August 13, 2024 • 54 mins
It’s so simple, yet so compelling: you mine blocks and cut down trees to put things together to make cool new stuff. There isn’t really a point and there’s not really a way to win. Minecraft is a non-game and it’s the second-most popular game of all time.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck
and Jerry's here too, and this is Stuff you Should
Know in Way over our Heads edition.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
The help Parents understand what their child is doing in
their room all day Edition.
Speaker 1 (00:26):
I hope so, but I suspect that more than just
parents are going to listen to this. And I've never
been more nervous about what a group of eight year
olds thinks of me than I am right now because
I know too much about Minecraft, like I can go
way too deep in it, But I also feel very
clearly I don't know enough to not get hate mail
for misspeaking.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
Yeah, I would maybe not dig too deep on this one,
because the deeper you go, the more you risk. Oh yeah,
it's being mad for sure.
Speaker 1 (00:57):
But one of the key things about Minecraft is like
it's nothing but rabbit holes. You look up one thing
and all of a sudden, that leads to ten other things,
and those ten other things lead twenty other things each.
And it's so fascinating how complex and complicated this whole
thing is, especially when you understand the actual mechanics of
(01:19):
how these worlds are built, how they originate, how simple
it is. It's just I love it. I love Minecraft
a lot. If I didn't get addicted to things that
I like, I would probably start playing Minecraft. But I
know that that would ruin my life.
Speaker 2 (01:34):
Well, I'm glad you're addicted to podcasting with me.
Speaker 1 (01:38):
I totally am. I can't get enough of it.
Speaker 2 (01:40):
Yeah, I mean, if that wasn't clear all that that
we just said, like this is officially a CoA, like
this will be a broad overview of a very very
very dense game that neither one of us play. So
we're gonna get stuff wrong. We're not going to dive
into things you want us to dive into. So just
an email disappointed. Yeah, Like, I can't believe you didn't
(02:02):
mention blank, like just say it. And thanks to Ruby
we got a little help.
Speaker 1 (02:09):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (02:09):
I sent some questions last night that I guess, you know,
will Pepper in it if they apply?
Speaker 1 (02:17):
For sure? Yeah, there was a few things that I
just couldn't nail down, and I was like, oh that
Ruby knows this, and sure enough she did.
Speaker 2 (02:23):
Yeah. Well maybe, I mean she doesn't really play anymore.
Speaker 1 (02:26):
She played.
Speaker 2 (02:27):
I'm kind of glad about this. Like Minecraft is a
wonderful game, and we're going we'll go over the benefits
of it, because there are many compared to most video games,
but it's also a game, and we'll go over the pitfalls.
It's also a game that can really get under your
skin as a kid and as an adult. I guess.
But what it's not great if you're a kid and
(02:48):
you have other things like schooling to do, if you
have a kid that's super super super super into it,
and she never got that into it. She really enjoyed it,
but she's a kind of kid if like you take
it away or for go away for a minute, she says, like, what,
all right, I'll just do something else, which is he's
just good.
Speaker 1 (03:05):
She's not gonna give you the satisfaction of pun.
Speaker 2 (03:07):
Maybe I don't know, honestly, think she just forgets oh cool,
because she was all into the Roadblocks game, which is
a whole other kind of game, and like really into it.
And as a punishment for something, we we wiped it
off her iPad along with everything else except for music.
Speaker 1 (03:24):
Like were you yelling when you did it?
Speaker 2 (03:26):
No, But we just cleaned the iPad free of everything
except for podcast and music and it's like the next
day she was like, oh, all right, whatever.
Speaker 1 (03:35):
That reminds me. Do you remember Doctor Katz, the nineties
cartoon with the squiggly lines.
Speaker 2 (03:40):
Of course, it loved cats.
Speaker 1 (03:41):
And Don Morrera was a regular on that. Man here
was a great Yeah, he is great. He was talking
about how cats just never give you the satisfaction of like,
no matter what you do to him, they're not going
to let on that you've bothered them. So, like he
gave the example of throwing a cat through the air,
the cat would be like, thanks, my man, I wanted
(04:02):
to go this way anyway.
Speaker 2 (04:04):
Well into cats too, So maybe that's it. Yeah, sure,
she's part cat.
Speaker 1 (04:09):
There you go. I think that's what it is.
Speaker 2 (04:11):
Maybe, so that's fine, Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 1 (04:15):
So I think we should give a little bit of
background on Minecraft for people who don't know what Minecraft is. Surely,
I mean, at the very least most people walking around
know that it's a very, very very popular video.
Speaker 2 (04:29):
Game, right yeah, I mean I think so, And we'll
get into the history. But at its base, it is
a you know, if you look at it, it goes
counter to a lot of like the way it got
popular is just almost astounding in some ways, because it
goes counter to most video games these days, which try
to make things very very real looking, and Minecraft is
(04:50):
very blocky and pixelated, an old school and it's sort
of like an interactive lego game. It's called the sandbox game,
where you can just go around and and build things
you mind, things to craft with.
Speaker 1 (05:05):
Yeah, I mean that's the point. And there's plenty of
things to do. Like it's not like they're like nothing happens. Yeah,
Like like you can because there are so few rules,
because there's no real point to it. There's not like
a game that you like want to win or conquer
anything like that. Like, it's essentially up to the limits
(05:27):
of your imagination what you do in this amazing blocky world.
Speaker 2 (05:32):
Yeah. And despite those blocks, despite the fact that there
is no real plot, it is the best selling PC
game of all time, second to Tetris as the biggest
video game in Tetris. By the way, that's coming. We
need to do that's got a great story to it. Okay,
so we need to do one of those. But yeah,
it's it's one of the all time giants. And it
(05:53):
was created by a not very good dude named Marcus
with a K Person of Sweden aka Notch.
Speaker 1 (06:04):
Yeah, and he was a coder from wayback, like he
taught himself on a Commodore one twenty eight, which came
out in nineteen eighty five. I'm not quite sure how
old he was when he was working on it, but
just suffice to say, like that's like you really had
to understand code to code with one of those things. Right,
So he was like a game developer, a coder from
(06:25):
from the outset essentially, And he got a couple jobs
at some of the big game companies in Sweden, and
he was working at one of them, I think it
was King dot com when he was inspired to kind
of create his own game. And he was playing a
game called Infinna Minor, Right am I saying that? Right?
Like Infinity Minor but without the tea part. Yeah, okay,
(06:46):
And essentially you mine resources and you build stuff with
these blocks that you mine. It's a mining game essentially.
Sounds very familiar, and he's not like shy about saying
like this was a copy, a spoof basically of Infinom Minor,
but it was also inspired by some other games, like
one called Dwarf Fortress, which is really simple, but the
(07:11):
all of the characters involved in all of the non
player characters kind of have their own drive and decisions,
so a lot of random stuff can happen in there.
And then also roller coaster Tycoon, where you could just
build your own well roller coasters. So if you put
all those three things together, you have kind of the
rough outlines of Minecraft, which he really started releasing I
(07:32):
think in two thousand and nine.
Speaker 2 (07:34):
Yeah, and I you know, I went down a twenty
second rabbit hole of because once I looked up in
Phenomnor and I was like, wait a minute, did he
just like literally kind of steal that game? And that
is a rabbit hole that I was loath to go
down because I found myself on Reddit and it's just
like it's very contentious of people who are like, yeah,
(07:55):
he totally stole that game and ripped it off, and
people are like, no, he didn't. He was inspired by
So I'm not wading into that argument. Probably you can
make up your own mind about that, right, but.
Speaker 1 (08:08):
Yeah, However, however it came out, he released it in
two thousand and nine and people just dug on it
very very quickly.
Speaker 2 (08:16):
I think that was the alpha version. Yeah, the beta
version main release.
Speaker 1 (08:21):
No the and he was like, he just put the
word out there, and I think he actually started charging
people thirteen dollars for just to play the alpha version.
But he was also getting offs of feedback and like
blogging about it and everything. The whole thing was his
side gig, and but little by little it kind of
moved his main gig, like alf to the side itself,
(08:42):
and then until it was like I can actually support
myself with Minecraft. I'm quitting my day job.
Speaker 2 (08:49):
Yeah, which finally in twenty ten, he founded the company
Swedish for gadget. It's Mojang moj Ang almost a g
with a couple of coworkers name And here's where I
don't know whether to say Jacob or Yakub.
Speaker 1 (09:05):
It's it's not Yakub or Jacob is Jacob.
Speaker 2 (09:10):
It's Papioma.
Speaker 1 (09:12):
No, it really is Jacob. What was wrong with Pepioma?
I didn't read that email closely enough.
Speaker 2 (09:16):
It's Papaloma. Oh, and I knew that, and I heard
you saying it. But I was just like, I guess
you know something I don't know because that was such
a wild stab. I just figured you were ahead of me.
Speaker 1 (09:28):
You just found it so enchanting anyway.
Speaker 2 (09:31):
You said it is yakub I forgot already h JOCKI, Jacob,
Jacob Porcer and Karl MANA M A N N e H.
They hired some people, they had a gaming company all
of a sudden, and the beta version came out not
too long after, and they went over a six month
(09:52):
period at the beginning of twenty eleven to July of
that year. They went from a million players to ten
million in that short time. I'm officially launching in November
twenty eleven at mine Con, which was it's still an
ongoing event. I think they do it online now, but
for a while it was a live event in Vegas
called Minecraft Live.
Speaker 1 (10:14):
Yeah. I think they held the twenty fifteen one in
London and it set the record for the largest attendance
of any convention in the history of humanity.
Speaker 2 (10:23):
I think it's big stuff, everybody.
Speaker 1 (10:26):
It's huge. I mean, it is enormous. I didn't see
any statistics on what percentage of the world plays it,
but I did see that at any point in time
there's as many as like thirty forty fifty million people
playing it at the same time, not necessarily altogether, because
as we'll see there's different ways to play it by
(10:46):
yourself or with other people. But if you just were
able to zoom out and look at what everybody in
the world's doing, thirty million of them would be playing
Minecraft at that moment.
Speaker 2 (10:58):
Oh boy. So starting in twenty eleven, there was a
man named or and still is name Yen's Jeb Bergenston
as lead designer. Watched a few interviews with this guys.
It's definitely YenS, but it's also Jeb and not Yeb.
It's getting very confusing. Notch stayed on on the Minecraft team,
(11:24):
but you know, it was basically sort of letting YenS
run the show. It seems like as far as being
in the weeds he was developing other games, Notch was
and you know, kind of live in the high life
because he got very wealthy, very quick.
Speaker 1 (11:37):
Yeah. One of the first things he did was by
himself a Fedora, which became kind of like a trademark
look for him. Sure, and he started just basically join
the international party set. It was like, how much how
much money does it cost to get in here? They're like,
you've got you've got enough, come on in, so well
(11:58):
it exactly right. So he kind of got I got
the impression that he was not just distracted by this
newfound wealth and all the stuff you could do with it,
but that he was not really interested in seeing a
game like becoming a massive, globally dominating blockbuster and all
(12:18):
the work that takes and coordination and all that. He
was more interested in developing games. So he stepped away,
like you said, and handed it over to Jeb. And
then when Microsoft came a call in twenty fourteen, apparently
not tweeted, who does anybody want to buy my share
of Mojang because I'm ready to move on with my life.
(12:40):
Apparently like all these companies were like, uh yeah, we
totally will supposedly set up that Microsoft deal for two
and a half billion, and at that point he's like,
I'm completely gone now.
Speaker 2 (12:50):
Yeah. Forbes had him as of like last week at
about a one point two billion dollar net worth, and
that seems pretty reliable, not like the stupid Sealle network rights.
Speaker 1 (13:01):
Not too shabby for somebody who wears a fedora in public.
