folks remember if you haven’t joined the minecraft server yet you like really should because so often people thank me for providing an amazing server some people it gets them back into minecraft for months on end i genuinely

Don’t know how thankful i am that people just enjoy playing on this so much i’m really glad that we all have something that we have in common here now go out please again send some love over to that fundraiser for medkits in cambodia it’s literally a lifesaver and you’ll be

Doing a lot of good just by clicking the link in the description i hope you have an awesome day lots of love see you later You