You'd be forgiven for not noticing that last Friday was a potentially watershed moment for gaming culture. Specifically, it was the release of Alex Kisiel's feature-length Minecraft Civilization, two years in the making, which documents the rise and fall of nation-states in a thousand-player multiplayer Minecraft server.
Kisiel, who goes by "ish," is not Minecraft's largest content creator by any means: his last major video received 34 million views, which is a lot, but not quite at the levels of "Minecraft Purge" or the extremely dumb (and extremely memed) Parkour Civilization. What sets ish's videos apart is their sheer ambition and scope, and the way they treat Minecraft as a creative medium in and of itself—not just a storytelling tool, but something that enables stories that couldn't be conceived of otherwise.
People who write critically about video games often focus on either the "pure" design of a game—how well its mechanics work, how its difficulty feels—or on its more traditional narrative components, as if a game is little more than a film that lets you hold a controller while you're watching it. Both these approaches miss the fundamental complexity that makes games so unusual to think about critically: namely, that they enable unique experiences for each of their players. Their design serves as a starting point for player experience; what players make of a game matters as much as the design of the game itself. This is particularly true of multiplayer games, whose play literally can't be understood as a purely individual experience. It's the inherent ambiguity of game-as-art or game-as-experience: the game makes the player and the player makes the game.
In the mid-00s, this fact inspired a new approach to writing about games, appropriately called New Games Journalism. Rather than writing about games themselves, writers would talk about their experiences within those games, treating games as scaffolding for the "real" experiences players had. This opened up room to tell stories that weren't strictly invented by those games' designers: journalists could write about the stakes of bigotry in a duel [CW: intense racist language], or they might live as a pacifist in violent fantasy worlds. More creative storytellers found that they could blur the lines between real and invented gameplay to turn Animal Crossing into a horror movie, or to tell harrowing apocalyptic stories about living basketball players.
(And this trend proved to be serious fertile ground: Jon Bois, who rose to fame with his Breaking Madden stories about inventing a 400-pound quarterback named Clarence BEEFTANK, went on to write arguably the single greatest work of digital fiction using narrative techniques that he'd developed while messing around with Madden games.)
Some games have become famous purely for the sheer scope of the ambitions that they enable in players. EVE Online, while far less popular an MMORPG than World of Warcraft and its ilk, has become infamous for its decades of intense political machinations and online battles that draw in thousands of players at at time—infamous enough that individual battles have Wikipedia articles dedicated to them. It even spawned a series of histories, Empires of EVE, that document the evolution of its universe, virtually all of which was created by players themselves.
There's evidence that players respond powerfully to games that offer them genuine creative freedom. For a long times, The Sims was the bestselling game of all time, fueled by players' obsessions with telling stories about their created families. Indie simulators like Stardew Valley routinely outsell bigger-budget studio productions, by offering players a world to play stories within. Even large-scale RPGs like Skyrim tie into this trend: a huge part of their appeal is offering a world big enough, and responsive enough to player actions, that it lets players choose exactly who they want to become, what niche they want to fill, and how they want to shape the future of these worlds through their actions.
And then, of course, there's Minecraft, which is perhaps the only franchise in video game history that you could argue has outshone Mario itself. Minecraft, with its crude graphics and often-simplistic gameplay, became a worldwide sensation—so much so that other bestselling games often rip off some of its terminology wholesale. (Terraria models some of its resources and mechanics directly off Minecraft's initial design; Stardew Valley is more-or-less an exact hybrid of Minecraft and Harvest Moon.) Even Nintendo, which is stubbornly resistant to changing its core formulas, began introducing Minecraft concepts like crafting and weapon durability into its games, which made Breath of the Wild its biggest game in a generation. Minecraft changed the gaming landscape overnight, by discovering a way to offer its players unprecedented creative control within the confines of a compelling gameplay loop.
Perhaps the only flavor of game to become more popular than Minecraft's crafting-and-creation genre is the tactical multiplayer game, starting with early successes like Overwatch and League of Legends before consolidating around the "battle royale" genre of games like PUBG and Fortnite. And while Fortnite became a hit specifically by offering the kinds of colorful world and creative tools that Minecraft and its ilk did a generation prior, this flavor of multiplayer game became popular by adding an even more urgent creative element to its play: the unpredictability and intensity of other players.
