Minecraft as a Storytelling Medium

I’ve been playing Minecraft off and on for something like seven or eight years at this point. I’ve probably sunk more hours into it than any other game (a number I hope to never be told…). And so, when I started writing about video games on Unsupervised Nerds, this was one that came to my mind fairly early on.

There was a problem though.

While I have spent so much time playing Minecraft, I couldn’t figure out what exactly there was I could say about it. So far everything I have written about games have been along the lines of how mechanics help build story and theme or explaining references in motifs. But then when it came to Minecraft, there is no real story to talk about, and there isn’t much to pull from as far as visual references.

This was a problem that I kept coming back to, until about a week ago when it finally hit me: the lack of defined story, alongside the core mechanics of the game, create an experience that is both unified between players while also being entirely unique for each one. It is through this oxymoron, that Minecraft finds itself in a place where it can act not just as a game played by an individual, but as a medium through which one or more people can tell their own stories in a way that most video games can’t.

Narrowing the scope

Minecraft is difficult to talk about in a general sense, because it has so many different ways it can be played.

The most obvious issues that come into play are things like texture packs and mods. A texture pack can change the look of the game into anything from a cartoon, to a sci-fi adventure, to something near realism. And mods, well, they can affect just about everything in the game, adding new mechanics, new sorts of blocks, even new dimensions. Just as a couple examples, there are: SkyFactory (where you start on a tree on a single dirt block and have to craft the entire world from nothing), Galacticraft (which add rockets and space travel), and Pixelmon (which adds Pokemon).

Even with these add-ons set aside, there are still differences within the “vanilla” base game.

There are three main modes in Minecraft. There are the polar ends of the spectrum in Creative and Adventure, where the former is basically a god mode with everything at the player’s fingertips, and the latter doesn’t even let the player effect most blocks around them. In the middle of this spectrum is Survival mode, where the player starts with nothing, but has a high level to which they can change the world around them.

For simplicities sake, I will primarily be referring to Survival mode gameplay within the vanilla game. There will be some reference to other versions, but they will not be the focus. Though, that being said, much of what will be argued can be carried over into most other versions as well, with the possibility acknowledged of an exception existing in the mod community, due to there being infinite possibilities for the types of mods that can be created.

Unity through game mechanics

Of course, narrowing the scope of the game to just Survival mode still doesn’t create a singular starting point. Even within this mode there is still variation in nearly every instance of the game. First, there is difficulty setting, which ranges from Peaceful (no monsters spawn to kill the player), to Hardcore (a single death ends the world), with a couple options in between. On top of that, the worlds are randomly generated, so unless a world seed is used, two players coming into their own games for the first time could be put into very different circumstances.

And of course, because this all isn’t nearly enough to show how experiences may vary, playing the Java edition versus the bedrock edition will also adjust how some elements behave.

With this being the case, with every instance of the game being different from the start, how does it create any level of unified experience in players?

It’s probably an obvious answer to anyone who has played the game, but it is through its core mechanics that the game finds any sense of unity.

Whatever difficulty the player chooses, whatever type of area they may first spawn in, core mechanics remain constant.

Pixel art of the first level of Donkey Kong.

The player can move around, jump, and hit things; They can break blocks and get to keep them if they use the right tool; They can place down the blocks they have picked up; And they can craft new blocks, by placing one or more onto the crafting grid. These are all mechanics that remain constant throughout the modes of play. Even in Creative or in mods, these are all there for the player.

These are building blocks of gameplay in Minecraft.

Survival mode specifically has some other mechanics that are generally true (though there are ways to change just about anything in the settings or command blocks): things like a day-night cycle where monsters can spawn in the world at night, and the need to eat because health can only regenerate when food levels are full.

Extrapolating these commonalities in such a way as to sound vague or simplistic is incredibly important in seeing how a game that is all about unique circumstances can also be an experience that is shared between all of its players.

It is through these unifying qualities that Minecraft becomes a game that can be shared between players, even when their specifics experiences are completely different.

Here is a very basic example: Player A spawns in a jungle, and Player B on a tiny island of sand. The two starting points couldn’t be more different, but the core game remains the same: they need to move around to find blocks that they can break in order to build with them or use them to craft new things. Player A has an abundance of trees, a very important crafting material early on, while Player B has none. This means Player B is going to have a much more difficult time starting out and will need to travel before they can craft any tools.

Though the game itself is beginning very differently for Player A and Player B, if the two were to talk after playing, they would be able to share a common language because of these core mechanics. When Player B tells Player A that they spawned on an island with no trees, no further explanation is going to be necessary, Player A will understand the difficulty Player B was faced with.

Much of this will probably have come off as obvious to anyone who has played the game, but it lays important groundwork to make it explicit. Without any kind of unifying elements such as these mechanics, any kind of shorthand becomes impossible, and the barrier to entry becomes much higher as deeper explanations are necessary to understand each others experiences.

Designed for Freedom

Now that there is a baseline about how the Minecraft uses mechanics to create some degree of a unified experience, it is now time to get more in depth as to how it works to make every playthrough unique.