Speaker 2 (13:04):
Yeah yeah, and he you know, he stayed sort of
associated with the game in the company for a long
time even after the Microsoft purchase, well not that long
about five years ish when they basically stopped referencing him
on the loading page in twenty nineteen, stopped inviting him
(13:25):
to their Minecraft parties, like their tenth anniversary anniversary celebration. Yeah, basically,
he started letting everyone know his thoughts about QAnon and
far right wing politics and homophobic things and transphobic things
(13:45):
and sexist and misogynist things. It was sort of the
greatest hits of that kind of guy. And he went
public with all of it and issued some pretty lame
apologies for some of it. But yeah, so that's what happened,
and that's who he is.
Speaker 1 (14:02):
Yeah, so Minecraft just kept going on without him, And
from what I can tell, like when Jeb took over,
is he still the lead game designer, like essentially the showrunner.
Speaker 2 (14:12):
From But I'm not positive, but I'm pretty sure he is.
Speaker 1 (14:15):
Like it, even if he stopped, like a couple of
years ago, that game really flourished under his oversight. Like
he he's really creative. Also, really, and I think Natch
was willing to do this too, but Jeb was or
is really willing to be. Like, Hey, some player, some
random person somewhere came up with this amazing invention we're
(14:36):
going to actually release it as an update or add
on or something to the game like there, and it's
just it's a really creative, flourishing game still because of
that guy, from what I can tell.
Speaker 2 (14:49):
Yeah, totally. So there are three modes, and this is
the regular unmoded version, because as you'll learn, you can
modify it in all kinds of you know, creative kind
of ways or vanilla mode. But if you're playing just
that regular version that my daughter plays on the PlayStation,
you can play in survival mode, hardcore mode, or creative mode.
Speaker 1 (15:14):
Right. So survival mode is like the kind of like
the where the game part comes in, Like you can
actually die. So you're doing all of the interesting stuff
that you do in Minecraft that will you know, talk
about more extensively. But there's zombies attacking you, or there's
creepers coming up and blowing themselves up and hurting you,
(15:36):
or you can drown underwater, fall off a cliff, and
when that happens, all of the stuff that you've gathered
that make up what's called your inventory, all the things
you can use to make other stuff, all the stuff
you've made out of other things already that you want
to use to like extend your life or jump high
or whatever. You lose all that it actually stays in
the location that you died at in Minecraft World, and
(16:00):
but you are teleported back to either where you started
the game or your bed if you've made yourself a bed,
and I saw that if you can get there within
five like our reality minutes five minutes in our reality,
you can go pick up your stuff again, but it
can be very hard to do if you're really far
away from your bed.
Speaker 2 (16:22):
That's right. And what happens is you start basically with nothing.
If you're a parent, you've wandered through and it looks
like what is that blocky pixelated thing like punching everything
for that's the gameplay. You start with nothing, and you
basically go at the very beginning and you punch a
tree to get some wood. And what you're doing is,
(16:43):
you know, you're getting resources to build stuff, so you
just keep punching and diggings things and finding new things
and then and transforming them into i mean all kinds
of things from you know, farms to animals to buildings
and oceans and rivers, and you know you're building, you're
literally building your world as you go in all the modes.
(17:04):
From what I can tell you, got hardcore mode is next.
But if you die, like the game is over, which
is kind of a bummer.
Speaker 1 (17:15):
I guess yeah, because I mean, like, you can get
really far and develop a lot of stuff. So when
you're walking around like punching stuff, like punching a tree,
you're punching a tree to get wood. And when you
collect some wood, you can actually turn it into say, lumber,
and if you combine that lumber with something else you've
gotten I don't remember why, I think wool from a sheep. Sure,
(17:35):
put it together. You build yourself a bed. It's one
of the first things you're supposed to do it. You're supposed
to build a shelter and make a bed in your shelter.
And the reason why you want to make a bed
is because if you die in survival mode, you basically
it's called respawning. You wake up, you're teleported back in
your bed to start over. The problem is all that
(17:56):
stuff that you've accumulated, all the lumber and all the wool,
and all the things that you can make. By combining
those things, they make up what's called your inventory. And
your inventory can get pretty extensive. The longer you stay
alive and play and do stuff in the in the
Minecraft world, and you lose all that stuff, it's gone.
It's actually physically in the Minecraft world where you died,
(18:17):
and if you could make it over there in time
after you respawn, you could pick that stuff up. But
it can be really hard if you're really far away.
And then with hard core mode, like all that's just
gone forever, you have to start the game over completely.
And the reason that I know that that's true is
because Ruby answered that question.
Speaker 2 (18:35):
That was actually the funniest answer, because you said, hey,
if you die in hardcore mode, is like, is that
it is everything gone that you've ever built? And she said, yeah,
it's hardcore Josh. She doesn't play that mode, though she
plays the third mode almost exclusively. I think when she plays,
which is Creative Mode. And this is the super cute
(18:57):
fun one that when you see your you know, seven
and eight, your old daughter playing, you're like, this is
the greatest game ever. Because I sat down with her
one day and watched and she's just like, oh, look,
this is my farm, and this is my garden, and
these are my sheep, this is my animal pin and
this is my house, and look, I've got a pool
on the top floor and I've got a deck and
it's just really creative and super sweet and fun. You
(19:19):
can fly and creative mode, like if you want to
get up to the top of your thing, you can
fly up there. And the best thing is you can't
be harmed. There's no zombie coming to kill you. No.
Speaker 1 (19:32):
Yeah, you just do fun stuff like you said farm,
and it's not like, oh, I built a farm and
now this farm's running. Like you build the farm and
then you have to operate the farm to keep it going.
It's like, it's just amazing and neat all the stuff
that you can do in this game. It's just crazy.
And we'll talk about some of the just the mind
boggling stuff that people make. But one of the cool
(19:54):
things about it is you can build this world by yourself,
or you can work with others, play with others people
in your house using a local area network, or there's
Minecraft servers to where you're building a world together, and
like other people can come in and walk around your
world and hang out with you and sometimes mess with
you in your world too, because it's a giant shared world.
(20:18):
Whereas there's also another version which I ticket Ruby was playing,
where that is like that's your world. Nobody else can
come in because it's just on that one computer. It's
not being shared with the rest of the world.
Speaker 2 (20:31):
Yeah, and we just didn't know enough about it and
said that's the only version you can play, because the
last thing I wanted was some you know, you know,
I don't want to meeting those people. So I'm sure
there's a lot of fun that can be had on
those you know, multiplayer private server games. I'm sure it's
(20:51):
great in most ways. There are some very cool versions
of that. There's one called Pixel Mindcraft where they have
recreated the gameplay of Pokemon within the Minecraft world, which
is super cool. Yeah, and some of these are like
full on companies. Olivia found this boy, God blessed Livia
for the breadth of things that she helps us with. Yeah,
(21:12):
for sure, it's like, how about philosophy and then Minecraft.
But there's one called high Pixel, which has like forty
developers on staff and got bought themselves by Riot Games,
one of the big companies in twenty twenty. And you know,
these are all just modifying this game that was so
popular already. It's really, really kind of nuts.
Speaker 1 (21:34):
Yeah, I would say a cottage industry has grown up
around it. About like fifty different cottage industries have grown
up around it, with a bunch of different companies in
each that high pixel. To give you an example, they
make like games you can play in the Minecraft world.
Speaker 2 (21:50):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (21:51):
So, like there's one called Skyblock where you start out
on just a little patch of ground floating in the
sky with a single tree and a couple of resources,
and you have to build your way out of that.
You have to expand it with way more limited resources
than you would get normally. There's a one called bed Wars,
where your point is to like destroy your friend's bed
(22:11):
so that they can't they can't respawn in their bed again.
They have to go back to where they started the game. Yeah,
it's fun stuff, but that's on their server and they
they modified Minecraft, and the makers of Minecraft mojang don't
sue those people because you put it all together and
it's this it's almost like the Wikipedia of games, where
(22:32):
the entire world has collaborated on making this amazing game
that is Minecraft.
Speaker 2 (22:40):
I wonder if because he so heavily borrowed let's say,
from Infinity Minor or infinite minor. He was like, yeah,
maybe I'll just sit back and be super wealthy and
not worry about these people that are doing this stuff. Maybe.
Speaker 1 (22:52):
But also the mind boggling thing is now Microsoft owns
it and they don't sue other yeah created points. Yeah,
it's nuts. There's some them we're going on here. Man.
Speaker 2 (23:02):
All right, well, let's take a break and we'll be
right back to talk about who the heck is playing
this game and more about the world right after this.
(23:28):
So there's a lot of video games where you pay
monthly subscription fees. Sometimes you'll like buy the game but
then also subscribe monthly to get extra stuff or whatever,
new editions of the game, things like that. But Minecraft
has always been pretty great in that you buy the
game and that's it. You own the game. The game
(23:49):
is updated for free, the updates just roll out. A
lot of games do that as well. It's not the
only one, but it was sort of the core business model,
which is you buy this game, and whether it's a
PC or PlayStation or whatever, and that's your game for forever.
You've got that Minecraft game, and kids can grow into
(24:09):
adulthood like playing the same game that you, you know, insert
the disc into the player.
Speaker 1 (24:15):
Right, So there are other there's like in game purchases
and add ons and stuff you can buy. I think
the big hubbub that I picked up on is that
a SpongeBob bikini bottom biome is coming along, I think
in August, so you can play it by Bob and yeah,
it looks like it's gonna be pretty cool. There's other
(24:38):
like things called textures, which take this the very standard
like recognizable Minecraft look and do all sorts of things
to it. Some make it way smoother, some add different
kinds of shading. There's one called pastel that changes the
color palette and makes it much pinker and happier. There's
just a ton of stuff you can get. An add
(24:59):
on that like is you're it's a mansion, Like you
don't have to build yourself. It's just now you can
buy a mansion rather than build. It seems counterintuited over
counter against the point, I guess, but I'm sure some
kids are like, I just want to buy the mansion
in Farm instead. I don't want to waste my time
building my mansion. You're rabbit holing, sorry, but yes, my
(25:23):
point is there are stuff you can buy. But a
lot of that stuff is free too, a lot of
the mods are free.
Speaker 2 (25:29):
Yeah. Yeah, it's hard to get great statistics on who's
playing it, but Livia did found a survey from Jeez,
like seven years ago from Australia where fifth and you know,
I bet it's pretty indicative of who's playing worldwide. Fifty
four percent of boys ages three to twelve were playing it,
thirty two percent of girls.
Speaker 1 (25:51):
All of them raised on Foster's Beer.
Speaker 2 (25:56):
And early on it started out is more sort of
young adult men or older teenagers, but it has since
crept down in age, and I'm sure you know people
of all a just still play it. But you know,
it's a game that a four year old can kind
of start playing if they're good with their fingies. There
are two different default players from the early years. Steve
(26:20):
Well he was the only default player in the early years,
and then in twenty fourteen they added Alex. They added
a man and a woman, and then they rolled out
seven more in twenty twenty two with different outfits and
different skin tones. But you can skin your character. You
can create the stuff yourself, and I believe you can
probably buy stuff and get skins that other people have
(26:41):
created to make your player look more like you want
them to look.
Speaker 1 (26:46):
Yeah, they'd be more like you. Even Like there's clowns,
Japanese demons, scarecrows, there's a lot of cool skins out there.
For sure.
Speaker 2 (26:55):
You just stopped yourself. Yes, it hiss on that list,
So I guess we should talk about the fact that
and this is another really cool part of it. When
you start out, you know, I said, you start out
like and you just punch that tree. You start out
with one chunk of landscape that is a sixteen by
sixteen block square block, And once you reach those edges,
(27:18):
you start creating. Like you build as you go, and
it's procedurally generated as you go. And eventually if you're
asking like, is there even a limit? Yes, sixty million
blocks per side, which is seven times larger than the
Earth's surface.
Speaker 1 (27:35):
Yeah, if you consider a block a square kilometer of Earth,
it is. It's about half the size of Neptune and
twice the size of Earth. Isn't that nuts? Yeah, that's
just one world. So I read this amazing post by
a guy named Alan Zuconi called the World Generation of Minecraft.