Competitive games have shaped the history of human civilization: sports and board games like chess and Go have been a part of human culture for as long as there's been a human culture. As soon as the Internet enabled multiplayer gaming, series like Unreal Tournament and Counter-Strike popped up to give players a chance to square off against each other. Even more "friendly" game designers like Nintendo have spawned massively popular competitive games; their attempt to make Super Smash Bros less cutthroat than other fighting games wound up being what made it such a tournament staple. In fact, accessibility has become one of the major factors that determines which competitive games draw huge crowds: since competition itself has a way of intimidating and chasing off less experienced, diehard players, games which can handle intense competition while still being approachable to newcomers have been phenomenally popular.
It makes sense, then, that Minecraft—already a tremendous hit whose multiplayer mechanics promote collaboration rather than cutthroatedness—has been turned into a platform for hosting various kinds of competitive games. The popular "Minecraft Purge" series simply documents a series of battle royales, literally modeled around PUBG/Fortnite-style gameplay. While Minecraft's combat mechanics are fairly limited, the play (and the world) surrounding those mechanics is rich and intricate in a way that mere battle royales' mechanics are not. But it's the "Civilization"-style series—particularly ish's—that best use both Minecraft's mechanics and gaming's advantages as a medium to create an experience that couldn't possibly be constructed in any other way.
In the year 2000, the reality series Survivor became an unprecedented hit (and ushered in a new genre of television) for reasons that it didn't remotely expect. The producers behind Survivor expected it to be a brutal series in which the strong dominate the weak, Darwinism prevails, and the winner is crowned based on who proved to be the toughest and most "alpha." Instead, Survivor quickly revealed itself to be a social game more than anything, in which players' alliances (and their ability to maneuver within them) proved more important than any one individual's strength. The fascinating meta-game of Survivor, in fact, revolves around players' perceptions of one another: make yourself too strong, and you start to be perceived as a threat, which means you almost certainly won't last long. And in a world where threats can look like more than mere strength—a world in which social machinations are more important than raw strength—the ability to do well in Survivor itself marks you as a target on Survivor. The ever-shifting intricacy of the social game is what's kept the show going strong across 50 seasons (along with dozens of international spinoffs).
It's a bit of a giveaway that ish describes Minecraft Civilization the same way that Survivor describes itself: as a "social experiment." And the way he edits his videos together similarly seems derived from Survivor's manner of storytelling, eschewing simple three-act plot arcs—which Minecraft Purge, on the other hand, over-uses—for a series of threads tracking core alliances and groups, plotting the evolving friendships and enmities between individual characters, and telling a tale that, above all, attempts to explain how, exactly, players wind up meeting the fates that they do. There are similar phases, in fact, between ish's stories and Survivor's seasons: you get the initial jubilation of people dreaming up big schemes, the growing sourness with which they come into conflict, and the tension as each person plots to either seize control or jump ship or hold their alliances together.
The difference between Survivor and Minecraft is that, well, Minecraft offers a far more fluid and malleable world—and it allows fifty times more players, too. Survivor players aren't building volcano fortresses (though they do occasionally make spy nests). They have the numbers to create sleeper cells within broader alliances, but they don't have the raw numbers to create genuine political states with. And the thrill of ish's Minecraft videos is similar to the thrill of EVE Online: these players aren't playacting politics, they're doing politics. (One of EVE's central schemers, in fact, was a United States diplomat in real life.) Their empires might be ludicrous, their plots might be melodramatic, but these people are genuinely creating communities, and dealing with conflicts, that exist for the duration of these events. And unlike Survivor, and unlike even political board games like Diplomacy, these events don't offer their players any single competitive objective: there is no "point" to them, no singular "win condition," that every player knows all the others are gunning for. Whatever narratives arise come from the relationships that evolve between the players themselves.
For the first two years of its existence, Minecraft itself had no "end." And while it finally introduced one—literally called The End—very few players see getting to The End as the true objective of playing Minecraft. If anything, The End is just one ambition among many; it's sought after, not as an achievement, but as a source of rare resources that might enable a player's real goals, all of which the player themselves made up. In a sense, ish's Civilization videos mirror what makes Minecraft special to begin with—and they do justice, not just to Minecraft, but to the same profundity that Minecraft itself does such justice to. They truly internalize that belief that the game isn't what you play, but what you make. Just as Survivor quickly realized that its physical competitions mattered far less than the machinations of the players themselves, Minecraft Civilization understands that its responsibility is to enable its players, then sit back and let the players do what they do best.
