How to Think About Minecraft Lore | Deep Dive

Minecraft is a really strange game the gameplay is extremely open you can choose to build fight monsters breed animals and so many other possibilities yet minecraft has a hidden layer to it a story behind the world hidden within plain sight is there lore to this sandbox game how can we find it

If any of you have watched my channel you’ll know that i have several videos which talk about minecraft theories i call these deep dives and they’ve proven to be some of my most popular content if you haven’t seen them what i do is i take some aspect of minecraft and

Examine it in detail with the aim of understanding what it is or how it works for example in the piglen deep dive i tried to figure out why there are humanoid pigs in the nether and what exactly they’re doing in every video i encourage my audience to make their own theories about

Minecraft lore i never claim to be absolutely correct and there’s a lot of things which could be interpreted multiple ways i read many comments reddit posts and discord messages all of which have some sort of theory about the game in doing so i’ve started to realize that

There are some inconsistencies in how we choose to theorize although i have my own way of doing deep dives i’ve never actually sat down and explained it all in one place hopefully this video will help clear the air and put my deep dives in context

Before we get started i should say a few things i’m not a philosopher i’m a youtuber so if any of you do happen to have a philosophical background the language or reasoning may not be totally correct so i apologize for that also this is just how i do it i’ll

Explain why it works for me but there are definitely other ways to approach the game so don’t feel too bad if you see things differently with that out of the way it’s time to get started how do i approach my deep dives join me for a dive beneath the waves beneath the waves I’m going to start out with what i feel is the most important element to my approach i believe that everything we need to know about minecraft lore can be found within the game of minecraft that might seem obvious but actually it’s an important point

What i mean by this is that i put much more weight on the evidence found in game compared to written or spoken statements made by the developers to me the actual game is by far the most important source of evidence right off the bat some of you aren’t

Going to like this so i want to be sure to explain why i feel this way to do so we need to briefly examine the history of the game the original version of minecraft was developed by notch in early 2009 and he soon quit his day job starting the company mojang

Then called mojang specifications as minecraft grew in popularity he began adding people to help with development there were seven employees in 2011 28 in april of 2012 and 35 in late 2013. in 2014 notch became exhausted from the pressure and chose to sell mojang to microsoft microsoft had big plans for minecraft

Including consistent updates and a diverse range of supported platforms this required development manpower and by 2021 mosing had about 600 employees this is a far cry from the single person development team of the olden days coinciding with microsoft’s ownership was a much richer strategy for community engagement with many ways for fans of

The game to hear back from the developers this included videos such as minecraft live ask mojing how we make minecraft dev diaries and so on there were also new written pieces such as block of the week and taking inventory as well as the social media accounts of the developers the amount of effort

They’ve put forth for the community engagement is staggering and i think that they’ve done an extremely good job of this however this comes with a severe disadvantage when we are attempting to solve the minecraft lore how can we really know who is the authoritative voice let’s look at in stone for example the

Block of the week author says that he personally thinks of it as some porous coral-like substance naturally accruing from unseen spores that float in the haze of night is this an official statement on instone or is it just an opinion in the same article yen says that he

Can’t really come up with anything fun with regards to the fabled history of the block even worse an official minecraft video says that in stone feels pain that can’t be true right is it a joke or should we take it seriously this right here is a microcosm of the issue that i have

How do we know who to trust we could go with the hippo route highest paid person’s opinion which would almost certainly be yen since he’s the lead creative designer of minecraft but then why would he allow ambiguous or contradictory information to be released from official sources

And this happens all over the place time and time again it’s challenging to know for sure if a statement is a joke an actual indication of the lore or just the words of someone not qualified to make any bold claims for a person who aims to discover the

Lore of minecraft this is a serious problem this leads directly to the first of my main points i believe that if it’s important to the lore it will be in the game there’s so much noise from so many sources why not look at the very place we are

Trying to understand if you watch my deep dives you’ll notice that i tend to avoid developer statements in my opinion this approach has worked really well i’ve always found the information i need within the game itself this game first perspective is important and it’s something that i’ll mention again as we continue