(27:56):
I'm going to just dance just along the top of it.
But if you're at all interested in how the actual
world is generated, and it's quite fascinating and go read that.
But essentially, what they start with is what's called a seed.
It's sixty four bits of information, right, which is nothing
that's so small, but just following a couple of algorithmic rules,
(28:19):
the whole world generates from there. And because these sixty
four bits are slightly different in each seed, there's something
like eighteen point four quintillion possible worlds that can develop
from a seed. That's how many seeds are possible.
Speaker 2 (28:38):
Out there, right, Well, tell them what a seed is.
Speaker 1 (28:40):
So a seed is that sixty four bits that create
the world. And when you have a game like Ruby's game,
where she bought that game, she bought a seed. So
if she bought it, okay, her dad bought it for
and so if she started over when she started the game,
every time, that same world is gonna be built because
(29:01):
it's the same information following the same rules. So it's
gonna build the same world. But if she went and
bought another one, they'll see that it grew from would
create a totally different world. And it follows these really
simple rules like if the temperature is this, and the
altitude is this. This is the biome it's going to create,
like a desert or a tundra or a forest or
(29:22):
something like that. And so if you've created a forest
biome now in this spot, that means it's gonna have
trees and certain kinds of animals running around. If it's underwater,
what's the water temperature? And depending on the water temperature,
there's gonna be different animals in that biome too. And
it's just following like if then rules that create a
(29:44):
world from sixty four bits. It's nuts what they've done.
And the other thing about it, too, is people play
this so much that they'll actually go out and buy
another copy because they know that world so well.
Speaker 2 (29:58):
Can you imagine, Uh, can't you just start over?
Speaker 1 (30:03):
You can't. But it's going to be the same world,
That's what I'm saying.
Speaker 2 (30:06):
Oh no, I mean as a different character or something.
Speaker 1 (30:10):
I mean, yeah, you could start over, but you're going
to be exploring the same world that you did. You
know before, you could buy another copy, and it's going
to be a totally different world.
Speaker 2 (30:20):
Oh I thought if you started over as a new
like if I logged in as me in her game.
I could just start as whatever I wanted.
Speaker 1 (30:27):
No, because it's the same seed. Yeah, you could be
a different character, skin in or whatever, but.
Speaker 2 (30:31):
The mean the world start from scratch.
Speaker 1 (30:33):
Yeah, the world will still be the same because it's
growing from the same seed. I should probably caveat this
that this is Alan Ducony talking. I'm just I'm dis
amplifying what he's saying.
Speaker 2 (30:44):
Well, let's talk about those biomes. There are sixty four
biome types, fifty three in the over World, which is
where you know, that's sort of the main gameplay area,
and then they have a couple of other areas, the Nether,
which was added in twenty ten, which is pretty scary
like hellish place, and then the End, which is that
(31:07):
was in twenty eleven. That's a very very dark, very
bleak place, a very bleak landscape.
Speaker 1 (31:13):
It's kind of metroidy.
Speaker 2 (31:14):
Yeah, you can actually win that game if you defeat
the Ender Dragon. But I believe there are fifty three
biomes in the Overworld, five in the Nether, five in
the End, and then one that I didn't completely understand,
So I'm not even going to get into it, but
it gets really really detailed. Like you said, you know,
(31:35):
if you go to the ocean and the water temperature
to this, like there are nine oceans you can do
like warm water ocean, frozen ocean, cold water ocean. It
just and you know the different forests you can drill
down very very specifically within those sixty four biomes, which
is like only lens to the creativity. I think kids
(31:55):
can just not only are they like being creative, but
they're they're learning something about these biomes for sure, you know,
maybe not the most detailed stuff, but they know that, hey,
in this kind of biome, these are the plants and
trees that you'll have.
Speaker 1 (32:10):
Right, there's kids walking around that are like, yeah, if
you go under the ocean, you'll find abandoned cities that
the ancient builders created. That's what they're learning, Chuck.
Speaker 2 (32:22):
Mobile entities is another thing, or mobs. These are like
the animals and the monsters and stuff. When they're killed,
they can drop things that you can pick up. Sometimes
you can tame them. They if you get updates, these
mobs expand. I think they're more than seventy five now.
But the things I've seen walking through the room are
(32:44):
like sheep and pigs and things like that. Those were
the first animals kind of created that you can use
that you can you know, get wool from them. If
you want to make that bed, you're going to have
to get that wool from that sheep.
Speaker 1 (32:58):
Right. So, and you talked about different biomes having different animals,
and one of the reasons to go to the biomes
is not just to explore new cool things, but you
can get different things out of different mobs. Right. So,
if you went to a warm water ocean, you would
find pufferfish. And if you get a pufferfish and you
combine it with something else I don't remember, you can
(33:19):
create a potion that will let you breathe underwater, so
you can walk around and explore underwater. So everything that
you encounter that's a mob, which is essentially another term
for a non player character. You can get something from
and you can combine it with other stuff that you
got from other mobs, or from punching a tree, or
from digging up or with your pickaxe to create new
(33:41):
things to do new stuff with. That's what people are
doing when they're playing Minecraft.
Speaker 2 (33:47):
One of the other things that you can find, or zombies,
is very big part of the game. They are kind
of like most zombies are pretty easy to take care
of and defeat. They're different variations of zombies. Creepers are
kind of a fun mob because creepers are a mistake.
I believe that. What's the guy's name again, Marcus Person. Yeah,
(34:10):
he was trying to make a pig, but he coded
it wrong and it stretched out tall instead of wide,
and he thought it looked creepy. He liked it, and
so creepers became a very sort of popular monster in
the game because he just said, I love that mistake,
Let's leave it.
Speaker 1 (34:27):
And they're considered hostile mops, right because they'll attack you. Yeah, yeah,
and they do that by blowing up I think we
said earlier.
Speaker 2 (34:35):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (34:36):
There's also something called ender Men, which is kind of
a play on slender Man, and there are these creepy
entities that may or may not attack you, depending on
whether you look at.
Speaker 2 (34:45):
Him or not.
Speaker 1 (34:46):
So there's like there's definitely gameplay to this, right, Like
there's like you can go off and like defeat these
things and fight them and protect villages and stuff like that.
But there's also like you can also just farm and
once in a while you have to defend your farm
against some zombies. Or something.
Speaker 2 (35:04):
Yeah, you'll also come up on villagers and villages where
they live. And these you know look like they don't
look like they look like humans, I guess or their
version of humans, right, And you can get things from them.
You can trade with them. They have different jobs. You
can change their job if you want to. If you
(35:24):
need like food or something, you can make them unemployed
by destroying their job and then giving them a new job.
Then all of a sudden, you got somebody giving you food.
Speaker 1 (35:33):
Right exactly, And you like, it's just crazy that like
people have village farms essentially where they're breeding villagers to
make them stuff that they want. It can get really
really complicated really fast. But in the most basic version,
you're just you know, trading with the villagers given them.
You go get emeralds and you come bring them to
the villagers and they give you food or wool or
(35:54):
something like that.
Speaker 2 (35:56):
Yeah, and you know, you learn where to look for
different things that you need. Like if you want coal,
you know you can dig down not too deep bleef
or coal. If you want this thing called red, or
if you want like diamonds, you got a deep dig
really really deep to find the diamonds. Just like the
real world. And then Lyvia pointed out this thing called Redstone,
which was I believe it was an update to the alpha.
(36:19):
So it's been around basically from the beginning. But it
has a lot of different kinds of functions, but it
mainly functions like electrical wires. You can build and automate things.
Speaker 1 (36:29):
Yeah, it makes things go, powers them right, like everything
from pistons to doors opening to whatever. People make crazy
machines using Redstone. There's a kid who made a functioning
calculator by arranging Redstone and other items in a certain way.
He made a calculator in Minecraft, and it's kind of
one of those things you have to see to really
(36:50):
understand how crazy that is. But that's really it's neat.
I think it'd be. I don't know how well the
game would work at all if there wasn't such a
thing as Redstone, or if you know, you could just
make things work just by pressing them right, then having
to go mine Redstone and using it to make the
specific thing work the specific way.
Speaker 2 (37:08):
That's how you know.
Speaker 1 (37:09):
That's how detailed it involved. It is because of choices
like that and the development totally.
Speaker 2 (37:16):
Should we take our second break sure. All right, we'll
take that break and we'll talk about how this is
sort of taken over YouTube as well.
Speaker 1 (37:24):
Right for this, Okay, Chuck, So you mentioned YouTube and
(37:45):
that is basically the official outlet for Minecraft. That's where
Minecraft pours out into the rest of the world.
Speaker 2 (37:54):
Yeah, you know, we'll go over some of the ways
YouTube is utilized. It's very very I mean, YouTube is
full full full of Minecraft stuff. But one of the
things that sort of alarmed me and kind of disappointed
me with this and roadblocks is that kids will just
sit around watching people play this game on YouTube sometime
(38:18):
it's like to learn how to do things. But with
Ruby and her friends, I will see them just sitting
around and watching it instead of playing it. And I'm
always like, as a parent, like, oh god, can you
you know, can you play the game and like get
involved and you know, but try to pick my battles
and just limit it. You know.
Speaker 1 (38:37):
Well, they've really turned things around on their head. If
you're like, man, can you please play the video game?
Speaker 2 (38:44):
It?
Speaker 1 (38:45):
Can you go outside? Now? It's like, can you play
the video game rather than watch other people play?
Speaker 2 (38:50):
Yeah, that's a good point.
Speaker 1 (38:51):
That's how far we've slipped I get it though, It's like,
essentially she's watching an unscripted TV show money like that,
and there are people that do that. There's something called
Survival multiplayer Channels. There's one called dream SMP. I think
they disbanded, but essentially they had loosely scripted story arcs
(39:12):
that they acted out in Minecraft world as like kind
of fictionalized versions of themselves like our stuff you should
know TV show, and there were just plots that took place,
and people would watch YouTube videos of these essentially shows
created in Minecraft.
Speaker 2 (39:32):
Yeah, there's a one guy named Pewdiepi p E W
d I E p i E. It's got one hundred
and eleven million subs and is a very very very
wealthy man.
Speaker 1 (39:45):
Yeah, he was one of the first like genuine YouTube stars.
I think he was as big as it got for
a while and.
Speaker 2 (39:52):
Then for him, I'm not knocking it, by the way, he.
Speaker 1 (39:54):
Was toppled by an i think a Bollywood record label.
There was a competition a four year old from Taiwan,
right exactly who opened Minecraft lego gift sets. Yeah, but yeah,
so PewDiePie got very very wealthy just essentially from starting
out from playing Minecraft videos and you said people watch
people playing Minecraft, Phil watch speed runs, see how fast
(40:15):
they can go. There's parody music videos set in the
Minecraft world. Like I think it's one of those things
where like you can't get enough Minecraft once it gets
under your skin to where if you're like I don't
feel like playing today, I'm going to watch somebody else
play and that will satisfy that inch.
Speaker 2 (40:32):
Yeah, and you know what now that I've said that,
save your emails everyone, because yes, at home, I used
to sit around and watch my friends play Adventure when
they played and it was their turn, And I would
hover over the shoulders of my friends at arcades and
watch them play the games. So we did the exact
same thing, and I take it all back.
Speaker 1 (40:54):
Yeah, but it's a little different because you're sitting there
like willing your friend to hurry up and die so
it can be your you.
Speaker 2 (41:00):
Know, that's it's a little different.
Speaker 1 (41:02):
Yeah, you're you're up next, that's the reason. And what
else are you gonna do? You know, you're on your
eighth Orange Julius. You're not gonna go get another one
of those, so you might as well stand around and watch.
Speaker 2 (41:11):
Yeah, and your quarter sitting there flat on the on
the screen of the arcade game.