Watching other civilization-style videos throws the skillfulness of ish's events into stark relief. Other civilizations frame themselves intentionally as a war between pre-determined nations; they throw continual challenges (and harsh punishments) their players' way, framing themselves as a competition first and foremost. Their narrative editing focuses on events, emphasizing grandiose moments, rather than dwelling on the justification for those events, and the stories of the individuals who both initiate events and suffer their consequences.
Ish's skillfulness shows itself in the care with which he designs his players' worlds. In his last Civilization video, players were divided onto four islands, each with a unique physical climate; each island's development was informed purely by the challenges of its geological nature. Several days into the events, a fifth island secretly emerged; ish makes it clear that he and his team expect the players to react to its discovery in certain ways, only to find that they respond completely differently than he'd anticipated. The new civilization starts by dividing its players onto two islands, one of which has an abundance of resources and one of which has virtually none; the narrative revolves, not around how each group responds to its own fortunes or to the other island's, but around how each one thinks the other one might be thinking, and planning, and scheming.
(In a marvelous touch, the resource-poor island has one powerful, secret material buried beneath it which the resource-rich island doesn't have access to. When it's discovered, however, the question isn't how the citizens of the island use it to their advantage: it's whether the people who discovered it will share their newfound wealth, or use it to better position themselves within their own community.)
One of the fascinating byproducts of this event involving so many players—and taking place entirely within a computer game—is that ish was not the only person creating videos about his own event. In fact, another player's video about his experiences on the islands was released almost a year ago, and has over 3 million views in its own right. What's more, the faction of players he enmeshed himself with—a so-called "Canadian drug cartel"—isn't featured in ish's own video of the event whatsoever: ish references its existence in a single sentence without expounding, because the stories he chose to focus on wound up not involving the drug cartel at all.
This is to be expected in a thousand-player event: there's no way a single video, feature-length or otherwise, could possibly cover that many people's experiences, let alone in-depth. What's fascinating here is that the players have room to tell their own stories, and that the nature of the event allows those stories to be as colorful and as rich as the central one that ish's video revolves around. Over the last few days, other people have released event videos of their own, some of which dovetail with ish's narrative—including one released by the player who ish turned into his "protagonist," detailing his own plight—and some of which involve civilizations which ish barely touches upon. The release of these videos goes a step further even than the Empires of EVE histories: they're more akin to historiographies, documenting multiple perspectives on a single series of events, and sometimes outright conflicting with one another in their retellings.
But even within this panoply of storytellers, ish's own video stands out, both for the care of his editing and for his fascination with how things happened. In a way, his film is a story of what this game was—not what he intended it to be, but what his players made it. It's a unique use, not just of gaming as a medium, but of Minecraft specifically as a medium in and of itself. In some ways, this was a game that ish built on top of Minecraft, by designing a unique world and a unique set of rules that Minecraft allows for but didn't come up with itself. In other ways, describing it that way doesn't quite go far enough. This wasn't a battle royale, uniting its players around a single competitive goal. This wasn't Survivor or even EVE Online, whose mechanics are geared towards specific flavors of scheming and usurpation and betrayal. More than anything, this was an environment: a space shaped by play mechanics and by material world alike, and shaped by its players more than by either of those two things. The nouns that come to mind to me are even more abstract than that: this kind of game might be more precisely described as an opportunity, or as the potential for things to happen.
That's what games are, in the end: not the things that happen, but the potential things that could happen. When New Games Journalists began writing about experiences rather than games, it was because they felt that telling stories of what did happen might be the best way to articulate what a given game might allow to happen. And Minecraft Civilization feels like a celebration, simultaneously, of what Minecraft lets its players do and of what players found a way to let Minecraft become. That's true here of both ish's players and of ish himself. And what makes Minecraft Civilization so uniquely compelling is that ish leans into what Minecraft does best, and what games do best, and builds something on top of it that keeps its real objective in sight: not to tell stories about players, but to give players a chance to tell stories about themselves. It succeeds because it comes weirdly close to doing what actual civilization does; it succeeds by demonstrating that, on some level, this the kind of interplay that actual civilization is built upon too.
