Comrade-Z
2nd December 2011, 03:51
The Economics of Minecraft
Over the past 6 months I've played a decent amount of "Minecraft." For those of you who are unfamiliar with the game, the basic goal is to survive.
You have a health meter, and a hunger meter as well. If the hunger meter drops to 30%, your character can no longer sprint, and if your hunger meter drops to 0%, you start taking health damage until you die, or eat to replenish your hunger meter. So, one thing you have to do is find/farm food to eat.
The second requirement is to build shelter in order to survive the nights, because monsters start spawning around you whenever/wherever there is darkness.
Primitive Communism
The game (unintentionally) ends up representing the economic history of humankind. You start out in a pristine randomly-generated landscape with absolutely nothing. The most immediate way to survive is simply to go around collecting mushrooms and punching pigs and cows and whatnot. Hunter-gatherer existence. For shelter, the simplest option early on is usually to find a cave and huddle in there for the night. At first, you are able to gather wood to make crude wooden tools, and then you can use a wooden pickaxe to mine stone to create stone tools.
If a multiplayer server has just started a game and is at this stage of the game, I have observed that people generally cooperate and share most everything they have, simply because it is necessary for survival. One person has been chopping wood. The other person has been collecting some mushrooms. But neither will eat unless they combine wooden bowls with the mushrooms to make mushroom stew items that they can both eat. And it is simply more efficient for each person to divide such tasks, so that they can be completed before the first nightfall, at which point you have to huddle in your cave and maybe do some mining until the next day (unless you want to try your luck fighting monsters outside with crude stone swords and no armor).
After living like this for a few days in one area, the mushrooms and animals and some other resources will become exhausted. At this point, the players are faced with two options: become nomads and travel to a different area to deplete that area in turn, and so on...or, start setting up renewable farms for various resources.
Some people go on playing as nomads. The terrain is procedurally generated from a random seed as you move away from your original spawn, and the potential world is for all practical purposes limitless (potentially the size of the Earth).
The pros to this lifestyle are, you get to see lots of awesome new scenery. The cons are, the work never gets easier, and you never get the peace of mind of living in a nice secure dwelling with a renewable stream of resources set up. So, most people quickly move out of this nomadic playstyle and settle down, building a more-permanent dwelling with renewable resource streams.
Latifundia
For example, mushrooms need darkness to grow, so you might hollow out a small room in a nearby cave and plant some of your remaining mushrooms in there. But mushrooms grow slooooooooowly. Really what you'll want to start doing is growing wheat. You can collect wheat seeds from wild grass in the landscape. Once you have wheat, you can make bread, and you can also use the wheat to lure and breed animals, thus setting up a renewable stream of animals as well.
At this point in the game, a very curious thing happens. Whereas people are apt to shack up together for that first quasi-nomadic night, once they start accumulating some resources, they begin to stake out their own separate locations for their own dwellings and farms and whatnot. The distance between these dwellings is remarkably consistent: about half an in-game day's journey apart (about 5 minutes' walking-distance). People seem loathe to gather closer (because people start worrying about "griefing" (property damage) and theft once they start building and accumulating stuff), and they seem loathe to spread farther apart, perhaps because they want to make sure that they can still visit each other's homes via a day's journey and not get stuck outside at night while en-route.
So I would characterize this stage as the "latifundia" stage. The main difference between this stage in Minecraft and in real life is that in Minecraft people don't enslave or enserf other players to work for them. The reason is simple: it would be impossible because people don't have to play Minecraft. If people were to start bullying you on a server, and spawn-camping you, repeatedly killing you each time you respawned defenselessly unless you did their bidding in the game, that person could just quit the game and either play on another server or play in single player, or do something else entirely.
But just imagine if, for some weird reason (like, let's say the Chinese State started imprisoning Chinese gamers and farming them out to farm stuff in-game for hire, like private companies in China already do for World of Warcraft, and say that part of the agreement was that a gamer HAD to stay on this one server for 8 hours a day), the player couldn't leave the server. And imagine that the Chinese authorities beat you with a whip every time you died in-game, so that you had an incentive to contribute to your clients that you were farming for...then you very well might get something like in-game serfdom at this stage of a server's economic evolution.
During this stage of the game, it's rare that people will unsolicitedly give stuff to other people, but people are generally fine with making trades that are perceived as equal. And how does one reckon whether a trade is equal? Why, by how long it would take someone on average to get that stuff (given that something has a use-value in the first place). Diamonds take a long time to find and are useful, so they are evaluated quite preciously. Sand is easy to find and can be scooped up quickly with a shovel on the surface, but is also useful for making glass. Thus, you might see ~300 sand blocks get traded for 1 diamond. I would consider that a fair trade. That's, of course, not a constant, and not based off of the utility of the items, but their invested labor. If someone gets a monster grinder set up, so that you can get an ongoing supply of gunpowder to make TNT with, mining sand with TNT becomes faster, and in such a circumstance, where such a mob grinder and thus large amounts of TNT are accessible to everyone on the server, and the socially-necessary labor time necessary to mine sand is less, I might say that 600 sand would = 1 diamond. (But the server I'm on just started over with the 1.0.0 release and hasn't gotten a monster grinder up and running yet).
