My Digital Journal

December 4, 2024 7:25:21 PM – December 4, 2024 8:53:21 PM

I feel that it is worth examining how new players to a more established server (one of 188 days of age) often look for trees to punch, and while tree farms can satisfy that urge to some extent, there is this tendency for new players to start from scratch, even if there are countless resources already available—maybe not necessarily entirely, but in some small but telling ways such as the need to punch wood rather than look to possess resources from chests save for immediate needs such as bread.

As such, the most satisfying form of entering a server, it seems, is looking for a tree in a naturally generated virgin land and punching it down for resources, tracing the steps of a single player world, but as time passes, expecting integration in the form of accepting resources from the established players and using those same resources to contribute to the world is natural.

This parallels the single player experience in that a player enjoys the initial steps of cutting down trees—going to mines and reaping from "virgin" caves or creating one's own man-made caves to extract ores—crafting basic equipment, including a crafting table, furnace, and boat—and upgrading from wooden, to stone, to iron, and to diamond tools. Subsequently, they transition to the next step of interacting with the rest of the world—villagers, especially, since they are the closest thing to a multiplayer server. However, it is particularly when the villagers start to reach their max levels in trading and the world they live in starts to look a lot more structured, built, and tailored that they begin seeking relief in the "chaos" and dynamics of a multiplayer server. This is where ideas truly bounce instead of lingering as buildings on the ground floor.

It naturally follows that one can view it in the following diagram:

Single-player Start (Basic Equipment and Infrastructure) and Mid-game (Villagers) -> Multiplayer Late-Game (A sense of global dynamics)

The following bullet points expand upon the complete idea:

• Slice and Pie: This can be analogized as each person wanting to create their own slice of the pie before joining the pie itself. In that sense, no one wants to join the pie unless they have an established role, place, and identity (their slice).

• Privacy and Autonomy: This relates to the concept of privacy and autonomy and how it allows people to carve our their place in society—slice -> pie—self -> community.

• Labels in a Disparate System: This is why people love personality tests ("daring," "introverted," etc.) and labels ("writer," "artist," etc.). They help them find their place and help define their role in a disparate (one with different roles) system.

• Society as a Cage: This extends to why people might feel that society is a cage, because it can feel as though there are "no more virgin forests in which one can punch trees from scratch." This is analogous to being born in a Minecraft server with a rich, vast, and complex history and being forced to stay there forever, with no "Exit" button. With that said, in a real society, one has to navigate the dynamics, complexities, factions, borders, boundaries, social and culture norms and etiquette, and the endless things that make a society so emergently sophisticated, unlike a simple Minecraft server. Considering these ideas, we can naturally conclude that one might be born in a city with a rich history, but they might yearn to escape it and see the virgin forests they find like their ancestors did when they first started the city in which he was born.

• Self and Society: Expanding further upon this divergence from a specific case to the universal level is that alienation is a common theme when referring to the relationship between self and society (though viewed differently when between self and one's community). For that reason, giving someone a way to start over from scratch when it comes to creating their own slice, role, and identity—punching their own natural-born trees in a virgin land—is critical to the development not only of their personality and psyche, but of their level of engagement with the world, empathy, and capacity to contribute to a "more whole" definition of society—at least the ideal of a society as one of egalitarianism—also.

• Childhood Freedom of Individual Expression: Relevant to this is why childhood is a source of comfort and nostalgia, because it presents often the point that one is societally most individually expressive, even if they were at an earlier stage of their identity development, before the "societal regimes" of adulthood.

• Biblical Foreigners: There is even this Biblical saying that echoes the idea of alienation in the NCV version in 1 Peter 2:11 that states: "Dear friends, you are like foreigners and strangers in this world. I beg you to avoid the evil things your bodies want to do that fight against your soul." To draw a clearer line of comparison, "bodies" in this verse has been said to represent societal and cultural norms and taboos as well.

• Fear of Identity Loss: Returning this to a broader level, people are afraid of losing their place, just as much as they are afraid of being in a society, just as much as they are afraid of entering a Minecraft server that does not welcome them as individuals, but as foreigners to a pre-established world.

• Limbo and History: But we are all foreigners to this world and to existence, because we were not at the beginning or the end. We are in a limbo, just as much as a pre-established Minecraft world is both a place where time does not exist yet history is very much relevant, just as much as society itself is a place of both great interconnectedness of history and profound alienation of the slice and the self with the rest of the pie and society. For such reasons, no one wants to have no place.

• Jim Jones' Alienation: To give an extreme example, Jim Jones felt that a mass suicide—though he would not define it as a "suicide" or merely a suicide—was a form of resistance and protest against what he believed to be the "the conditions of an inhumane world," which were his actual last words.

• Reiteration and Conclusion of Alienation: Ultimately, alienation is common among the extreme, the Biblical, and the Internet and virtual, and in everyday real-life moments such as in the crossing of a pedestrian lane.