Speaker 1 (41:15):
So you're definitely next.
Speaker 2 (41:18):
Oh man, those were the days.
Speaker 1 (41:20):
What else you want to talk about the Lord at
all or move on?
Speaker 2 (41:23):
Uh? Yeah, well, I mean I think it's kind of
cool in that if you have a world like this,
you're gonna you're gonna get some stuff like fan fiction.
Even though technically Alex and Steve are sort of until
they release, the other ones were the only two kind
of characters. So it's you know, it's a little weird
to have fan fiction about these two blocky people that
really have did you know nothing about personality wise? Sure,
(41:45):
I guess that's the point of fan fiction. They've also
come up with this stuff, this sort of like fan fiction,
you know, where you talked about the ancient Builders, Like
they've created this backstory sort of of the ancient ones
who who created the original structures in the game, and
like where did they come from? So like the creativity
is really off the charts, you know.
Speaker 1 (42:06):
Yeah, it's yeah, Yeah, that's the thing about it is
we'll see, like one of the big benefits of it
for kids but also for anybody is it it really
gets your imagination and creativity going along with some other
stuff too.
Speaker 2 (42:18):
What about Hero Brian.
Speaker 1 (42:19):
Herobrian is a legendary character from what I saw, Notch
said unequivocally that Herobrien doesn't exist.
Speaker 2 (42:26):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (42:27):
In Minecraft World, there was a four cham post from
years back where somebody claimed to have encountered Steve, but
it was Steve with all white eyes, and he was
a weirdo doing weird stuff following him around the Minecraft world,
and that became the legend of Herobrien, this character that
supposedly is the ghost of Nach's dead brother, right, not
(42:50):
just like I don't even have a brother, I have
a half brother I've never met. So no, there's no Herobrien.
Sorry to bust that bubble.
Speaker 2 (42:58):
Yeah, and I believe, like in mods and things, people
have created that kind of stuff, but in the official
Minecraft game there never has been one, even though people
swear that they've come across exactly.
Speaker 1 (43:09):
Yeah. So there's a lot of ways that you can
modify Minecraft yourself. Again, one of the cottage industries is
creating editors to let Minecraft players modify the game to
their own specifications, to let them do things like, you know,
jump really high and survival mode or fly or whatever
you want to do. But one of the things that
(43:31):
people have done is build stuff with or without modifications,
and the less you modify, the more impressive your build is.
It's what they're called their builds. For example, one kid
named Atmospheric Beats.
Speaker 2 (43:47):
This is incredible.
Speaker 1 (43:49):
Who may or may not be Travis Hicks. I found
a YouTube video and a Reddit post. I can't imagine.
There's too many people running around making one to one
scale models of Kansas City in Minecraft. Either way, there
is a one to one scale model of Kansas City,
every building, every tree, every street, and you can go
(44:09):
inside every building. It's just completely true to life in Minecraft.
Somebody built that.
Speaker 2 (44:16):
I want that for Atlanta because I would have fun
running around there.
Speaker 1 (44:20):
Well, there's a whole group called Build the Earth where
people around the world are creating like faithful to life. Yeah,
creations of buildings. The point is to recreate every building
on Earth. So you can do that.
Speaker 2 (44:36):
Okay, maybe will one day. It gets even cooler if
you're like, all right, Kansas City one to one scale
model not bad. Scale model of the entire Earth not
pretty impressive. There's an eighteen year old This is a
couple of years ago, so I guess he's twenty ish
now a YouTuber named Christopher Slayton. I think his real
(44:57):
name is Chris Decal. Yet probably the other way. I
thought Slayton was the made up thing, not Decal Slayton.
Speaker 1 (45:07):
If it was like slay Tour, maybe.
Speaker 2 (45:10):
Yeah, I had that reverse. But he made a model
of the observable universe.
Speaker 1 (45:15):
Did you see the video of this, of the explanation. Yeah,
it wasn't like he was like, oh, I'm gonna draw
this in Minecraft. The kid did the physics required to
create the models of the universe. I mean, like everything
from like nebula galaxies to the Sun, Like you can
zoom into pixels on the Sun. It's just one of
(45:36):
the most impressive things I've ever seen in my entire life.
Speaker 2 (45:39):
Would that be a photon?
Speaker 1 (45:41):
I guess so. It'd be a one kilometer square photon.
Speaker 2 (45:46):
If all that wasn't cool enough. In twenty twenty, the
group Reporters Without Borders started a project called Uncensored Library.
And this this is amazing. In places like Saudi Arabia
and Russia where the real news is like censored or
you don't have access to these news sites, they are
(46:06):
burying news inside the Minecraft world. Because you can play
Minecraft there.
Speaker 1 (46:12):
Yeah, they write books or they create books that have
these articles in them.
Speaker 2 (46:16):
And that's cool, unbelievably cool.
Speaker 1 (46:18):
There's another thing too. I mentioned a kid who made
a calculator. You can arrange these Redstone like or basically
and make things into logic gates on off if then
that kind of stuff and if you make if you
arrange different logic gates together, you can create computers. And
there was somebody who created a computer that plays Minecraft
(46:41):
in Minecraft. Like you go on to Minecraft, go over
to that computer and play Minecraft on that computer that
exists only in Minecraft. I just want to make sure
it's totally clear what I'm saying here, and it actually works.
It's not some it's not a drawing. It's like it's
operating on logic gates that they created with arrangements of
(47:02):
Redstone or incredible. So let's talk about this because I
think it's pretty clear Chuck, that there are a lot
of benefits to playing this, Like, yes, it would be
really easy for a kid to become addicted, and that
really can happen, and I've seen that that actually is
an actual thing and you have to look out for it.
But there's also some real benefits to this, to playing this,
(47:22):
especially as a kid.
Speaker 2 (47:24):
Yeah, I mean, you know, if you're a parent, keep
an eye on your kid. Monitor there there how long
they're playing this game. Because it is great, and we're
gonna talk about the benefits for sure, but like if
they don't want to do anything but Minecraft, and if
it seems like they're never satisfied with the amount that
they're playing and they're lying about their playing, and if
(47:46):
they don't have it, they're you know, experiencing you know,
the withdrawal symptoms of anything else, and they're grumpy and
irritated or depressed. Like, seriously, get involved because it's a
real danger. The benefits, you know, been talking about how
creative it is. It's not only is it going to
encourage you to just use your creative brain, but you're
(48:06):
problem solving, you're using math, you're working with other people
like teamwork, potentially learning to code. Like there, this is
the one game I believe. I asked Hodgman because I
knew his son played, and I was like, Hey, is
this Minecraft thing? And he was like, that's kind of
the one game that it's it's okay for kids to
start playing because it's got like plenty of good benefits.
Speaker 1 (48:27):
Yeah, and even more esoteric stuff that like managing resources.
Like it's not like the kids like, oh, I'm learning
to manage resources is great just by virtue of playing Minecraft.
You have to learn to manage resources. You have to
keep up with your sheep and make sure that they're
breeding so that you can get enough wool, like like
you have to know what to use, where, where to
(48:47):
go get it, and then how to use it smartly
so that you can get the most out of it.
Like that's a huge part of playing Minecraft, and that's
a great thing to learn. It also teaches kids to
like focus on a you know, well you want to
raise some sheep. I know, I keep going to that. Well,
but it's a good one. Yeah, you have to go
you have to farm the food to feed the sheep,
(49:09):
and then you have to shear the sheep to get
the wool, and then you use the wool that do
god knows what with And you have a goal and
it's not just that one goal. That goal is made
up of a series of sub goals too, And that's
a great thing to learn early on.
Speaker 2 (49:23):
Yeah, and you know your kids aren't coming to you
and asking you how to do it unless you happen
to be a parent that really knew Minecraft, because I'm
sure you know that exists now, it's been around long enough.
But generally, like your kid's probably in the other room
figuring this stuff out. Maybe they're asking friends for help.
Maybe they're not. They're learning as they go and making
(49:43):
like what they think are like smart decisions to do
better in the game and real time. My advice to
a parent is like, it's really easy just to sort
of walk by anytime your kid is doing this with
zero interest, but just maybe once or twice down and
ask them to tell you about their world for fifteen minutes.
(50:06):
Just like sit there with them while they played for
like fifteen minutes and say show me your world. I
did that a couple of times, and it's incredible to see.
I mean she was like five or six at the time.
Oh wow, to see a kid really like I was like,
oh my god, and you figured out that, and you
figured out you needed to do that to get that
And to them, they're like, yeah, Dad, that's duh, that's
(50:26):
the game. But I'm over here going like this is incredible,
Like you're learning, Like, keep at it. That's cool and
I'm glad you stopped playing it.
Speaker 1 (50:34):
At the same time, I feel like we would be
grossly reversed if we didn't give a shout out to
our little friend from the Medford Show. Yeah, that's right,
who requested this. I don't remember his name, and I'm
very sorry for that. But there was a kid, a guy,
a young dude at the Medford Show recently, I think
(50:55):
in May who during QA asked us to do an
episode on Minecraft. The whole thing started with him asking
us about mobs, and we're like, what is a mob?
Speaker 2 (51:04):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (51:04):
Yeah, it kind of kicked the whole thing off. So
that's why we're where we are right now.
Speaker 2 (51:09):
That's right. And if you hear this kid and parent
and you want us to set the record straight and
get that name on the air, like email, listen, we'll
include that in a future correction for sure.
Speaker 1 (51:19):
And speaking of email, I think, Chuck, it's time for
listening now.
Speaker 2 (51:25):
Uh yeah, this is about salsa. We got a lot
of good salsa emails. People love salsa. I like to
say salsa, saying and eating. Boy that did you see
the one woman who's sent in the black salsa from
that restaurant in Chicago? No, I didn't see that it
looked good. I think it was the last couple of
days she posted a picture and it's like Charred Pepper's
(51:46):
basically nice boy, did it look good? Hey, guys, great
job on the recent episode on salsa. I was born
and raised in northwestern Mexico, being Mexican, I was very
interested on how you guys would tackle this. Josh got
it right about the fact that salsa is a condiment mostly,
but he did get it wrong that it is in
fact served at most restaurants in Mexico along with tortilla
(52:08):
chips called to topos or like the tostadas like Chuck
mentioned being broken apart. It is not an appetizer, nor
do you need to order it. It's just served. And
you can also use the salsa as a condiment with
your food. And I saw someone else wrote in a
Mexican woman that said a lot of times, that's a
good way to test the salsa, to test taste tests
(52:32):
sort of the salsa or the different sauceas you get
to see which one you do want to use as.
Speaker 1 (52:36):
A coe, which makes sense.
Speaker 2 (52:40):
Sorry, but the only thing that that was innovated in
the US was to charge for something that comes free
with your meal.
Speaker 1 (52:47):
Of Mexico boo.
Speaker 2 (52:49):
Indeed, also guys tortilla chips go back to the pre
Hispanic era with the Mexican word for tortilla chip again
to topo coming from a nahuato where meaning to toast
or brown, and finally for chuck. Pico degao Mexico's any
sort of mixed or chopped fruits and vegetables. Pico digao
(53:10):
that he referenced in the US is usually called salsa
fresca I don't know, I didn't say it, or salsa
bendero bendera meaning flag and the chilies, onion, and tomato
are green, white and red like the Mexican flag. Very nice,
great email. That's from Ricardo Lamas Vidales.
Speaker 1 (53:29):
Thanks a lot, Ricardo. We appreciate that. It's nice to
hear from a local expert. And if you want to
be like Ricardo and set us straight on some stuff,
we would love to hear that. You can send it
off to Stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot Stuff you Should
Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (53:49):
For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Yeah,
Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio. Hey,
and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck
and Jerry's here too, and this is Stuff you Should
Know in Way over our Heads edition.
Speaker 2 (00:21):
The help Parents understand what their child is doing in
their room all day Edition.