Kisiel, who goes by "ish," is not Minecraft's largest content creator by any means: his last major video received 34 million views, which is a lot, but not quite at the levels of "Minecraft Purge" or the extremely dumb (and extremely memed) Parkour Civilization. What sets ish's videos apart is their sheer ambition and scope, and the way they treat Minecraft as a creative medium in and of itself—not just a storytelling tool, but something that enables stories that couldn't be conceived of otherwise.
People who write critically about video games often focus on either the "pure" design of a game—how well its mechanics work, how its difficulty feels—or on its more traditional narrative components, as if a game is little more than a film that lets you hold a controller while you're watching it. Both these approaches miss the fundamental complexity that makes games so unusual to think about critically: namely, that they enable unique experiences for each of their players. Their design serves as a starting point for player experience; what players make of a game matters as much as the design of the game itself. This is particularly true of multiplayer games, whose play literally can't be understood as a purely individual experience. It's the inherent ambiguity of game-as-art or game-as-experience: the game makes the player and the player makes the game.
In the mid-00s, this fact inspired a new approach to writing about games, appropriately called New Games Journalism. Rather than writing about games themselves, writers would talk about their experiences within those games, treating games as scaffolding for the "real" experiences players had. This opened up room to tell stories that weren't strictly invented by those games' designers: journalists could write about the stakes of bigotry in a duel [CW: intense racist language], or they might live as a pacifist in violent fantasy worlds. More creative storytellers found that they could blur the lines between real and invented gameplay to turn Animal Crossing into a horror movie, or to tell harrowing apocalyptic stories about living basketball players.
(And this trend proved to be serious fertile ground: Jon Bois, who rose to fame with his Breaking Madden stories about inventing a 400-pound quarterback named Clarence BEEFTANK, went on to write arguably the single greatest work of digital fiction using narrative techniques that he'd developed while messing around with Madden games.)
Some games have become famous purely for the sheer scope of the ambitions that they enable in players. EVE Online, while far less popular an MMORPG than World of Warcraft and its ilk, has become infamous for its decades of intense political machinations and online battles that draw in thousands of players at at time—infamous enough that individual battles have Wikipedia articles dedicated to them. It even spawned a series of histories, Empires of EVE, that document the evolution of its universe, virtually all of which was created by players themselves.
There's evidence that players respond powerfully to games that offer them genuine creative freedom. For a long times, The Sims was the bestselling game of all time, fueled by players' obsessions with telling stories about their created families. Indie simulators like Stardew Valley routinely outsell bigger-budget studio productions, by offering players a world to play stories within. Even large-scale RPGs like Skyrim tie into this trend: a huge part of their appeal is offering a world big enough, and responsive enough to player actions, that it lets players choose exactly who they want to become, what niche they want to fill, and how they want to shape the future of these worlds through their actions.
And then, of course, there's Minecraft, which is perhaps the only franchise in video game history that you could argue has outshone Mario itself. Minecraft, with its crude graphics and often-simplistic gameplay, became a worldwide sensation—so much so that other bestselling games often rip off some of its terminology wholesale. (Terraria models some of its resources and mechanics directly off Minecraft's initial design; Stardew Valley is more-or-less an exact hybrid of Minecraft and Harvest Moon.) Even Nintendo, which is stubbornly resistant to changing its core formulas, began introducing Minecraft concepts like crafting and weapon durability into its games, which made Breath of the Wild its biggest game in a generation. Minecraft changed the gaming landscape overnight, by discovering a way to offer its players unprecedented creative control within the confines of a compelling gameplay loop.
Perhaps the only flavor of game to become more popular than Minecraft's crafting-and-creation genre is the tactical multiplayer game, starting with early successes like Overwatch and League of Legends before consolidating around the "battle royale" genre of games like PUBG and Fortnite. And while Fortnite became a hit specifically by offering the kinds of colorful world and creative tools that Minecraft and its ilk did a generation prior, this flavor of multiplayer game became popular by adding an even more urgent creative element to its play: the unpredictability and intensity of other players.