But there’s a second perhaps more intriguing question that quickly arises how do we know that minecraft even has lore there’s no written out story in the game the whole point is that you can do whatever you want could such a free-form environment have any in-universe history or explanations

And i think that’s a fair question i’ve definitely seen comments from people who’ve wondered this for themselves i think that one reason this is tricky is that early on in the game’s history minecraft was much more clearly designed to be a sandbox game think rollercoaster tycoon does that game have deep lore

No it’s just a platform where you can build your dream park and i think this is what minecraft used to be earlier on in development a game where you could place blocks build houses and not much more than that nowadays it’s not so easy although the

Game can still be played as a pure sandbox the world is much richer than it was there are societies of villagers abandoned structures ancient ruins strange bosses in other words there are a lot of things generated in the world that don’t have a simple explanation rather they seem to invite us to think

About them and discover their secrets in my personal opinion it’s pretty unlikely that a new player would stumble upon an ancient pyramid without asking who built it or a woodland mansion without wondering why there are giant animal statues the mystery is beckoning us to investigate this

Is of course a subjective take but in my experience i really do think that mojing wants us to ask these questions the structures we find are invitations to learn about the world more deeply it’s a form of passive storytelling while the game never says exactly what happened

I do believe that something did happen but in that case why not just say it why only give us a rough sense of what could have been to explain this i’m going to talk a little bit about art since it’ll prove to be a useful analogy there’s an artistic approach called realism

A realist artist attempts to depict a scene with fine detail avoiding excessive reinterpretation and preferring a more precise image an opposing style is impressionism this art presents a more free-flowing view with blurred lines and less exact edges impressionism was widely hated when it initially began to develop but soon audiences realized that it

Wasn’t better or worse than other styles just different could a realist create just as great of work as an impressionist absolutely but they would be different than if the same scene was painted by that impressionist in some cases it’s possible to express things with impressionism that may not

Be possible in realism and vice versa monet’s impression sunrise would not be the same if it were painted by a realist the ambiguity in this image is a strength not a weakness and that’s okay not all art has to be the same i believe that minecraft takes the impressionistic approach to lore

It doesn’t try to explain every small detail rather it expresses itself more broadly it’s an impression of the story it feels no need to be precise just as monet felt no need to depict the docks the boat or the sun as literally as another artist might have yet just as impression sunrise is

Effective so too is the world of minecraft’s lore so long as we recognize how to approach it this idea is why i’m willing to overlook minor issues in favor of the overarching story i don’t try to explain every little detail just the ones that i feel are important

Now this is dangerous if done incorrectly so i want to talk a little bit more about the value of evidence a trap which i found to be quite common when reading theories is that people tend to create the story first and then find evidence to support it another prevalent issue is that someone

Will suggest a theory that is unsupported but not obviously incorrect then they ask other people to prove it wrong as an extreme example they might say that endermen evolved from sheep can we show this to be false it’s pretty hard to do so it must be true right but this way of

Thinking is not productive it’s easy to make statements that cannot be disproved what gutter those when you’re trying to understand the intent behind the game to make a good theory you must explain why it’s true instead of waiting for others to show that it’s false this leads to what may be my most

Important idea i take an evidence-first approach to minecraft lore this is consistent with my idea that the game is the most important source of information i choose to start with the evidence and see where that takes us yet not all evidence is created equally for example the landscape pops in and

Out as the player explores does this mean that in some bizarre fashion the entire world revolves around the player and that which they cannot see does not exist within the framework of the minecraft universe no it happens because minecraft is a video game which is a type of software

And this very realization forces us to recognize that not every element within the game is intended as a way to explain its lore all parts of minecraft fall into at least one of the following categories lore gameplay and technical considerations lore is things that are clearly intended

To tell the story such as the ancient pyramids or the ender dragon for example the main purpose of these is to help the player understand the story of minecraft and they should be the primary evidence source when developing theories however there are also gameplay elements these serve a practical purpose and are