Jumping back to the example of Player A and Player B, whose worlds spawn them in a jungle and sandy island respectively, we can already see how the world generation creates an entirely different beginning to their games.

QuantumFlux169’s starter base on the GeekFYICraft server.

The world generation, not just at the point the player spawns in, but how the land in every direction will randomly form, is a big part of the creating new experiences in every world. But it isn’t just through what the map looks like that the game is designed for different experiences.

When a player spawns into a new world, there is nothing in that world to tell them what they should do. The closest the player has to any guide is to look over the achievements in bedrock edition (called Trophies on PS4), or the advancements in Java edition. Only don’t work as heavy-handedly as a tutorial, but rather act as ways to steer the player into the directions of things they could try.

The advancement system is much more organised than the achievement system, so it gives off a sense of more heavily guiding the player, even going so far as to label one of its categories as “Minecraft: The Heart and Story of the Game”. Now, this may sound like it contradicts my early statement of Minecraft not really having a story of its own, as it calls out having a story right there, but what it refers to as a story acts more like a list of hints to help the player discover how the basic progression system of the game works, to help the player unlock everything the game has to offer.

This category of the advancements run the player through the basics. It suggests the player make a crafting table (which is needed to access most kinds of blocks), then to get woods tool, then to upgrade those tools. It suggests the player make weapons and armor, and eventually go to new dimensions and even kill a dragon.

“Suggests” is the key word here.

There is nothing telling the player they must do any of these advancements, nor are they displayed on the screen in any meaningful way to remind the player of the task at hand. They merely exist in the background, a list the player might not even realize is there, aside from the occasional popup that tells them they completed something, whether it was on purpose or not.

Furthermore, the player has no real reason to do most of these unless they decide its what they want to do. There are players who never fight the dragon, just because they don’t feel any real need. If the player finds something they would rather do, the game does nothing to push them in another direction.

This is even demonstrated by how the advancements themselves are laid out (again, on Java. The achievements system on Bedrock is laid out as just a single list). These are split into categories where, sure, there is the one that calls itself the story of the game, but there is another one that is called “Adventure: Adventure, Exploration, and Combat”. Right here it is acknowledging that player may be more interested in things exploring their world, fighting monsters, or trading with villagers, than making it to “the end”. The way the game suggests options for what the player can get up to, is in itself telling the player there are different ways to play the game.

Some players focus on building, maybe with the goal of making a very nice house, or because they have decided to make an entire city. Or maybe their building goes in another direction entirely and they see what kinds of pixel art or sculptures they can create given the blocks at their disposal.

Some players focus on the red stone element, which is the game’s form of electricity. With this, players are able to do all kinds of things, from doors that open when the player steps on a pressure plate, to giant farms that automatically harvest huge amounts of crops.

There are adventurers who like to travel around their world, PVP players who have the goal of fighting other players, miners who most enjoy mining out caves and collecting resources, and all other sorts of play. And nothing in the game really pushes a player toward or away from any of these options. At best, it guides the player to see them as options so that they can best decide how they want to play for themselves.

Minecraft is a true sandbox game that never really ends and allows the player total freedom. There is no point at which the player really finishes the game. And so, without an end goal, the goal becomes whatever the player decides it is.

Or to put it another way:

“Well, I guess I kinda worked it out. If there's no great glorious end to all this, if nothing we do matters... then all that matters is what we do. 'Cause that's all there is. What we do.”
– Angel (Angel, “Epiphany” S02.E16)

A Storytelling medium

With no real story of its own, Minecraft allows itself to be open to players creating their own stories. For the most part, the player defines what they want the game to be, and it can be a definition that changes over time or even between each world they create, depending on the goals they set for themselves. But this isn’t limited to their own experience.

It is with multiplayer and/or recording that the aspect of storytelling most comes into play.

There are a couple ways in which Minecraft is used to tell stories, and the first I want to get into takes advantage of the different modes the game has to offer.

Though a world can be started in any of the three main modes, it isn’t locked into that mode. This means, a player can start a world in Creative, build out whatever they so choose, and then change it to either Survival or Adventure to experience themselves or have others move through their creation.

Achievement Hunter’s Legend of the Hidden Tower build.

An example of this is Achievement Hunter’s Minecraft Let’s Play: Legends of the Hidden Tower. For this short series of videos, they constructed their own version of the old show Legends of the Hidden Temple (the building process itself shown in their Let’s Build series). After it was built, a group of them explore the temple and play through its challenges. It is through this process that the group created their own story to play through within Minecraft.

Achievement Hunter, and many others, have a lot of videos like this where a self-imposed challenge is put in place to create new goals within the game. Or in this case, going so far as to create new games within the game.

Another example of a similar idea, where a new challenge is externally added to the game, but without the pre-construction, is ImpulseSV and Skizzleman’s series Naked & Scared. In this series they take on a challenge that they must complete in a set number of Minecraft days, and within a Hardcore world (which means if they die a single time they can’t come back). This works to create a kind of spoof reality show type of storyline (most specifically referencing Naked & Afraid for their title).