Competitive games have shaped the history of human civilization: sports and board games like chess and Go have been a part of human culture for as long as there's been a human culture. As soon as the Internet enabled multiplayer gaming, series like Unreal Tournament and Counter-Strike popped up to give players a chance to square off against each other. Even more "friendly" game designers like Nintendo have spawned massively popular competitive games; their attempt to make Super Smash Bros less cutthroat than other fighting games wound up being what made it such a tournament staple. In fact, accessibility has become one of the major factors that determines which competitive games draw huge crowds: since competition itself has a way of intimidating and chasing off less experienced, diehard players, games which can handle intense competition while still being approachable to newcomers have been phenomenally popular.
It makes sense, then, that Minecraft—already a tremendous hit whose multiplayer mechanics promote collaboration rather than cutthroatedness—has been turned into a platform for hosting various kinds of competitive games. The popular "Minecraft Purge" series simply documents a series of battle royales, literally modeled around PUBG/Fortnite-style gameplay. While Minecraft's combat mechanics are fairly limited, the play (and the world) surrounding those mechanics is rich and intricate in a way that mere battle royales' mechanics are not. But it's the "Civilization"-style series—particularly ish's—that best use both Minecraft's mechanics and gaming's advantages as a medium to create an experience that couldn't possibly be constructed in any other way.
In the year 2000, the reality series Survivor became an unprecedented hit (and ushered in a new genre of television) for reasons that it didn't remotely expect. The producers behind Survivor expected it to be a brutal series in which the strong dominate the weak, Darwinism prevails, and the winner is crowned based on who proved to be the toughest and most "alpha." Instead, Survivor quickly revealed itself to be a social game more than anything, in which players' alliances (and their ability to maneuver within them) proved more important than any one individual's strength. The fascinating meta-game of Survivor, in fact, revolves around players' perceptions of one another: make yourself too strong, and you start to be perceived as a threat, which means you almost certainly won't last long. And in a world where threats can look like more than mere strength—a world in which social machinations are more important than raw strength—the ability to do well in Survivor itself marks you as a target on Survivor. The ever-shifting intricacy of the social game is what's kept the show going strong across 50 seasons (along with dozens of international spinoffs).
It's a bit of a giveaway that ish describes Minecraft Civilization the same way that Survivor describes itself: as a "social experiment." And the way he edits his videos together similarly seems derived from Survivor's manner of storytelling, eschewing simple three-act plot arcs—which Minecraft Purge, on the other hand, over-uses—for a series of threads tracking core alliances and groups, plotting the evolving friendships and enmities between individual characters, and telling a tale that, above all, attempts to explain how, exactly, players wind up meeting the fates that they do. There are similar phases, in fact, between ish's stories and Survivor's seasons: you get the initial jubilation of people dreaming up big schemes, the growing sourness with which they come into conflict, and the tension as each person plots to either seize control or jump ship or hold their alliances together.
The difference between Survivor and Minecraft is that, well, Minecraft offers a far more fluid and malleable world—and it allows fifty times more players, too. Survivor players aren't building volcano fortresses (though they do occasionally make spy nests). They have the numbers to create sleeper cells within broader alliances, but they don't have the raw numbers to create genuine political states with. And the thrill of ish's Minecraft videos is similar to the thrill of EVE Online: these players aren't playacting politics, they're doing politics. (One of EVE's central schemers, in fact, was a United States diplomat in real life.) Their empires might be ludicrous, their plots might be melodramatic, but these people are genuinely creating communities, and dealing with conflicts, that exist for the duration of these events. And unlike Survivor, and unlike even political board games like Diplomacy, these events don't offer their players any single competitive objective: there is no "point" to them, no singular "win condition," that every player knows all the others are gunning for. Whatever narratives arise come from the relationships that evolve between the players themselves.
For the first two years of its existence, Minecraft itself had no "end." And while it finally introduced one—literally called The End—very few players see getting to The End as the true objective of playing Minecraft. If anything, The End is just one ambition among many; it's sought after, not as an achievement, but as a source of rare resources that might enable a player's real goals, all of which the player themselves made up. In a sense, ish's Civilization videos mirror what makes Minecraft special to begin with—and they do justice, not just to Minecraft, but to the same profundity that Minecraft itself does such justice to. They truly internalize that belief that the game isn't what you play, but what you make. Just as Survivor quickly realized that its physical competitions mattered far less than the machinations of the players themselves, Minecraft Civilization understands that its responsibility is to enable its players, then sit back and let the players do what they do best.