Speaker 1 (00:26):
I hope so, but I suspect that more than just
parents are going to listen to this. And I've never
been more nervous about what a group of eight year
olds thinks of me than I am right now because
I know too much about Minecraft, like I can go
way too deep in it, But I also feel very
clearly I don't know enough to not get hate mail
for misspeaking.
Speaker 2 (00:48):
Yeah, I would maybe not dig too deep on this one,
because the deeper you go, the more you risk. Oh yeah,
it's being mad for sure.
Speaker 1 (00:57):
But one of the key things about Minecraft is like
it's nothing but rabbit holes. You look up one thing
and all of a sudden, that leads to ten other things,
and those ten other things lead twenty other things each.
And it's so fascinating how complex and complicated this whole
thing is, especially when you understand the actual mechanics of
(01:19):
how these worlds are built, how they originate, how simple
it is. It's just I love it. I love Minecraft
a lot. If I didn't get addicted to things that
I like, I would probably start playing Minecraft. But I
know that that would ruin my life.
Speaker 2 (01:34):
Well, I'm glad you're addicted to podcasting with me.
Speaker 1 (01:38):
I totally am. I can't get enough of it.
Speaker 2 (01:40):
Yeah, I mean, if that wasn't clear all that that
we just said, like this is officially a CoA, like
this will be a broad overview of a very very
very dense game that neither one of us play. So
we're gonna get stuff wrong. We're not going to dive
into things you want us to dive into. So just
an email disappointed. Yeah, Like, I can't believe you didn't
(02:02):
mention blank, like just say it. And thanks to Ruby
we got a little help.
Speaker 1 (02:09):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (02:09):
I sent some questions last night that I guess, you know,
will Pepper in it if they apply?
Speaker 1 (02:17):
For sure? Yeah, there was a few things that I
just couldn't nail down, and I was like, oh that
Ruby knows this, and sure enough she did.
Speaker 2 (02:23):
Yeah. Well maybe, I mean she doesn't really play anymore.
Speaker 1 (02:26):
She played.
Speaker 2 (02:27):
I'm kind of glad about this. Like Minecraft is a
wonderful game, and we're going we'll go over the benefits
of it, because there are many compared to most video games,
but it's also a game, and we'll go over the pitfalls.
It's also a game that can really get under your
skin as a kid and as an adult. I guess.
But what it's not great if you're a kid and
(02:48):
you have other things like schooling to do, if you
have a kid that's super super super super into it,
and she never got that into it. She really enjoyed it,
but she's a kind of kid if like you take
it away or for go away for a minute, she says, like, what,
all right, I'll just do something else, which is he's
just good.
Speaker 1 (03:05):
She's not gonna give you the satisfaction of pun.
Speaker 2 (03:07):
Maybe I don't know, honestly, think she just forgets oh cool,
because she was all into the Roadblocks game, which is
a whole other kind of game, and like really into it.
And as a punishment for something, we we wiped it
off her iPad along with everything else except for music.
Speaker 1 (03:24):
Like were you yelling when you did it?
Speaker 2 (03:26):
No, But we just cleaned the iPad free of everything
except for podcast and music and it's like the next
day she was like, oh, all right, whatever.
Speaker 1 (03:35):
That reminds me. Do you remember Doctor Katz, the nineties
cartoon with the squiggly lines.
Speaker 2 (03:40):
Of course, it loved cats.
Speaker 1 (03:41):
And Don Morrera was a regular on that. Man here
was a great Yeah, he is great. He was talking
about how cats just never give you the satisfaction of like,
no matter what you do to him, they're not going
to let on that you've bothered them. So, like he
gave the example of throwing a cat through the air,
the cat would be like, thanks, my man, I wanted
(04:02):
to go this way anyway.
Speaker 2 (04:04):
Well into cats too, So maybe that's it. Yeah, sure,
she's part cat.
Speaker 1 (04:09):
There you go. I think that's what it is.
Speaker 2 (04:11):
Maybe, so that's fine, Yeah, for sure.
Speaker 1 (04:15):
So I think we should give a little bit of
background on Minecraft for people who don't know what Minecraft is. Surely,
I mean, at the very least most people walking around
know that it's a very, very very popular video.
Speaker 2 (04:29):
Game, right yeah, I mean I think so, And we'll
get into the history. But at its base, it is
a you know, if you look at it, it goes
counter to a lot of like the way it got
popular is just almost astounding in some ways, because it
goes counter to most video games these days, which try
to make things very very real looking, and Minecraft is
(04:50):
very blocky and pixelated, an old school and it's sort
of like an interactive lego game. It's called the sandbox game,
where you can just go around and and build things
you mind, things to craft with.
Speaker 1 (05:05):
Yeah, I mean that's the point. And there's plenty of
things to do. Like it's not like they're like nothing happens. Yeah,
Like like you can because there are so few rules,
because there's no real point to it. There's not like
a game that you like want to win or conquer
anything like that. Like, it's essentially up to the limits
(05:27):
of your imagination what you do in this amazing blocky world.
Speaker 2 (05:32):
Yeah. And despite those blocks, despite the fact that there
is no real plot, it is the best selling PC
game of all time, second to Tetris as the biggest
video game in Tetris. By the way, that's coming. We
need to do that's got a great story to it. Okay,
so we need to do one of those. But yeah,
it's it's one of the all time giants. And it
(05:53):
was created by a not very good dude named Marcus
with a K Person of Sweden aka Notch.
Speaker 1 (06:04):
Yeah, and he was a coder from wayback, like he
taught himself on a Commodore one twenty eight, which came
out in nineteen eighty five. I'm not quite sure how
old he was when he was working on it, but
just suffice to say, like that's like you really had
to understand code to code with one of those things. Right,
So he was like a game developer, a coder from
(06:25):
from the outset essentially, And he got a couple jobs
at some of the big game companies in Sweden, and
he was working at one of them, I think it
was King dot com when he was inspired to kind
of create his own game. And he was playing a
game called Infinna Minor, Right am I saying that? Right?
Like Infinity Minor but without the tea part. Yeah, okay,
(06:46):
And essentially you mine resources and you build stuff with
these blocks that you mine. It's a mining game essentially.
Sounds very familiar, and he's not like shy about saying
like this was a copy, a spoof basically of Infinom Minor,
but it was also inspired by some other games, like
one called Dwarf Fortress, which is really simple, but the
(07:11):
all of the characters involved in all of the non
player characters kind of have their own drive and decisions,
so a lot of random stuff can happen in there.
And then also roller coaster Tycoon, where you could just
build your own well roller coasters. So if you put
all those three things together, you have kind of the
rough outlines of Minecraft, which he really started releasing I
(07:32):
think in two thousand and nine.
Speaker 2 (07:34):
Yeah, and I you know, I went down a twenty
second rabbit hole of because once I looked up in
Phenomnor and I was like, wait a minute, did he
just like literally kind of steal that game? And that
is a rabbit hole that I was loath to go
down because I found myself on Reddit and it's just
like it's very contentious of people who are like, yeah,
(07:55):
he totally stole that game and ripped it off, and
people are like, no, he didn't. He was inspired by
So I'm not wading into that argument. Probably you can
make up your own mind about that, right, but.
Speaker 1 (08:08):
Yeah, However, however it came out, he released it in
two thousand and nine and people just dug on it
very very quickly.
Speaker 2 (08:16):
I think that was the alpha version. Yeah, the beta
version main release.
Speaker 1 (08:21):
No the and he was like, he just put the
word out there, and I think he actually started charging
people thirteen dollars for just to play the alpha version.
But he was also getting offs of feedback and like
blogging about it and everything. The whole thing was his
side gig, and but little by little it kind of
moved his main gig, like alf to the side itself,
(08:42):
and then until it was like I can actually support
myself with Minecraft. I'm quitting my day job.
Speaker 2 (08:49):
Yeah, which finally in twenty ten, he founded the company
Swedish for gadget. It's Mojang moj Ang almost a g
with a couple of coworkers name And here's where I
don't know whether to say Jacob or Yakub.
Speaker 1 (09:05):
It's it's not Yakub or Jacob is Jacob.
Speaker 2 (09:10):
It's Papioma.
Speaker 1 (09:12):
No, it really is Jacob. What was wrong with Pepioma?
I didn't read that email closely enough.
Speaker 2 (09:16):
It's Papaloma. Oh, and I knew that, and I heard
you saying it. But I was just like, I guess
you know something I don't know because that was such
a wild stab. I just figured you were ahead of me.
Speaker 1 (09:28):
You just found it so enchanting anyway.
Speaker 2 (09:31):
You said it is yakub I forgot already h JOCKI, Jacob,
Jacob Porcer and Karl MANA M A N N e H.
They hired some people, they had a gaming company all
of a sudden, and the beta version came out not
too long after, and they went over a six month
(09:52):
period at the beginning of twenty eleven to July of
that year. They went from a million players to ten
million in that short time. I'm officially launching in November
twenty eleven at mine Con, which was it's still an
ongoing event. I think they do it online now, but
for a while it was a live event in Vegas
called Minecraft Live.
Speaker 1 (10:14):
Yeah. I think they held the twenty fifteen one in
London and it set the record for the largest attendance
of any convention in the history of humanity.
Speaker 2 (10:23):
I think it's big stuff, everybody.
Speaker 1 (10:26):
It's huge. I mean, it is enormous. I didn't see
any statistics on what percentage of the world plays it,
but I did see that at any point in time
there's as many as like thirty forty fifty million people
playing it at the same time, not necessarily altogether, because
as we'll see there's different ways to play it by
(10:46):
yourself or with other people. But if you just were
able to zoom out and look at what everybody in
the world's doing, thirty million of them would be playing
Minecraft at that moment.
Speaker 2 (10:58):
Oh boy. So starting in twenty eleven, there was a
man named or and still is name Yen's Jeb Bergenston
as lead designer. Watched a few interviews with this guys.
It's definitely YenS, but it's also Jeb and not Yeb.
It's getting very confusing. Notch stayed on on the Minecraft team,
(11:24):
but you know, it was basically sort of letting YenS
run the show. It seems like as far as being
in the weeds he was developing other games, Notch was
and you know, kind of live in the high life
because he got very wealthy, very quick.
Speaker 1 (11:37):
Yeah. One of the first things he did was by
himself a Fedora, which became kind of like a trademark
look for him. Sure, and he started just basically join
the international party set. It was like, how much how
much money does it cost to get in here? They're like,
you've got you've got enough, come on in, so well
(11:58):
it exactly right. So he kind of got I got
the impression that he was not just distracted by this
newfound wealth and all the stuff you could do with it,
but that he was not really interested in seeing a
game like becoming a massive, globally dominating blockbuster and all
(12:18):
the work that takes and coordination and all that. He
was more interested in developing games. So he stepped away,
like you said, and handed it over to Jeb. And
then when Microsoft came a call in twenty fourteen, apparently
not tweeted, who does anybody want to buy my share
of Mojang because I'm ready to move on with my life.
(12:40):
Apparently like all these companies were like, uh yeah, we
totally will supposedly set up that Microsoft deal for two
and a half billion, and at that point he's like,
I'm completely gone now.
Speaker 2 (12:50):
Yeah. Forbes had him as of like last week at
about a one point two billion dollar net worth, and
that seems pretty reliable, not like the stupid Sealle network rights.
Speaker 1 (13:01):
Not too shabby for somebody who wears a fedora in public.
Speaker 2 (13:04):
Yeah yeah, and he you know, he stayed sort of
associated with the game in the company for a long
time even after the Microsoft purchase, well not that long
about five years ish when they basically stopped referencing him
on the loading page in twenty nineteen, stopped inviting him
(13:25):
to their Minecraft parties, like their tenth anniversary anniversary celebration. Yeah, basically,
he started letting everyone know his thoughts about QAnon and
far right wing politics and homophobic things and transphobic things
(13:45):
and sexist and misogynist things. It was sort of the
greatest hits of that kind of guy. And he went
public with all of it and issued some pretty lame
apologies for some of it. But yeah, so that's what happened,
and that's who he is.
