School of Block
, or: why most people preferred simulation to reality by 2025
Why do most people now prefer simulation to reality?
In the emotional denouement of A Minecraft Movie, Steve1 remonstrates with the other characters about going back to the real world:
“There you got constraints, judgements, obstacles”.
It’s an interesting moment that tells us something, both about this world of piped simulations we remain captivated by (or captive in), and how the avatars of this world represent its values and preferability back – to a willing audience of children and school holiday parents.
Whether the Overworld, the Nether, or The Wend, the worlds Minecraft simulates in the film are presented as being about limitless creativity. In the simulation, a person – typically a kooky outsider who didn’t quite fit in IRL, because their talents were not recognised and valued – can make and take whatever they want, without judgment. In simulation, IRL-stymied creativity is unleashed, jocko-normie bullies are absent, the world’s your oyster, or your Enderman. Minecraft is offered as a set of worlds ‘for you’2.
This is the film’s dichotomy, then:
IRL = constraints, judgments, obstacles (IRL = CJO)
online = limitlessness, creativity, play (OL = ‘LOL’)
How true is this, really?
Steve’s IRL = CJO occludes one or two of the most important appeals about what Minecraft simulates; the film subtly misrepresents why most people prefer this simulation, and this, in turn, can tell us a little something about why people prefer simulaton – in general, overall, and indefinitely.
A Minecraft Movie performs a fairly novel feat of being a simulation about a simulation which is itself a Lego-isation of the world. The film does to Minecraft what Minecraft does to reality: it pixelates the world into chunks. But in pixelising the pixelisation in this way, A Minecraft Movie leaves out important parts of the game and the appeal of its simulation (although it does capture that, in certain senses, it’s a very boring game, a huge elaboration of something not actually that interesting – so much digging, so little depth). These are the bits of the game in which you get to build, manipulate, destroy, control – and accumulate for doing so. The bits, in other words, that are like capitalism’s 19C fantasy of itself3.
In Minecraft, you accumulate as an individual, gaining new and more powerful tools and weapons that ramp up your creative, extractive and destructive power. This ‘coin collecting’ dynamic, is at least as old as Mario, is also what academia has become, and is part of what make Duolingo so sticky. In Duolingo, you gotta keep your streak; in Minecraft, you gotta keep grinding, if you wanna get anywhere. In Minecraft’s pixelation of late Victorian plunder and pillage, you’re in control of the extractive-destructive actions that allow you to accumulate (and I’ll come back to control). In practice, for the majority of players4, it is basically Texas and Queensland in the 1890s, with mobs and villagers playing the role of indigenous people. If all goes well, you get to accumulate, they get to die.
We can see one ‘reality of this simulation’ by glancing at DreamSMP, the invite-only survival multiplayer server. Its founding players are all guys, now in their mid 20s5. Most of these players not only had talent in Minecraft’s various simulations and servers, they sunk a brainbending amount of time grinding their way there. Just as the term ‘Warcrack’ revealed the in-game truth of World of Warcraft (just like Lee Seong Seup revealed that fifty consecutive hours of Starcraft could be deadly), Minecraft could be more honestly called TimeSink. This is because there’s a direct correlation in Minecraft between grinding and rank: if you were prepared to give several years of your life into the game in the 2010s – literally thousands of hours logged – and you were savvy enough not to be fucking around on the marginal servers, you could ‘make it’.
In this sense, although Minecraft simulates aspects of capitalism’s Herbert Spencer 1890s, it’s thoroughly unlike capitalism now IRL: in the simulation, the correlation between effort and success still roughly holds, you do get out what you grind in. Thanks to the co-emergence of Twitch and 2010s-style YouTube, the reality of this simulation now washes up as actual IRL millions for its 1%ers, like the DreamSMP invitees of five or so years ago, when that was a thing. The main players of the game’s 2020-1 elite are now all men in their 20s who, based on their stats, have made a few million from… making it to being them… (a pittance compared to Mr Beast or other YouTubers, but still, it beats selling feet to men who beat for feet).
But what has such intense involvement made, what value does it amount to, what has it created?
This is a point where an aspect of C Thi Nguyen’s idea of value capture comes in. In the simulation, DreamSMP players did some things which seem very creative and funny: there was a whole role play scenario, apparently based on Hamilton. I can’t pretend to understand it properly – but the key point is twofold. First of all, I don’t have to, and I’m an outsider anyway, it would be weird and cringe if I tried. Whatever cool stuff happened, that language, those meanings only make sense to those for whom it is meaningful.
And yet: this is a set of worlds made and maintained by Mojang, owned by Microsoft. In giving over our autonomy, our time, our effort to a gamified simulation owned by a multibillion dollar corporation, and grinding for it, we’ve actually pixelated our values. We start off as people, but we end up like villagers.