Watching other civilization-style videos throws the skillfulness of ish's events into stark relief. Other civilizations frame themselves intentionally as a war between pre-determined nations; they throw continual challenges (and harsh punishments) their players' way, framing themselves as a competition first and foremost. Their narrative editing focuses on events, emphasizing grandiose moments, rather than dwelling on the justification for those events, and the stories of the individuals who both initiate events and suffer their consequences.
Ish's skillfulness shows itself in the care with which he designs his players' worlds. In his last Civilization video, players were divided onto four islands, each with a unique physical climate; each island's development was informed purely by the challenges of its geological nature. Several days into the events, a fifth island secretly emerged; ish makes it clear that he and his team expect the players to react to its discovery in certain ways, only to find that they respond completely differently than he'd anticipated. The new civilization starts by dividing its players onto two islands, one of which has an abundance of resources and one of which has virtually none; the narrative revolves, not around how each group responds to its own fortunes or to the other island's, but around how each one thinks the other one might be thinking, and planning, and scheming.
(In a marvelous touch, the resource-poor island has one powerful, secret material buried beneath it which the resource-rich island doesn't have access to. When it's discovered, however, the question isn't how the citizens of the island use it to their advantage: it's whether the people who discovered it will share their newfound wealth, or use it to better position themselves within their own community.)
One of the fascinating byproducts of this event involving so many players—and taking place entirely within a computer game—is that ish was not the only person creating videos about his own event. In fact, another player's video about his experiences on the islands was released almost a year ago, and has over 3 million views in its own right. What's more, the faction of players he enmeshed himself with—a so-called "Canadian drug cartel"—isn't featured in ish's own video of the event whatsoever: ish references its existence in a single sentence without expounding, because the stories he chose to focus on wound up not involving the drug cartel at all.
This is to be expected in a thousand-player event: there's no way a single video, feature-length or otherwise, could possibly cover that many people's experiences, let alone in-depth. What's fascinating here is that the players have room to tell their own stories, and that the nature of the event allows those stories to be as colorful and as rich as the central one that ish's video revolves around. Over the last few days, other people have released event videos of their own, some of which dovetail with ish's narrative—including one released by the player who ish turned into his "protagonist," detailing his own plight—and some of which involve civilizations which ish barely touches upon. The release of these videos goes a step further even than the Empires of EVE histories: they're more akin to historiographies, documenting multiple perspectives on a single series of events, and sometimes outright conflicting with one another in their retellings.
But even within this panoply of storytellers, ish's own video stands out, both for the care of his editing and for his fascination with how things happened. In a way, his film is a story of what this game was—not what he intended it to be, but what his players made it. It's a unique use, not just of gaming as a medium, but of Minecraft specifically as a medium in and of itself. In some ways, this was a game that ish built on top of Minecraft, by designing a unique world and a unique set of rules that Minecraft allows for but didn't come up with itself. In other ways, describing it that way doesn't quite go far enough. This wasn't a battle royale, uniting its players around a single competitive goal. This wasn't Survivor or even EVE Online, whose mechanics are geared towards specific flavors of scheming and usurpation and betrayal. More than anything, this was an environment: a space shaped by play mechanics and by material world alike, and shaped by its players more than by either of those two things. The nouns that come to mind to me are even more abstract than that: this kind of game might be more precisely described as an opportunity, or as the potential for things to happen.
That's what games are, in the end: not the things that happen, but the potential things that could happen. When New Games Journalists began writing about experiences rather than games, it was because they felt that telling stories of what did happen might be the best way to articulate what a given game might allow to happen. And Minecraft Civilization feels like a celebration, simultaneously, of what Minecraft lets its players do and of what players found a way to let Minecraft become. That's true here of both ish's players and of ish himself. And what makes Minecraft Civilization so uniquely compelling is that ish leans into what Minecraft does best, and what games do best, and builds something on top of it that keeps its real objective in sight: not to tell stories about players, but to give players a chance to tell stories about themselves. It succeeds because it comes weirdly close to doing what actual civilization does; it succeeds by demonstrating that, on some level, this the kind of interplay that actual civilization is built upon too.