Speaker 1 (14:02):
Yeah, so Minecraft just kept going on without him, And
from what I can tell, like when Jeb took over,
is he still the lead game designer, like essentially the showrunner.
Speaker 2 (14:12):
From But I'm not positive, but I'm pretty sure he is.
Speaker 1 (14:15):
Like it, even if he stopped, like a couple of
years ago, that game really flourished under his oversight. Like
he he's really creative. Also, really, and I think Natch
was willing to do this too, but Jeb was or
is really willing to be. Like, Hey, some player, some
random person somewhere came up with this amazing invention we're
(14:36):
going to actually release it as an update or add
on or something to the game like there, and it's
just it's a really creative, flourishing game still because of
that guy, from what I can tell.
Speaker 2 (14:49):
Yeah, totally. So there are three modes, and this is
the regular unmoded version, because as you'll learn, you can
modify it in all kinds of you know, creative kind
of ways or vanilla mode. But if you're playing just
that regular version that my daughter plays on the PlayStation,
you can play in survival mode, hardcore mode, or creative mode.
Speaker 1 (15:14):
Right. So survival mode is like the kind of like
the where the game part comes in, Like you can
actually die. So you're doing all of the interesting stuff
that you do in Minecraft that will you know, talk
about more extensively. But there's zombies attacking you, or there's
creepers coming up and blowing themselves up and hurting you,
(15:36):
or you can drown underwater, fall off a cliff, and
when that happens, all of the stuff that you've gathered
that make up what's called your inventory, all the things
you can use to make other stuff, all the stuff
you've made out of other things already that you want
to use to like extend your life or jump high
or whatever. You lose all that it actually stays in
the location that you died at in Minecraft World, and
(16:00):
but you are teleported back to either where you started
the game or your bed if you've made yourself a bed,
and I saw that if you can get there within
five like our reality minutes five minutes in our reality,
you can go pick up your stuff again, but it
can be very hard to do if you're really far
away from your bed.
Speaker 2 (16:22):
That's right. And what happens is you start basically with nothing.
If you're a parent, you've wandered through and it looks
like what is that blocky pixelated thing like punching everything
for that's the gameplay. You start with nothing, and you
basically go at the very beginning and you punch a
tree to get some wood. And what you're doing is,
(16:43):
you know, you're getting resources to build stuff, so you
just keep punching and diggings things and finding new things
and then and transforming them into i mean all kinds
of things from you know, farms to animals to buildings
and oceans and rivers, and you know you're building, you're
literally building your world as you go in all the modes.
(17:04):
From what I can tell you, got hardcore mode is next.
But if you die, like the game is over, which
is kind of a bummer.
Speaker 1 (17:15):
I guess yeah, because I mean, like, you can get
really far and develop a lot of stuff. So when
you're walking around like punching stuff, like punching a tree,
you're punching a tree to get wood. And when you
collect some wood, you can actually turn it into say, lumber,
and if you combine that lumber with something else you've
gotten I don't remember why, I think wool from a sheep. Sure,
(17:35):
put it together. You build yourself a bed. It's one
of the first things you're supposed to do it. You're supposed
to build a shelter and make a bed in your shelter.
And the reason why you want to make a bed
is because if you die in survival mode, you basically
it's called respawning. You wake up, you're teleported back in
your bed to start over. The problem is all that
(17:56):
stuff that you've accumulated, all the lumber and all the wool,
and all the things that you can make. By combining
those things, they make up what's called your inventory. And
your inventory can get pretty extensive. The longer you stay
alive and play and do stuff in the in the
Minecraft world, and you lose all that stuff, it's gone.
It's actually physically in the Minecraft world where you died,
(18:17):
and if you could make it over there in time
after you respawn, you could pick that stuff up. But
it can be really hard if you're really far away.
And then with hard core mode, like all that's just
gone forever, you have to start the game over completely.
And the reason that I know that that's true is
because Ruby answered that question.
Speaker 2 (18:35):
That was actually the funniest answer, because you said, hey,
if you die in hardcore mode, is like, is that
it is everything gone that you've ever built? And she said, yeah,
it's hardcore Josh. She doesn't play that mode, though she
plays the third mode almost exclusively. I think when she plays,
which is Creative Mode. And this is the super cute
(18:57):
fun one that when you see your you know, seven
and eight, your old daughter playing, you're like, this is
the greatest game ever. Because I sat down with her
one day and watched and she's just like, oh, look,
this is my farm, and this is my garden, and
these are my sheep, this is my animal pin and
this is my house, and look, I've got a pool
on the top floor and I've got a deck and
it's just really creative and super sweet and fun. You
(19:19):
can fly and creative mode, like if you want to
get up to the top of your thing, you can
fly up there. And the best thing is you can't
be harmed. There's no zombie coming to kill you. No.
Speaker 1 (19:32):
Yeah, you just do fun stuff like you said farm,
and it's not like, oh, I built a farm and
now this farm's running. Like you build the farm and
then you have to operate the farm to keep it going.
It's like, it's just amazing and neat all the stuff
that you can do in this game. It's just crazy.
And we'll talk about some of the just the mind
boggling stuff that people make. But one of the cool
(19:54):
things about it is you can build this world by yourself,
or you can work with others, play with others people
in your house using a local area network, or there's
Minecraft servers to where you're building a world together, and
like other people can come in and walk around your
world and hang out with you and sometimes mess with
you in your world too, because it's a giant shared world.
(20:18):
Whereas there's also another version which I ticket Ruby was playing,
where that is like that's your world. Nobody else can
come in because it's just on that one computer. It's
not being shared with the rest of the world.
Speaker 2 (20:31):
Yeah, and we just didn't know enough about it and
said that's the only version you can play, because the
last thing I wanted was some you know, you know,
I don't want to meeting those people. So I'm sure
there's a lot of fun that can be had on
those you know, multiplayer private server games. I'm sure it's
(20:51):
great in most ways. There are some very cool versions
of that. There's one called Pixel Mindcraft where they have
recreated the gameplay of Pokemon within the Minecraft world, which
is super cool. Yeah, and some of these are like
full on companies. Olivia found this boy, God blessed Livia
for the breadth of things that she helps us with. Yeah,
(21:12):
for sure, it's like, how about philosophy and then Minecraft.
But there's one called high Pixel, which has like forty
developers on staff and got bought themselves by Riot Games,
one of the big companies in twenty twenty. And you know,
these are all just modifying this game that was so
popular already. It's really, really kind of nuts.
Speaker 1 (21:34):
Yeah, I would say a cottage industry has grown up
around it. About like fifty different cottage industries have grown
up around it, with a bunch of different companies in
each that high pixel. To give you an example, they
make like games you can play in the Minecraft world.
Speaker 2 (21:50):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (21:51):
So, like there's one called Skyblock where you start out
on just a little patch of ground floating in the
sky with a single tree and a couple of resources,
and you have to build your way out of that.
You have to expand it with way more limited resources
than you would get normally. There's a one called bed Wars,
where your point is to like destroy your friend's bed
(22:11):
so that they can't they can't respawn in their bed again.
They have to go back to where they started the game. Yeah,
it's fun stuff, but that's on their server and they
they modified Minecraft, and the makers of Minecraft mojang don't
sue those people because you put it all together and
it's this it's almost like the Wikipedia of games, where
(22:32):
the entire world has collaborated on making this amazing game
that is Minecraft.
Speaker 2 (22:40):
I wonder if because he so heavily borrowed let's say,
from Infinity Minor or infinite minor. He was like, yeah,
maybe I'll just sit back and be super wealthy and
not worry about these people that are doing this stuff. Maybe.
Speaker 1 (22:52):
But also the mind boggling thing is now Microsoft owns
it and they don't sue other yeah created points. Yeah,
it's nuts. There's some them we're going on here. Man.
Speaker 2 (23:02):
All right, well, let's take a break and we'll be
right back to talk about who the heck is playing
this game and more about the world right after this.
(23:28):
So there's a lot of video games where you pay
monthly subscription fees. Sometimes you'll like buy the game but
then also subscribe monthly to get extra stuff or whatever,
new editions of the game, things like that. But Minecraft
has always been pretty great in that you buy the
game and that's it. You own the game. The game
(23:49):
is updated for free, the updates just roll out. A
lot of games do that as well. It's not the
only one, but it was sort of the core business model,
which is you buy this game, and whether it's a
PC or PlayStation or whatever, and that's your game for forever.
You've got that Minecraft game, and kids can grow into
(24:09):
adulthood like playing the same game that you, you know, insert
the disc into the player.
Speaker 1 (24:15):
Right, So there are other there's like in game purchases
and add ons and stuff you can buy. I think
the big hubbub that I picked up on is that
a SpongeBob bikini bottom biome is coming along, I think
in August, so you can play it by Bob and yeah,
it looks like it's gonna be pretty cool. There's other
(24:38):
like things called textures, which take this the very standard
like recognizable Minecraft look and do all sorts of things
to it. Some make it way smoother, some add different
kinds of shading. There's one called pastel that changes the
color palette and makes it much pinker and happier. There's
just a ton of stuff you can get. An add
(24:59):
on that like is you're it's a mansion, Like you
don't have to build yourself. It's just now you can
buy a mansion rather than build. It seems counterintuited over
counter against the point, I guess, but I'm sure some
kids are like, I just want to buy the mansion
in Farm instead. I don't want to waste my time
building my mansion. You're rabbit holing, sorry, but yes, my
(25:23):
point is there are stuff you can buy. But a
lot of that stuff is free too, a lot of
the mods are free.
Speaker 2 (25:29):
Yeah. Yeah, it's hard to get great statistics on who's
playing it, but Livia did found a survey from Jeez,
like seven years ago from Australia where fifth and you know,
I bet it's pretty indicative of who's playing worldwide. Fifty
four percent of boys ages three to twelve were playing it,
thirty two percent of girls.
Speaker 1 (25:51):
All of them raised on Foster's Beer.
Speaker 2 (25:56):
And early on it started out is more sort of
young adult men or older teenagers, but it has since
crept down in age, and I'm sure you know people
of all a just still play it. But you know,
it's a game that a four year old can kind
of start playing if they're good with their fingies. There
are two different default players from the early years. Steve
(26:20):
Well he was the only default player in the early years,
and then in twenty fourteen they added Alex. They added
a man and a woman, and then they rolled out
seven more in twenty twenty two with different outfits and
different skin tones. But you can skin your character. You
can create the stuff yourself, and I believe you can
probably buy stuff and get skins that other people have
(26:41):
created to make your player look more like you want
them to look.
Speaker 1 (26:46):
Yeah, they'd be more like you. Even Like there's clowns,
Japanese demons, scarecrows, there's a lot of cool skins out there.
For sure.
Speaker 2 (26:55):
You just stopped yourself. Yes, it hiss on that list,
So I guess we should talk about the fact that
and this is another really cool part of it. When
you start out, you know, I said, you start out
like and you just punch that tree. You start out
with one chunk of landscape that is a sixteen by
sixteen block square block, And once you reach those edges,
(27:18):
you start creating. Like you build as you go, and
it's procedurally generated as you go. And eventually if you're
asking like, is there even a limit? Yes, sixty million
blocks per side, which is seven times larger than the
Earth's surface.
Speaker 1 (27:35):
Yeah, if you consider a block a square kilometer of Earth,
it is. It's about half the size of Neptune and
twice the size of Earth. Isn't that nuts? Yeah, that's
just one world. So I read this amazing post by
a guy named Alan Zuconi called the World Generation of Minecraft.
(27:56):
I'm going to just dance just along the top of it.
But if you're at all interested in how the actual
world is generated, and it's quite fascinating and go read that.
But essentially, what they start with is what's called a seed.