But can this even be creation? Or like: what does this amount to, outside of itself6? In opening thinking about simulation beyond simulation, we have to think again about constraints, judgments and obstacles (CJO).
CJO are not only ‘bad’, they’re not just impediments. CJO also describe boundary conditions that comprise the constructive features of realms in which we attune and learn skills and wisdom to do actual creative work. Yes, all of IRL = CJO.
Leaving aside the crucial social factor all this – judgment – constraints and obstacles are apiece with physics and causality. When you rock climb, descend at 70km/h on a road bike, or sail on a big swell out of side of land, you feel this as an existential bodied truth. Sky is high and blue, water is cold and wet, rock and asphalt are hard. In such situations, constraints and obstacles are acutely experienced (which is what can make such activities awe-inspiringly wonderful and terrifying), but they exist in all times in all places. As Pascal quipped: we are embarked.
Much of industrial modernity has been about shielding, padding and piping our existential embarkation out of awareness: contemporary air travel and cruise ships likewise pour a huge amount of effort and resources into padding the edge out of the ocean and skies7. They do this because constraints and obstacles are part of what defines our world existentially: all padding hides the bony truth of the world.
But can we have creation if we insist on as much padding as or culture prefers? This is an open question. My guess is we can have a little bit, but not much.
One thing we can see clearly Minecraft creates is an enjoyment in destructiveness. As with all computer games, the thrill we get from blowing shit up, digging shit up, and fucking shit up comes from the exhilarated denial and simulated annulment of constraints and obstacles: cos IRL, you couldn’t do this. They wouldn’t let you; you’re not strong enough; you might die. In One Man Chorus, Anthony Burgess paired creation and destruction, showing their intimate proximity. He wrote:
“Creation always involves destroying the status quo, breaking the rules, violating the norms. Creative acts demand destruction. But creation demands talent; destruction does not.”
I would say, then, that maybe at its apogee, even Minecraft is creative. Hell, in its best five minutes, even A Minecraft Movie managed creation8.
When we blow shit up in computer games, we get to simulate doing things to people and the world heedlessly– with zero fucks given. It can be fun fragging your friends; it was fun when I was doing it Playing Duke Nukem 3D over dial up in 1995. We had fun, we killed time, boredom, one another’s avatars. We blew shit up, and it didn’t matter, because we didn’t blow shit up. But we created nothing. Minecraft is a game that held out the promise of creation, as a kind of digital Lego. But ten years on from early Minecraft, it swerved back into being mostly a first person shooter – little different to Wolfenstein 3D in terms of its pixelated fast pace and un-nuanced spree killing. In other words, 99% of the time, for 99% of its players, Minecraft creates nothing; all it does is divert its players, mostly children, from the CJO way things work IRL.
All of this to say:
Multi-billion dollar global scale corporate-owned simulations like Minecraft are not only driven for a wholesome, understandable, human desire for play and escape. On the demand side, they’re driven by a desire for constraints and for obstacles – because the simulation gifts the player a felt sense of responsive control. This is what Steve doesn’t say.
Games obey predictable laws of response, the world does not: the shittier reality is for you, and/or the more you find skilful means IRL challenging, the more appealing this becomes. If you are a young, scared, unskilled person living in a shitty world, suddenly the simulation… wow, it seems amazing.
A more realistic way of writing Steve’s denouement line would have been:
‘There you got shittiness, loneliness, uncontrollability9’
When you hold the controller, control is in your hands – provided you remain in simulation. When you simulate control effectively, you can play or live a different persona, or live your fantasy. But fantasy is no accident. So what are Minecraft’s most popular scenarios?
In most of Minecraft’s simulations, you get to dig up and destroy shit, while accumulating metaphorical coins that give you access to better tools and weapons: in a controlled, controlling way where you are always the controller – without anyone in the game judging you for doing this single-mindedly, all day, for years.
For me this is the kicker, and boomerangs back to the core human truth: gamers want to enjoy the fantasy enacted in their simulation – without being judged for that. Those who want their simulation really want it, and if an outsider or Other threatens it, most players do not like this10.
Back in 2006, Joseph LeLappe showed what might happen when you yuck on someone’s yum with dead-in-iraq. LeLappe would enter Armies of America, start playing, then, in the in-game chat, he would start entering the names, ages, service branches and age of death of each American casualty. As he was giving all his attention to typing the names correctly, he would get shot – but then just keep entering details11.
In the mid 00s, responses among players were mixed: hostility, incredulity – and occasional support. One response from a deployed airman at the time, quoted in Wired, is worth brinking back from oblivion, for what it says about how simulation seemed in 2006:
“If I were to die in Iraq I would not want my name to be used in this manner at all. A dead soldier is not, and should not, be a political icon used to justify beliefs that they may not have shared."
