So a few weeks back I came across this post on reddit, basically telling the tale of a game of Minecraft gone terribly terribly wrong. Like putting a bunch of kittens in charge of a tank kinda wrong. The story tells of a minecraft game between friends, where the one rule of the server is to not leave the play area, which was only a few hundred blocks long. Since the world of Minecraft is infinite, and resources (even rare ores) aren’t that hard to come across, normally this wouldn’t be a problem, but make that infinite world into a finite one, and the problems you eventually face will be very similar to those the real world faces. Needless to say, once there was a demand for scarce resources, a power struggle broke out and the group descended into factions, using open warfare, subterfuge and trading to get what they needed.
Now I’ve been on reddit long enough to question the validity of this guy’s story. I’ve also been on reddit long enough to know that crazier shit has happened. Either way it’s a nice story but regardless of the truth it raises an interesting question. Can we use video games like Minecraft to simulate real world occurrences, and predict the outcomes of potential events via such a method? This played on my mind for quite a long while, so I decided to do some digging. (excuse the pun)