After a while at this stage, people will have built up their own secure homes with their own wheat farms, their own furnace rooms, their own chicken coops, their own pumpkin and melon farms, their own enchanting rooms, their own cactus farms, their own reed farms. Note that there's a lot of redundant work here. A server only really needs one communal enchanting room, or one big furnace room where you could get a lot of smelting done at once, or one big automated wheat farm...but when people are just starting out with survival, they don't seem to want to mess with these collective schemes. They just want to set up their own steady supply first.
Now, after this stage, the requirements of survival become a lot less onerous. A lot of your stuff is already built-up and some of your resource-harvesting might even be automated on a small scale (like water-stream harvesting of your wheat farm).
http://youtu.be/J2N583q85PU
(This is the sort of contraption that I would characterize as belonging to the "Renaissance" stage--small-scale industrialization and tinkering with automation still largely confined to the individual manors).
Industrialization
Anyways, you begin to get a lot more free time to devote to building stuff. At this stage, people tend to start re-centralizing their build projects in a central location for general use. "Public works" you might call it. Examples:
http://youtu.be/NFcmvXZM1Ko
http://youtu.be/DYYy99_W754
http://youtu.be/ROQFfMU4alE
A hodge-podge industrial town starts to take shape around these central projects. Often people will connect their rural dwellings to the central location with minecart systems:
http://youtu.be/kNhqEHGXdBs
Advanced Communism(?)
After a while at this stage, the server becomes superabundant in pretty much any automatically-harvested resource, and people will often set up central chests stocked with these supplies for free general use. People tend to spend their time after this point making awesome, aesthetically-pleasing architecture and fun random projects.
Implications
Obviously this game is an incomplete representation of human economic development because it is missing a very important feature: class struggle. Still, it offers some interesting observations.
I find it interesting that a game like this becomes popular in our society at this point in history. Perhaps it signifies that people are beginning to become more intrigued by the economic evolution of human society, and are beginning to think more along the lines of being their own engineers and bosses, setting up their own factories. How long before people demand this sort of power in the real world?
Over the past 6 months I've played a decent amount of "Minecraft." For those of you who are unfamiliar with the game, the basic goal is to survive.
You have a health meter, and a hunger meter as well. If the hunger meter drops to 30%, your character can no longer sprint, and if your hunger meter drops to 0%, you start taking health damage until you die, or eat to replenish your hunger meter. So, one thing you have to do is find/farm food to eat.
The second requirement is to build shelter in order to survive the nights, because monsters start spawning around you whenever/wherever there is darkness.
Primitive Communism
The game (unintentionally) ends up representing the economic history of humankind. You start out in a pristine randomly-generated landscape with absolutely nothing. The most immediate way to survive is simply to go around collecting mushrooms and punching pigs and cows and whatnot. Hunter-gatherer existence. For shelter, the simplest option early on is usually to find a cave and huddle in there for the night. At first, you are able to gather wood to make crude wooden tools, and then you can use a wooden pickaxe to mine stone to create stone tools.
If a multiplayer server has just started a game and is at this stage of the game, I have observed that people generally cooperate and share most everything they have, simply because it is necessary for survival. One person has been chopping wood. The other person has been collecting some mushrooms. But neither will eat unless they combine wooden bowls with the mushrooms to make mushroom stew items that they can both eat. And it is simply more efficient for each person to divide such tasks, so that they can be completed before the first nightfall, at which point you have to huddle in your cave and maybe do some mining until the next day (unless you want to try your luck fighting monsters outside with crude stone swords and no armor).
After living like this for a few days in one area, the mushrooms and animals and some other resources will become exhausted. At this point, the players are faced with two options: become nomads and travel to a different area to deplete that area in turn, and so on...or, start setting up renewable farms for various resources.
Some people go on playing as nomads. The terrain is procedurally generated from a random seed as you move away from your original spawn, and the potential world is for all practical purposes limitless (potentially the size of the Earth).
The pros to this lifestyle are, you get to see lots of awesome new scenery. The cons are, the work never gets easier, and you never get the peace of mind of living in a nice secure dwelling with a renewable stream of resources set up. So, most people quickly move out of this nomadic playstyle and settle down, building a more-permanent dwelling with renewable resource streams.