People go to games to play, to have fun, said the airman, and while players do go to America’s Army to learn more about the Army, “they don't want to be brought down by reality. Video games are usually used as an escape.”
In a sense, 2006 seems like another world, one in which the fine line between simulation and reality was still precisely what was at issue in first person shooters, which were still a way of escaping ‘a reality’ one could be ‘brought down’ by’. Eight years later, with Gamergate, a percentage of gamers were happy to have female critiques of gaming doxed, raped or killed. A group-held perception that outsiders were going to steal the enjoyment gamers derived from simulation was so strong, and the compulsion of reality’s constraints and obstacles so weak, that insisting a stranger be doxed and threatened with rape and murder came to be what ‘feels right’. What’s striking in hindsight is not only the vacuous absence of empathy or care by the gamers whose simulation felt threatened, it’s the pixelation. What starts with the pixelation of reality, in exchange for control, ends up with the pixelation of the self.
As I reflect on this, I’m left with the centrality of control, fantasy, and judgment.
It’s vanishingly unlikely that Steve would have said
‘There you got shittiness, loneliness, uncontrollability.’
But what he could have said was
“Here you got constraints, obstacles, control – and no judgment”.
Because, in essence, this is what nearly every currently popular game offers, and it’s why people prefer simulation12.
Alongside the state of the world. Reality hurts and seems to be getting worse each year right now; simulation is painless, and the graphics keep getting better.
Perhaps I should finish the post there, so we can go back to doomscrolling, or fragging our friends on Hipixel Skyblock.
But I’m still so curious about so much in all of this, especially as an ex gamer (a 20C gamer!) raising kids who game a bit, in a very uneven 3SD 2025.
So yes, I’m with Baudrillard: simulation ‘won’ (game over), gaming continues.
But I also don’t want to forget Foucault, and the reminder that nothing is necessary. This means many other things are possible, and that this is a surreal hyperreality that came to be, and could be otherwise. There is the Netherworld, and there are many other worlds besides.
So for part two, I’m going to go back over the way in which simulation evolved across the last five decades – next week. We – all of us – got into this somehow.
Oh, and (spoiler alert): Steve eventually does jump through the portal, back to IRL. Like nearly everyone, he must have realised… Minecraft is boring.
played by Jack Black, whose performance is… if you fed an AI School of Rock and then asked it to do a parody of Jack Black: the constant mugging at the world is 10/10 irritating.
As a parent of neurodivergent kids with a reflexive relationship to involuted institutions, bleak prospects, and climate catastrophe – more than most ‘adults’ in positions of leadership right now – I geddit.
which is, of course, nothing like what capitalism is like IRL anymore, no? It used to be such a lark…
Of course, Minecraft is extremely open, and you totally don’t have to play it in these ways, and large minorities of people do not. The key point to me, though, is that most people do. The millennial equivalent right now is Bluesky: in theory, anyone could build anything there (the architecture is really open and quite decentralised, very much unlike the big platforms). In practice, it’s just woke Twitter, cos that’s what the audience who are into this simulation want-expect from it, or cos no one can be bothered imagining anything different from it while there’s still Trump to react to.
There were a couple of prominent female invitees when I glanced to check, other than that, all dudes.
I think about some of my most cherished half remembered moments in night clubs: did that happen? Was that real? I would say ‘it didn’t amount to anything’; I would say, it was mostly about consumption (in the sense of excess, and in being consumed with fire); I would say it still had meaning; I wouldn’t want to make it the basis for a life. It glints in the half dark.
I have to say, I adore it when turbulence hits, and you notice just how fucking frightened we always all are. I don’t want to seem like a pervert for existential edges, but there’s something great about turbulence interrupting people’s thrombosis-inducing screen binges, 11k above the earth’s surface.
Because Jennifer Coolidge has talent: Burgess’ theory holds.
We’d have needed Mike Leigh directing and writing A Minecraft Movie to get this line out of Jack Black though… wow, that would be a film… although, having seen Ang Lee’s Hulk, maybe things wouldn’t have turned out so different…
Especially by non-player outsiders. Obviously in-game chat shows us that ribbing other players is a stock in trade… and as Elon Musk found out recently, if you’re cringe IRL, expect to hear about that when you get online to play.
Luckily for LeLappe, his art project only meant entering details of American soldiers, which meant 4,431. If he’d made the creative choice of drawing attention to direct civilian casualties, that would have been 82,272 to 204,575 lives.
I also felt the same about drinking excessively, when I was. Beer never judged me for drinking it. Put side by side with the ability it gave me to drink my feelings, and that was hella appealing.