It's sixty four bits of information, right, which is nothing
that's so small, but just following a couple of algorithmic rules,
(28:19):
the whole world generates from there. And because these sixty
four bits are slightly different in each seed, there's something
like eighteen point four quintillion possible worlds that can develop
from a seed. That's how many seeds are possible.
Speaker 2 (28:38):
Out there, right, Well, tell them what a seed is.
Speaker 1 (28:40):
So a seed is that sixty four bits that create
the world. And when you have a game like Ruby's game,
where she bought that game, she bought a seed. So
if she bought it, okay, her dad bought it for
and so if she started over when she started the game,
every time, that same world is gonna be built because
(29:01):
it's the same information following the same rules. So it's
gonna build the same world. But if she went and
bought another one, they'll see that it grew from would
create a totally different world. And it follows these really
simple rules like if the temperature is this, and the
altitude is this. This is the biome it's going to create,
like a desert or a tundra or a forest or
(29:22):
something like that. And so if you've created a forest
biome now in this spot, that means it's gonna have
trees and certain kinds of animals running around. If it's underwater,
what's the water temperature? And depending on the water temperature,
there's gonna be different animals in that biome too. And
it's just following like if then rules that create a
(29:44):
world from sixty four bits. It's nuts what they've done.
And the other thing about it, too, is people play
this so much that they'll actually go out and buy
another copy because they know that world so well.
Speaker 2 (29:58):
Can you imagine, Uh, can't you just start over?
Speaker 1 (30:03):
You can't. But it's going to be the same world,
That's what I'm saying.
Speaker 2 (30:06):
Oh no, I mean as a different character or something.
Speaker 1 (30:10):
I mean, yeah, you could start over, but you're going
to be exploring the same world that you did. You
know before, you could buy another copy, and it's going
to be a totally different world.
Speaker 2 (30:20):
Oh I thought if you started over as a new
like if I logged in as me in her game.
I could just start as whatever I wanted.
Speaker 1 (30:27):
No, because it's the same seed. Yeah, you could be
a different character, skin in or whatever, but.
Speaker 2 (30:31):
The mean the world start from scratch.
Speaker 1 (30:33):
Yeah, the world will still be the same because it's
growing from the same seed. I should probably caveat this
that this is Alan Ducony talking. I'm just I'm dis
amplifying what he's saying.
Speaker 2 (30:44):
Well, let's talk about those biomes. There are sixty four
biome types, fifty three in the over World, which is
where you know, that's sort of the main gameplay area,
and then they have a couple of other areas, the Nether,
which was added in twenty ten, which is pretty scary
like hellish place, and then the End, which is that
(31:07):
was in twenty eleven. That's a very very dark, very
bleak place, a very bleak landscape.
Speaker 1 (31:13):
It's kind of metroidy.
Speaker 2 (31:14):
Yeah, you can actually win that game if you defeat
the Ender Dragon. But I believe there are fifty three
biomes in the Overworld, five in the Nether, five in
the End, and then one that I didn't completely understand,
So I'm not even going to get into it, but
it gets really really detailed. Like you said, you know,
(31:35):
if you go to the ocean and the water temperature
to this, like there are nine oceans you can do
like warm water ocean, frozen ocean, cold water ocean. It
just and you know the different forests you can drill
down very very specifically within those sixty four biomes, which
is like only lens to the creativity. I think kids
(31:55):
can just not only are they like being creative, but
they're they're learning something about these biomes for sure, you know,
maybe not the most detailed stuff, but they know that, hey,
in this kind of biome, these are the plants and
trees that you'll have.
Speaker 1 (32:10):
Right, there's kids walking around that are like, yeah, if
you go under the ocean, you'll find abandoned cities that
the ancient builders created. That's what they're learning, Chuck.
Speaker 2 (32:22):
Mobile entities is another thing, or mobs. These are like
the animals and the monsters and stuff. When they're killed,
they can drop things that you can pick up. Sometimes
you can tame them. They if you get updates, these
mobs expand. I think they're more than seventy five now.
But the things I've seen walking through the room are
(32:44):
like sheep and pigs and things like that. Those were
the first animals kind of created that you can use
that you can you know, get wool from them. If
you want to make that bed, you're going to have
to get that wool from that sheep.
Speaker 1 (32:58):
Right. So, and you talked about different biomes having different animals,
and one of the reasons to go to the biomes
is not just to explore new cool things, but you
can get different things out of different mobs. Right. So,
if you went to a warm water ocean, you would
find pufferfish. And if you get a pufferfish and you
combine it with something else I don't remember, you can
(33:19):
create a potion that will let you breathe underwater, so
you can walk around and explore underwater. So everything that
you encounter that's a mob, which is essentially another term
for a non player character. You can get something from
and you can combine it with other stuff that you
got from other mobs, or from punching a tree, or
from digging up or with your pickaxe to create new
(33:41):
things to do new stuff with. That's what people are
doing when they're playing Minecraft.
Speaker 2 (33:47):
One of the other things that you can find, or zombies,
is very big part of the game. They are kind
of like most zombies are pretty easy to take care
of and defeat. They're different variations of zombies. Creepers are
kind of a fun mob because creepers are a mistake.
I believe that. What's the guy's name again, Marcus Person. Yeah,
(34:10):
he was trying to make a pig, but he coded
it wrong and it stretched out tall instead of wide,
and he thought it looked creepy. He liked it, and
so creepers became a very sort of popular monster in
the game because he just said, I love that mistake,
Let's leave it.
Speaker 1 (34:27):
And they're considered hostile mops, right because they'll attack you. Yeah, yeah,
and they do that by blowing up I think we
said earlier.
Speaker 2 (34:35):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (34:36):
There's also something called ender Men, which is kind of
a play on slender Man, and there are these creepy
entities that may or may not attack you, depending on
whether you look at.
Speaker 2 (34:45):
Him or not.
Speaker 1 (34:46):
So there's like there's definitely gameplay to this, right, Like
there's like you can go off and like defeat these
things and fight them and protect villages and stuff like that.
But there's also like you can also just farm and
once in a while you have to defend your farm
against some zombies. Or something.
Speaker 2 (35:04):
Yeah, you'll also come up on villagers and villages where
they live. And these you know look like they don't
look like they look like humans, I guess or their
version of humans, right, And you can get things from them.
You can trade with them. They have different jobs. You
can change their job if you want to. If you
(35:24):
need like food or something, you can make them unemployed
by destroying their job and then giving them a new job.
Then all of a sudden, you got somebody giving you food.
Speaker 1 (35:33):
Right exactly, And you like, it's just crazy that like
people have village farms essentially where they're breeding villagers to
make them stuff that they want. It can get really
really complicated really fast. But in the most basic version,
you're just you know, trading with the villagers given them.
You go get emeralds and you come bring them to
the villagers and they give you food or wool or
(35:54):
something like that.
Speaker 2 (35:56):
Yeah, and you know, you learn where to look for
different things that you need. Like if you want coal,
you know you can dig down not too deep bleef
or coal. If you want this thing called red, or
if you want like diamonds, you got a deep dig
really really deep to find the diamonds. Just like the
real world. And then Lyvia pointed out this thing called Redstone,
which was I believe it was an update to the alpha.
(36:19):
So it's been around basically from the beginning. But it
has a lot of different kinds of functions, but it
mainly functions like electrical wires. You can build and automate things.
Speaker 1 (36:29):
Yeah, it makes things go, powers them right, like everything
from pistons to doors opening to whatever. People make crazy
machines using Redstone. There's a kid who made a functioning
calculator by arranging Redstone and other items in a certain way.
He made a calculator in Minecraft, and it's kind of
one of those things you have to see to really
(36:50):
understand how crazy that is. But that's really it's neat.
I think it'd be. I don't know how well the
game would work at all if there wasn't such a
thing as Redstone, or if you know, you could just
make things work just by pressing them right, then having
to go mine Redstone and using it to make the
specific thing work the specific way.
Speaker 2 (37:08):
That's how you know.
Speaker 1 (37:09):
That's how detailed it involved. It is because of choices
like that and the development totally.
Speaker 2 (37:16):
Should we take our second break sure. All right, we'll
take that break and we'll talk about how this is
sort of taken over YouTube as well.
Speaker 1 (37:24):
Right for this, Okay, Chuck, So you mentioned YouTube and
(37:45):
that is basically the official outlet for Minecraft. That's where
Minecraft pours out into the rest of the world.
Speaker 2 (37:54):
Yeah, you know, we'll go over some of the ways
YouTube is utilized. It's very very I mean, YouTube is
full full full of Minecraft stuff. But one of the
things that sort of alarmed me and kind of disappointed
me with this and roadblocks is that kids will just
sit around watching people play this game on YouTube sometime
(38:18):
it's like to learn how to do things. But with
Ruby and her friends, I will see them just sitting
around and watching it instead of playing it. And I'm
always like, as a parent, like, oh god, can you
you know, can you play the game and like get
involved and you know, but try to pick my battles
and just limit it. You know.
Speaker 1 (38:37):
Well, they've really turned things around on their head. If
you're like, man, can you please play the video game?
Speaker 2 (38:44):
It?
Speaker 1 (38:45):
Can you go outside? Now? It's like, can you play
the video game rather than watch other people play?
Speaker 2 (38:50):
Yeah, that's a good point.
Speaker 1 (38:51):
That's how far we've slipped I get it though, It's like,
essentially she's watching an unscripted TV show money like that,
and there are people that do that. There's something called
Survival multiplayer Channels. There's one called dream SMP. I think
they disbanded, but essentially they had loosely scripted story arcs
(39:12):
that they acted out in Minecraft world as like kind
of fictionalized versions of themselves like our stuff you should
know TV show, and there were just plots that took place,
and people would watch YouTube videos of these essentially shows
created in Minecraft.
Speaker 2 (39:32):
Yeah, there's a one guy named Pewdiepi p E W
d I E p i E. It's got one hundred
and eleven million subs and is a very very very
wealthy man.
Speaker 1 (39:45):
Yeah, he was one of the first like genuine YouTube stars.
I think he was as big as it got for
a while and.
Speaker 2 (39:52):
Then for him, I'm not knocking it, by the way, he.
Speaker 1 (39:54):
Was toppled by an i think a Bollywood record label.
There was a competition a four year old from Taiwan,
right exactly who opened Minecraft lego gift sets. Yeah, but yeah,
so PewDiePie got very very wealthy just essentially from starting
out from playing Minecraft videos and you said people watch
people playing Minecraft, Phil watch speed runs, see how fast
(40:15):
they can go. There's parody music videos set in the
Minecraft world. Like I think it's one of those things
where like you can't get enough Minecraft once it gets
under your skin to where if you're like I don't
feel like playing today, I'm going to watch somebody else
play and that will satisfy that inch.
Speaker 2 (40:32):
Yeah, and you know what now that I've said that,
save your emails everyone, because yes, at home, I used
to sit around and watch my friends play Adventure when
they played and it was their turn, And I would
hover over the shoulders of my friends at arcades and
watch them play the games. So we did the exact
same thing, and I take it all back.
Speaker 1 (40:54):
Yeah, but it's a little different because you're sitting there
like willing your friend to hurry up and die so
it can be your you.
Speaker 2 (41:00):
Know, that's it's a little different.
Speaker 1 (41:02):
Yeah, you're you're up next, that's the reason. And what
else are you gonna do? You know, you're on your
eighth Orange Julius. You're not gonna go get another one
of those, so you might as well stand around and watch.
Speaker 2 (41:11):
Yeah, and your quarter sitting there flat on the on
the screen of the arcade game.
Speaker 1 (41:15):
So you're definitely next.
Speaker 2 (41:18):
Oh man, those were the days.
Speaker 1 (41:20):
What else you want to talk about the Lord at
all or move on?
Speaker 2 (41:23):
Uh? Yeah, well, I mean I think it's kind of
cool in that if you have a world like this,
you're gonna you're gonna get some stuff like fan fiction.