Latifundia
For example, mushrooms need darkness to grow, so you might hollow out a small room in a nearby cave and plant some of your remaining mushrooms in there. But mushrooms grow slooooooooowly. Really what you'll want to start doing is growing wheat. You can collect wheat seeds from wild grass in the landscape. Once you have wheat, you can make bread, and you can also use the wheat to lure and breed animals, thus setting up a renewable stream of animals as well.
At this point in the game, a very curious thing happens. Whereas people are apt to shack up together for that first quasi-nomadic night, once they start accumulating some resources, they begin to stake out their own separate locations for their own dwellings and farms and whatnot. The distance between these dwellings is remarkably consistent: about half an in-game day's journey apart (about 5 minutes' walking-distance). People seem loathe to gather closer (because people start worrying about "griefing" (property damage) and theft once they start building and accumulating stuff), and they seem loathe to spread farther apart, perhaps because they want to make sure that they can still visit each other's homes via a day's journey and not get stuck outside at night while en-route.
So I would characterize this stage as the "latifundia" stage. The main difference between this stage in Minecraft and in real life is that in Minecraft people don't enslave or enserf other players to work for them. The reason is simple: it would be impossible because people don't have to play Minecraft. If people were to start bullying you on a server, and spawn-camping you, repeatedly killing you each time you respawned defenselessly unless you did their bidding in the game, that person could just quit the game and either play on another server or play in single player, or do something else entirely.
But just imagine if, for some weird reason (like, let's say the Chinese State started imprisoning Chinese gamers and farming them out to farm stuff in-game for hire, like private companies in China already do for World of Warcraft, and say that part of the agreement was that a gamer HAD to stay on this one server for 8 hours a day), the player couldn't leave the server. And imagine that the Chinese authorities beat you with a whip every time you died in-game, so that you had an incentive to contribute to your clients that you were farming for...then you very well might get something like in-game serfdom at this stage of a server's economic evolution.
During this stage of the game, it's rare that people will unsolicitedly give stuff to other people, but people are generally fine with making trades that are perceived as equal. And how does one reckon whether a trade is equal? Why, by how long it would take someone on average to get that stuff (given that something has a use-value in the first place). Diamonds take a long time to find and are useful, so they are evaluated quite preciously. Sand is easy to find and can be scooped up quickly with a shovel on the surface, but is also useful for making glass. Thus, you might see ~300 sand blocks get traded for 1 diamond. I would consider that a fair trade. That's, of course, not a constant, and not based off of the utility of the items, but their invested labor. If someone gets a monster grinder set up, so that you can get an ongoing supply of gunpowder to make TNT with, mining sand with TNT becomes faster, and in such a circumstance, where such a mob grinder and thus large amounts of TNT are accessible to everyone on the server, and the socially-necessary labor time necessary to mine sand is less, I might say that 600 sand would = 1 diamond. (But the server I'm on just started over with the 1.0.0 release and hasn't gotten a monster grinder up and running yet).
After a while at this stage, people will have built up their own secure homes with their own wheat farms, their own furnace rooms, their own chicken coops, their own pumpkin and melon farms, their own enchanting rooms, their own cactus farms, their own reed farms. Note that there's a lot of redundant work here. A server only really needs one communal enchanting room, or one big furnace room where you could get a lot of smelting done at once, or one big automated wheat farm...but when people are just starting out with survival, they don't seem to want to mess with these collective schemes. They just want to set up their own steady supply first.
Now, after this stage, the requirements of survival become a lot less onerous. A lot of your stuff is already built-up and some of your resource-harvesting might even be automated on a small scale (like water-stream harvesting of your wheat farm).
http://youtu.be/J2N583q85PU
(This is the sort of contraption that I would characterize as belonging to the "Renaissance" stage--small-scale industrialization and tinkering with automation still largely confined to the individual manors).
Industrialization
Anyways, you begin to get a lot more free time to devote to building stuff. At this stage, people tend to start re-centralizing their build projects in a central location for general use. "Public works" you might call it. Examples:
http://youtu.be/NFcmvXZM1Ko
http://youtu.be/DYYy99_W754
http://youtu.be/ROQFfMU4alE
A hodge-podge industrial town starts to take shape around these central projects. Often people will connect their rural dwellings to the central location with minecart systems:
http://youtu.be/kNhqEHGXdBs
Advanced Communism(?)
After a while at this stage, the server becomes superabundant in pretty much any automatically-harvested resource, and people will often set up central chests stocked with these supplies for free general use. People tend to spend their time after this point making awesome, aesthetically-pleasing architecture and fun random projects.
Implications
Obviously this game is an incomplete representation of human economic development because it is missing a very important feature: class struggle. Still, it offers some interesting observations.
I find it interesting that a game like this becomes popular in our society at this point in history. Perhaps it signifies that people are beginning to become more intrigued by the economic evolution of human society, and are beginning to think more along the lines of being their own engineers and bosses, setting up their own factories. How long before people demand this sort of power in the real world?