Of course, ImpusleSV is involved in another series, the biggest example I want to get address, Hermitcraft.

Hermitcraft is a collection of individual Minecraft Youtubers who play together on a mostly vanilla Survival server (there are slight tweaks added with data packs). This isn’t the only server of its kind, but it is a great demonstration of what is possible in terms of storytelling within this game. This comes down to where Hermitcraft really shines, in its balance between the individual creator and the collective server, and how both can work with spontaneous elements as well as written (or at least roughly outlined) ones.

ZombieCleo’s armor stand kitchen workers.

First there is the individuals in Hermitcraft. Each member of the server has their own unique styles both of play and how they put a video together. Looking at just a few, we have Hermits like GoodTimesWithScar who has a focus on landscaping, or ZombieCleo who has a focus on playing with armor stands to make complete scenes out of her builds, or Mumbo Jumbo who has a focus on large scale redstone based builds.

Even looking at just the three of them (there are currently twenty three active members), it shows how drastically the experience of Minecraft can change. Here is where the importance of unity through the mechanics comes in. While each of the Hermits approach the game in entirely different ways, there is this core system that remains in place that creates a single language they all share.

Each creates entirely different forms story, but each is undoubtedly Minecraft. Every time one of them mentions a particular tool, or enemy, or any possible jargon specific to the game, there is a sense familiarity that comes along with it that wouldn’t exist without the unified experience of the game.

In terms of the collective server, many members of the group are incredibly collaborative. They show up in each other videos, sometimes just for something small, or sometimes the whole server comes together for an event like their civil war in season 6.

The Hermitcraft civil war began as a prank war and grew until all the hermits picked sides, and they agreed on two possible win condition: each side was given a certain number of deaths before the other side wins by PVP, or if either side finds three flags hidden by other side they win.

This entire event only works because of an agreement between the players of how they will choose to play the game. Absolutely none of it was prompted by Minecraft itself. And in fact, in hunting the other sides flags they would work against what is natural to Minecraft by agreeing to not break through walls when puzzles were created to open doors instead.

And then there are the elements of the spontaneous and the written.

Much of what goes on within these videos are about the reactions of the players as they experience the game in whichever means they so choose. But some hermits do work toward particular storylines, either on their own or as a collaboration.

Mumbo Jumbo’s giant pit industrial district.

Again, I’m going to refer to season 6. There is a point in this season where Grian claims some of his things are missing. This leads to him building a time machine, which he uses to go back in time and steal his own things, which becomes the explanation for why they were ever missing in the first place. This means he decided on this plot episodes in advance, recorded his travelling to the past section where he stole from himself, and then pretended to go on as if he didn’t do that.

While this may not be the craziest innovation to storytelling, it works to make the point of how the gameplay can be used to tell a story. It is a completely written event that makes for an entertaining storyline but has no effect whatsoever on the game itself.

Continuing this time machine storyline, more Hermits become involved. GoodTimesWithScar and DocM77 steal Grian’s time machine, and create Area 77, their version of Area 51 (for context, this was around when the “let’s all storm Area 51” thing was going around). Grian joins forces with Rendog and ImpulseSV, and they all become hippies trying to take down Area 77 to get Grian’s time machine back. This all builds to a point where the three of them get the time machine back and take it to the past, specifically to the Minecraft Beta, a much more simplistic version of the game.

And again, this was a situation that was mostly written. There is no mechanic within the game itself that can create a time machine to go back to the Beta (you can change which version you open in Java, but not with a time machine). This was an agreement between the players involved that they would do this and play it as though it is what is really possible within the game, for the sake of storytelling.

These are all presented as a Let’s Play type of video, but with the lack of storyline in the game itself, players create ways to build one out themselves. Where Machinima (animation created using gameplay footage) generally involves the player working against the game in order to create something new, Minecraft steps out of the way entirely.

This doesn’t always mean outlining stories ahead of time, sometimes it is a more straightforward story of their progress from starting in a new world to whatever their end goals happen to be. But the fact remains, that without any story being presented to the player, the player’s choices of how to play craft a story all their own.

It is this process that allows Minecraft to act as a medium, a blank canvas that the player shapes with every block they place.

Conclusion

Many games are used to make videos, both as Let’s Plays or as Machinima, but Minecraft sets itself apart with the way it enables itself to be used as the medium of story rather than a source of story.

The focus of this post is incredibly narrow relative to what exists as possibilities in Minecraft as a whole, but that was only to keep to a manageable length. The points here can be expanded on in order to think about things like mods in a similar way, either as the player creating story within the mod, much like with vanilla, or in some cases viewing the creator of the mod as the author of the story they have the player experience in Minecraft.

Let me know if I missed a major element that either proves for or against this way of looking at Minecraft. Or, if there are examples you’d like to share about stories told within the game.

(Any images that do not contain a link to their source were taken from my own Minecraft worlds)