Even though technically Alex and Steve are sort of until
they release, the other ones were the only two kind
of characters. So it's you know, it's a little weird
to have fan fiction about these two blocky people that
really have did you know nothing about personality wise? Sure,
(41:45):
I guess that's the point of fan fiction. They've also
come up with this stuff, this sort of like fan fiction,
you know, where you talked about the ancient Builders, Like
they've created this backstory sort of of the ancient ones
who who created the original structures in the game, and
like where did they come from? So like the creativity
is really off the charts, you know.
Speaker 1 (42:06):
Yeah, it's yeah, Yeah, that's the thing about it is
we'll see, like one of the big benefits of it
for kids but also for anybody is it it really
gets your imagination and creativity going along with some other
stuff too.
Speaker 2 (42:18):
What about Hero Brian.
Speaker 1 (42:19):
Herobrian is a legendary character from what I saw, Notch
said unequivocally that Herobrien doesn't exist.
Speaker 2 (42:26):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (42:27):
In Minecraft World, there was a four cham post from
years back where somebody claimed to have encountered Steve, but
it was Steve with all white eyes, and he was
a weirdo doing weird stuff following him around the Minecraft world,
and that became the legend of Herobrien, this character that
supposedly is the ghost of Nach's dead brother, right, not
(42:50):
just like I don't even have a brother, I have
a half brother I've never met. So no, there's no Herobrien.
Sorry to bust that bubble.
Speaker 2 (42:58):
Yeah, and I believe, like in mods and things, people
have created that kind of stuff, but in the official
Minecraft game there never has been one, even though people
swear that they've come across exactly.
Speaker 1 (43:09):
Yeah. So there's a lot of ways that you can
modify Minecraft yourself. Again, one of the cottage industries is
creating editors to let Minecraft players modify the game to
their own specifications, to let them do things like, you know,
jump really high and survival mode or fly or whatever
you want to do. But one of the things that
(43:31):
people have done is build stuff with or without modifications,
and the less you modify, the more impressive your build is.
It's what they're called their builds. For example, one kid
named Atmospheric Beats.
Speaker 2 (43:47):
This is incredible.
Speaker 1 (43:49):
Who may or may not be Travis Hicks. I found
a YouTube video and a Reddit post. I can't imagine.
There's too many people running around making one to one
scale models of Kansas City in Minecraft. Either way, there
is a one to one scale model of Kansas City,
every building, every tree, every street, and you can go
(44:09):
inside every building. It's just completely true to life in Minecraft.
Somebody built that.
Speaker 2 (44:16):
I want that for Atlanta because I would have fun
running around there.
Speaker 1 (44:20):
Well, there's a whole group called Build the Earth where
people around the world are creating like faithful to life. Yeah,
creations of buildings. The point is to recreate every building
on Earth. So you can do that.
Speaker 2 (44:36):
Okay, maybe will one day. It gets even cooler if
you're like, all right, Kansas City one to one scale
model not bad. Scale model of the entire Earth not
pretty impressive. There's an eighteen year old This is a
couple of years ago, so I guess he's twenty ish
now a YouTuber named Christopher Slayton. I think his real
(44:57):
name is Chris Decal. Yet probably the other way. I
thought Slayton was the made up thing, not Decal Slayton.
Speaker 1 (45:07):
If it was like slay Tour, maybe.
Speaker 2 (45:10):
Yeah, I had that reverse. But he made a model
of the observable universe.
Speaker 1 (45:15):
Did you see the video of this, of the explanation. Yeah,
it wasn't like he was like, oh, I'm gonna draw
this in Minecraft. The kid did the physics required to
create the models of the universe. I mean, like everything
from like nebula galaxies to the Sun, Like you can
zoom into pixels on the Sun. It's just one of
(45:36):
the most impressive things I've ever seen in my entire life.
Speaker 2 (45:39):
Would that be a photon?
Speaker 1 (45:41):
I guess so. It'd be a one kilometer square photon.
Speaker 2 (45:46):
If all that wasn't cool enough. In twenty twenty, the
group Reporters Without Borders started a project called Uncensored Library.
And this this is amazing. In places like Saudi Arabia
and Russia where the real news is like censored or
you don't have access to these news sites, they are
(46:06):
burying news inside the Minecraft world. Because you can play
Minecraft there.
Speaker 1 (46:12):
Yeah, they write books or they create books that have
these articles in them.
Speaker 2 (46:16):
And that's cool, unbelievably cool.
Speaker 1 (46:18):
There's another thing too. I mentioned a kid who made
a calculator. You can arrange these Redstone like or basically
and make things into logic gates on off if then
that kind of stuff and if you make if you
arrange different logic gates together, you can create computers. And
there was somebody who created a computer that plays Minecraft
(46:41):
in Minecraft. Like you go on to Minecraft, go over
to that computer and play Minecraft on that computer that
exists only in Minecraft. I just want to make sure
it's totally clear what I'm saying here, and it actually works.
It's not some it's not a drawing. It's like it's
operating on logic gates that they created with arrangements of
(47:02):
Redstone or incredible. So let's talk about this because I
think it's pretty clear Chuck, that there are a lot
of benefits to playing this, Like, yes, it would be
really easy for a kid to become addicted, and that
really can happen, and I've seen that that actually is
an actual thing and you have to look out for it.
But there's also some real benefits to this, to playing this,
(47:22):
especially as a kid.
Speaker 2 (47:24):
Yeah, I mean, you know, if you're a parent, keep
an eye on your kid. Monitor there there how long
they're playing this game. Because it is great, and we're
gonna talk about the benefits for sure, but like if
they don't want to do anything but Minecraft, and if
it seems like they're never satisfied with the amount that
they're playing and they're lying about their playing, and if
(47:46):
they don't have it, they're you know, experiencing you know,
the withdrawal symptoms of anything else, and they're grumpy and
irritated or depressed. Like, seriously, get involved because it's a
real danger. The benefits, you know, been talking about how
creative it is. It's not only is it going to
encourage you to just use your creative brain, but you're
(48:06):
problem solving, you're using math, you're working with other people
like teamwork, potentially learning to code. Like there, this is
the one game I believe. I asked Hodgman because I
knew his son played, and I was like, Hey, is
this Minecraft thing? And he was like, that's kind of
the one game that it's it's okay for kids to
start playing because it's got like plenty of good benefits.
Speaker 1 (48:27):
Yeah, and even more esoteric stuff that like managing resources.
Like it's not like the kids like, oh, I'm learning
to manage resources is great just by virtue of playing Minecraft.
You have to learn to manage resources. You have to
keep up with your sheep and make sure that they're
breeding so that you can get enough wool, like like
you have to know what to use, where, where to
(48:47):
go get it, and then how to use it smartly
so that you can get the most out of it.
Like that's a huge part of playing Minecraft, and that's
a great thing to learn. It also teaches kids to
like focus on a you know, well you want to
raise some sheep. I know, I keep going to that. Well,
but it's a good one. Yeah, you have to go
you have to farm the food to feed the sheep,
(49:09):
and then you have to shear the sheep to get
the wool, and then you use the wool that do
god knows what with And you have a goal and
it's not just that one goal. That goal is made
up of a series of sub goals too, And that's
a great thing to learn early on.
Speaker 2 (49:23):
Yeah, and you know your kids aren't coming to you
and asking you how to do it unless you happen
to be a parent that really knew Minecraft, because I'm
sure you know that exists now, it's been around long enough.
But generally, like your kid's probably in the other room
figuring this stuff out. Maybe they're asking friends for help.
Maybe they're not. They're learning as they go and making
(49:43):
like what they think are like smart decisions to do
better in the game and real time. My advice to
a parent is like, it's really easy just to sort
of walk by anytime your kid is doing this with
zero interest, but just maybe once or twice down and
ask them to tell you about their world for fifteen minutes.
(50:06):
Just like sit there with them while they played for
like fifteen minutes and say show me your world. I
did that a couple of times, and it's incredible to see.
I mean she was like five or six at the time.
Oh wow, to see a kid really like I was like,
oh my god, and you figured out that, and you
figured out you needed to do that to get that
And to them, they're like, yeah, Dad, that's duh, that's
(50:26):
the game. But I'm over here going like this is incredible,
Like you're learning, Like, keep at it. That's cool and
I'm glad you stopped playing it.
Speaker 1 (50:34):
At the same time, I feel like we would be
grossly reversed if we didn't give a shout out to
our little friend from the Medford Show. Yeah, that's right,
who requested this. I don't remember his name, and I'm
very sorry for that. But there was a kid, a guy,
a young dude at the Medford Show recently, I think
(50:55):
in May who during QA asked us to do an
episode on Minecraft. The whole thing started with him asking
us about mobs, and we're like, what is a mob?
Speaker 2 (51:04):
Yeah?
Speaker 1 (51:04):
Yeah, it kind of kicked the whole thing off. So
that's why we're where we are right now.
Speaker 2 (51:09):
That's right. And if you hear this kid and parent
and you want us to set the record straight and
get that name on the air, like email, listen, we'll
include that in a future correction for sure.
Speaker 1 (51:19):
And speaking of email, I think, Chuck, it's time for
listening now.
Speaker 2 (51:25):
Uh yeah, this is about salsa. We got a lot
of good salsa emails. People love salsa. I like to
say salsa, saying and eating. Boy that did you see
the one woman who's sent in the black salsa from
that restaurant in Chicago? No, I didn't see that it
looked good. I think it was the last couple of
days she posted a picture and it's like Charred Pepper's
(51:46):
basically nice boy, did it look good? Hey, guys, great
job on the recent episode on salsa. I was born
and raised in northwestern Mexico, being Mexican, I was very
interested on how you guys would tackle this. Josh got
it right about the fact that salsa is a condiment mostly,
but he did get it wrong that it is in
fact served at most restaurants in Mexico along with tortilla
(52:08):
chips called to topos or like the tostadas like Chuck
mentioned being broken apart. It is not an appetizer, nor
do you need to order it. It's just served. And
you can also use the salsa as a condiment with
your food. And I saw someone else wrote in a
Mexican woman that said a lot of times, that's a
good way to test the salsa, to test taste tests
(52:32):
sort of the salsa or the different sauceas you get
to see which one you do want to use as.
Speaker 1 (52:36):
A coe, which makes sense.
Speaker 2 (52:40):
Sorry, but the only thing that that was innovated in
the US was to charge for something that comes free
with your meal.
Speaker 1 (52:47):
Of Mexico boo.
Speaker 2 (52:49):
Indeed, also guys tortilla chips go back to the pre
Hispanic era with the Mexican word for tortilla chip again
to topo coming from a nahuato where meaning to toast
or brown, and finally for chuck. Pico degao Mexico's any
sort of mixed or chopped fruits and vegetables. Pico digao
(53:10):
that he referenced in the US is usually called salsa
fresca I don't know, I didn't say it, or salsa
bendero bendera meaning flag and the chilies, onion, and tomato
are green, white and red like the Mexican flag. Very nice,
great email. That's from Ricardo Lamas Vidales.
Speaker 1 (53:29):
Thanks a lot, Ricardo. We appreciate that. It's nice to
hear from a local expert. And if you want to
be like Ricardo and set us straight on some stuff,
we would love to hear that. You can send it
off to Stuff podcast at iHeartRadio dot Stuff you Should
Know is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (53:49):
For more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. Yeah,
Stuff You Should Know News
Hosts And Creators
Chuck Bryant
Josh Clark
Show Links
AboutOrder Our BookStoreSYSK ArmyRSSPopular Podcasts
Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang
Ding dong! Join your culture consultants, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, on an unforgettable journey into the beating heart of CULTURE. Alongside sizzling special guests, they GET INTO the hottest pop-culture moments of the day and the formative cultural experiences that turned them into Culturistas. Produced by the Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio.
40s and Free Agents: NFL Draft Season
Daniel Jeremiah of Move the Sticks and Gregg Rosenthal of NFL Daily join forces to break down every team's needs this offseason.
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.