Clearly designed to help minecraft play better as a video game one such example is the infinite water source is it telling us that the water in the minecraft universe is infinite and can be generated on demand no it’s just there to make things easier for the players the final possibility is

A technical concern this is anything which results from minecraft being computer software the aforementioned landscape is an example of this chunks loading and unloading is not intended to show us lore computers and consoles have finite resources and it would not be possible for the software to render the entire world all at once

Rather it only loads chunks which are relevant those that are close to the player so the reason this happens is primarily technical and thus not very useful when searching for lore i consider each piece of potential evidence through this lens is it actually designed to tell the

Story or is it necessary to either make the game more playable or perform better evidence can fall into multiple categories nether portals for example have parts of all three who went to the nether as clearly important as evidenced by the ruined portals found throughout but for the player to do it diamonds are

Typically required unless you’re a speedrunner so it serves as gameplay progression furthermore the nether takes place in a totally different dimension the entire overworld is unloaded and replaced by the nether it would not be technically feasible to load both simultaneously in this way the nether portal fits all three categories lore

Gameplay and technical i will admit there is some subjectivity here not everything will have an obvious category and there certainly can be some disagreements still it’s valuable to at least consider it we always want to find the best evidence so it’s worthwhile to think about if this is actually designed to

Help us understand the lore or if it serves a different purpose let’s get a quick recap here we talked about three central ideas which were important when looking at minecraft lore first minecraft tells us what we need to know about the story second laura’s impressionistic not exact

Third we need to examine the evidence and see if it actually works as lore evidence there are a few more odds and ends that i want to cover first what about the many differences between java and bedrock my personal opinion is that if it’s really important to the lore it’ll be on

Both versions typically they only differ in minor details so if a theory rests upon one of these small facts then it’s probably a weak theory another thing to keep in mind is how big of a leap are we taking at some point in any theory we will need

To assert something that is not fully supported ideally we want this to be as small of a leap as possible to improve the chances that it’s correct in my deep dives i try my best to recognize these leaps and i suggest you do the same any theory can be explained with enough

Mental gymnastics it’s just stronger if you don’t have to do that ah but there’s one more thing i’ve been avoiding because it may be the hardest thing to deal with and that’s the topic of minecraft dungeons should we use minecraft dungeons to explain the lore of minecraft

That’s a big question i’m actually not going to take a definitive stand one way or the other however i will explain why i have personally not used minecraft dungeons in my videos first of all the mundane reason i haven’t played it furthermore a lot of my viewers haven’t

Played either and by digging too deeply into that game it would risk pushing the base game out of the way and reducing its importance thus making it harder to understand for those who don’t play dungeons personally i like the idea of minecraft being self-contained the developers have been ambiguous at

Best as to if they take place in the same universe so i’ve chosen to be conservative and only considered one game independently it again goes back to my game first perspective idea but is this the right approach i’ve not seen anything that’s convinced me otherwise

Yet the dual game version of the lore is something you could very well do it’s just not how i choose to think about deep dives to me they’re alternate universes as spin-offs so often are you’re free to disagree with this or really anything in the video

I just thought it would be worthwhile to give some explanations about why i do the things that i do there’s more than one way to interpret the game but no matter what you choose it’s a great idea to define it think about your assumptions when creating your theories

What is it that you’re using when putting things together it’ll help you produce stronger ideas and be more aware of their strengths and weaknesses chances are none of us are totally right and that’s okay one of the beautiful things about minecraft is how it’s open to interpretation

I just recommend that you are aware of why you make certain choices in this regard so i hope this video helped you think about that a little bit more than you might be used to if you enjoyed talking about minecraft theories feel free to join us on the discord

You can also use the official retro gaming now subreddit oh and i’ve been doing some twitch streaming if you ever want to come and hang out follow me at twitch.tv retro gaming now we’ll go ahead and end with that this has been retro gaming now thanks so much for watching and i’ll see

You all in the next video have a great day you