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Minecraft and Philosophy

williamirwin14 / September 9, 2014

Minecraft and Philosophy

Kierkegaard Would Play Hardcore Mode

by Ian Schnee

Diamonds Aren’t Forever

Minecraft is a building game: you place blocks, pistons, stairs, and electric wire to construct
anything imaginable, from Gothic fortresses to carnival rollercoasters. In creative mode you
have unlimited access to building materials, but in survival mode the player has to earn
them. Survival mode is a bit like life: you have to balance the goals of staying alive and
entertaining yourself. You farm and hunt for food, build a shelter to survive the night (when
the hostile mobs come out), and mine for resources to make tools, weapons, and everything
else. That’s the staying alive part. What you do with the rest of the time is up to you: tame
wolves, explore caves, map distant lands, build a tree fort in the jungle, or quest to defeat
the Ender Dragon.

Like in most video games, if you die in survival mode you can spawn another life and
continue the game with most of your possessions intact. But there’s an exception:
Hardcore. Hardcore mode is maximally treacherous—it generates the maximal number of
hostile mobs and allows no respawning. When you die it’s “game over man [or woman].”

Hardcore mode therefore raises a basic question: why would anyone devote hours of
diamond mining, rollercoaster building, and monster battling to have it all disappear with
one bad run in with a band of arrow-flinging skeletons? Hardcore mode asks players to
willfully make all their hours of work fleeting, perilous, and meaningless.

Insurance companies know that teenagers are less risk averse than adults. So is Hardcore
mode just Mojang’s answer to an insufficiently developed prefrontal cortex? An indulgence
for thrill seekers lacking in prudential rationality?

No is the answer. And Kierkegaard can tell us why.

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And You Can Call Me Crazy, But I Like to Roll the Dice

The good life can take many forms: all sorts of jobs and pastimes are compatible with a
meaningful and excellent life. But Kierkegaard asks us to consider what sort of life would
be ultimately fulfilling and meaningful. Despite the enjoyment we take in our quotidian
existence, for example, contrast that with the kind of life lived by Susan B. Anthony, Martin
Luther King, Jr., or Nelson Mandela. Those great individuals might experience less simple
pleasure than we do, but they also experience something we probably don’t: unconditional
commitment to something historically, perhaps even globally, significant, something greater
than themselves that affects their entire existence.

Those great figures have some of the marks of the deepest kind of meaningfulness, on
Kierkegaard’s understanding (see, for example, Fear and Trembling and The Sickness Unto
Death). For one thing, they have a commitment to a cause that transcends social, legal,
and perhaps even ethical norms. Additionally, the object of the commitment is not
otherworldly and eternal; rather, it is an immanent, temporal object with no guarantee of
survival or success—which is, funnily enough, a bit like one’s bid to defeat the Ender
Dragon in Hardcore mode.

The force of Kierkegaard’s emphasis on one’s “defining commitment” can be appreciated by

contrasting it with a view on which salvation in an afterlife provides the fundamental
meaning to one’s life. In that case life’s meaningfulness is insulated from any of the
dangerous uncertainties of day-to-day living. No matter what happens—even in the face of
death itself—one’s significance is eternally assured.

For Kierkegaard, however, that kind of assurance and infinite security are simply a denial of
the immanent, temporal nature of our lives. It misses out on what is fundamentally important
about our humanity. It negates the whole basis of our caring about things in life.

Now think about playing Minecraft in regular survival mode. First, you can change the
difficulty level to easy any time events get threatening. But even if you die, what is really
lost? Even if you can’t get from your spawn point back to the scene of your demise in time,
all you lose perhaps is a prized enchanted sword and some experience points. The real
weight of your investment and time are insulated from loss. You can live another day, craft
another sword, venture to the Nether again. Death doesn’t really matter.

Contrast the pain of loss in Hardcore mode when you die in the End before defeating the
Ender Dragon. Everything you have achieved and invested time in is gone in an instant,
irrecoverably. That is why it’s a horrid violation of the spirit of Hardcore mode to hack it with
the save file. If you’re not willing to play with a commitment to your finitude, then don’t play
Hardcore mode. Kierkegaard would call that kind of hypocrisy infinite resignation.

There is something bizarre or paradoxical about making your life so precarious, but
Kierkegaard embraces that paradox: embracing the temporality of our existence is hard to
do and hard to sustain, and on a certain level even hard to make sense of. But that’s what
makes life worth living.

The Way to Dusty Death

I am not claiming that playing Minecraft in Hardcore mode measures up to the sort of life
lived by Susan B. Anthony and MLK. Indeed, playing any video game might seem like an
escapist indulgence fundamentally at odds with an authentic life. Rather, I am claiming that
we can understand the allure and significance of Hardcore mode by reflecting on
Kierkegaard’s analysis of lives like theirs, a significance which recovers a bit of authenticity
within the virtual realm.

At first glance Hardcore mode seems crazy, consigning your efforts to meaninglessness. It
looks like a willful disregard for your own interests or a way to challenge yourself with no
deeper import. Kierkegaard’s twist is this: Hardcore mode doesn’t make your efforts
meaningless—it is the only way they can be truly meaningful. If Minecraft could somehow
pop up in 1840s Copenhagen, there’s no doubt Kierkegaard would play Hardcore mode.

Just consider your emotional reaction to the game. In Hardcore mode you sweat it out when
you’re in real danger, battling a dozen mobs. You tread carefully around cliffs and lava
pools. You feel the despair of getting lost, since you can’t just die to respawn on familiar
ground.

Hardcore mode confronts players with the risk and temporality of existence, and it scares off
the half hearted who want a safe escape from the sound and the fury of daily life.

So yes, it is a thrill to play Hardcore mode, with all one’s chips on the table, but the thrill is
just the superficial exhaust created by a meaningful commitment. The cure for Macbeth’s
lament of “tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, creeps in this petty pace from day to
day” isn’t escapism; it’s a commitment that affirms our humanity.

(Many thanks to Kristina Gehrman and Professor Farnsworth.)

Ian Schnee is an assistant professor at Western Kentucky University. You can find
his work in Film and Philosophy, Episteme, and Quentin Tarantino and Philosophy.

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September 9, 2014 in New Frontiers, X and Philosophy. Tags: hardcore, Kierkegaard, Minecraft,
philosophy

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