Death by Video Game: Tales of Obsession From the Virtual Frontline (10 page)

In the four years since its initial release,
Minecraft
has become a phenomenon that is played by more than forty million people around the world, on computers, smartphones, and video-game consoles. It is primarily a game about human expression: a giant, Lego-style construction set in which every object can be broken down into its constituent elements and rebuilt in the shape of a house, an airship, a skyscraper, or whatever else a player can create.

Minecraft
’s universe is procedurally generated, meaning that an algorithm places each asset—every hill, mountain, cave, river, sheep, and so on—in a unique arrangement every time a new game is loaded, so that no two players’ worlds are exactly alike. Markus Persson, the game’s creator, planned for these worlds to be infinitely
large: if a player kept walking in a single direction, the game would create more of the world in front of him, like an engineer forever laying track for an advancing train.

But, at extreme distances from a player’s starting point, a glitch in the underlying mathematics causes the landscape to fracture into illogical shapes and patterns.

‘Pretty early on, when implementing the “infinite” worlds, I knew the game would start to bug out at long distances,’ Persson told me. ‘But I did the math on how likely it was people would ever reach it, and I decided it was far away enough that the bugs didn’t matter.’

In March 2011, Persson wrote a blog post about the problem in the game’s source code and the mysterious area where
Minecraft
’s world begins to warp and disintegrate, a place that he calls the Far Lands. Around that time, inspired by the legions of
Minecraft
players who record and broadcast their adventures, Mac started a YouTube channel to document his virtual exploits. As he cast about for a fresh angle to distinguish his episodes from those of other YouTube
Minecraft-casters
, he came upon Persson’s post. It was exactly what Mac had been searching for: he changed the name of his YouTube channel to Far Lands or Bust!, and he set off to see them for himself.

‘In my ignorance, I thought the journey might take a year or so,’ Mac tells me. ‘Had I known that the Far Lands were so many thousands of kilometres away, I might have been more hesitant.’

In his essential book about video games,
Trigger Happy
, the writer and critic Steven Poole argues, ‘The jewel in the crown of what video games can offer is the aesthetic emotion of wonder.’ This is achieved most readily, he writes, via the awe-inspiring places and scenes that
video-game designers build on our screens, ‘cathedrals of fire,’ in his memorable phrase.

Few who have, for example, stepped blinking from the murk and grime of
Oblivion
’s city sewers into the virtual kingdom of Cyrodil’s brilliant white sunlight would disagree with Poole’s assertion. Here, miles of verdant countryside blanket out from your feet; hills, valleys, and mountains that stretch away into the distance, inviting not only exploration, but also wonder.

There’s a unique sense of awe to being a tourist in a place that’s simultaneously vivid and virtual. It’s a feeling that video games elicit with wonderful regularity. It’s there when you crest a hill on horseback in
The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
while the sun sets and windmills wheel in the distance; it’s there as you climb one of the stratospheric stone giants in
Shadow of the Colossus
, as you haul yourself upwards by grasping fistfuls of the moss that grows on its back; it’s there in the sand-buffed structures found within the desert scenes of Sony’s appropriately named
Journey
, objects that provide touch-points of humanity in an otherwise arid and forsaken desert. Video-game designers often seek to propel us through their worlds, laying down a crumb trail of objectives designed to hold our attention. But sometimes, the worlds they create cause us to put down the to-do list, to stop and stare at this forest, that horizon, those fields, these spaceships.

Video games allow us to enter into the roles and vocations of people unlike us; likewise, they enable us to visit and explore places that would be unreachable any other way. In their bounds we are able to satisfy the fidgety human desire to explore, to seek out the new and, perhaps ultimately, to call the new our own.

Their appeal is to be found in time, the way we can lose ourselves in the tasks they set before us, the rhythms of their interactions and rewards that lead to chronoslip. But it’s also to be found in
the spaces that they make available to us, the openings they provide into new planes of landscape and reality.

The honest sense of success that accompanies an achieved goal is crucial to the video game’s appeal. But so too is the journey. In 1881, Robert Louis Stevenson articulated the idea in his book
Virginibus Puerisque
, writing that ‘to travel hopefully is a better thing than to arrive, and the true success is to labour.’

Stevenson, who two years later would publish his travelogue drama
Treasure Island
, would find the maxim borne out in fiction as well as life—as too do we video-game explorers, questing hopefully through virtual domains more than a century later.

In contrast to Columbus, Drake, Dampier, and all the other drivers of the age of discovery, with their bulging galleons bulging with supplies, Mac prepared for his hike through
Minecraft
in only a basic way. He gathered the materials to craft a sword, for protection, and a pickaxe, for digging rudimentary shelters to hide from the game’s lethal nocturnal terrors.

‘Most important, I brought a compass,’ he says. ‘The compass always points toward the original spawn point. That way, I would know that, as long as I walk in the direction opposite the needle’s point, I am headed in the right direction.’

Mac has filmed his entire odyssey, breaking it up into separate YouTube episodes, across multiple seasons.

‘The YouTube format serves the journey well, allowing the viewer to experience the entire adventure along with me,’ he says. ‘Also, if anyone had doubts as to whether or not I was making this trek to the Far Lands without cheating, they could go back and watch all of the footage.’

But Mac soon realised that he would have to fill each episode
with commentary, both to engage his audience and to stave off loneliness.

‘The series transformed into a sort of podcast, where the topics I talk about might have little to do with the journey itself,’ he says. ‘Of course, it is always exciting when
Minecraft
regrabs my attention with a perilous cliff, a zombie attack, or a memorable landscape, and I remember the journey I’m on.’

By one measure, Mac’s endeavour is motivated by the same spirit that propels any explorer towards the far reaches of the unknown. Today, we live in a world meticulously mapped by satellites and Google cars, making uncharted virtual lands some of the last places that can satisfy a yearning for the beyond, as well as locations where you are simply, as Mac puts it, ‘first.’

‘My viewers and I are the only people to ever see these places exactly as they are,’ he says. ‘Once we walk past, we will never see them again.’

While the premise of walking in a single direction through a video game for hundreds of hours may seem banal,
Minecraft
has a special ability to create unscripted character drama. In almost every one of Far Lands or Bust’s three hundred or so episodes, each of which lasts for about thirty-five minutes, Mac encounters something of note.

‘On June 6, 2011, in episode thirty-two, I tamed a wolf,’ he recalls. ‘He quickly became a fan favourite and my only companion on the trip. Unfortunately, on the final day of the season, Wolfie, as I’d named him, mysteriously disappeared during a break.’

Mac presumed that Wolfie had been glitched out of the game, and his disappearance lent a sour note to the season finale. But, in an unlikely plot twist, Mac was reunited with Wolfie during the
first episode of season four, and the pair continued the journey together.

When Mac began his quest, he was employed as a web designer, but as his channel attracted more viewers, he started generating enough advertising revenue to quit his job and make virtual exploration his sole career. In a way, his viewers have become his patrons, funding his trip in exchange for reports and updates, which are interesting enough to elicit their continued support. The channel’s success—today, it has more than three hundred thousand subscribers—has been such that Kurt adopted the pseudonym Mac to conceal his identity from fans who might try to locate his house, in the Chicago suburbs.

Persson is an avid supporter of the Far Lands journey.

‘It was one of those things that kind of slowly crept into my awareness,’ he told me. ‘I heard about it from various places and eventually got around to watching an episode.’

Mac met Persson in Paris, in 2012, at the game’s annual conference, where the pair shook hands.

‘I think, despite no longer being involved in
Minecraft
’s development, Notch is very amused at the various ways people have chosen to play his game,’ Mac says.

Persson watches Mac’s videos while working. ‘I find it strangely calming and Zen-like,’ he said. ‘It makes for an excellent background to programming. It’s not something I would ever attempt myself, though. I don’t think I have that kind of personality.’

In June 2011, Mac partnered with the charity Child’s Play, which aims to improve the lives of hospitalised children by providing toys and games to more than seventy hospitals worldwide.

‘The viewers have always motivated me with their generosity,’ he says. ‘It has allowed the series to become more than just about reaching the Far Lands in a video game, but actually making a difference in the real world.’

The charitable cause also gave Mac a reason to withhold how far he has travelled, in order to maintain a sense of mystery.

‘I now only ever press F3 to display my coordinates when certain fund-raising goals have been met,’ he says. When the first fund-raising goal, $8,200, was met, on November 14, 2011, Mac discovered he had travelled more than two hundred and ninety-two thousand metres.

‘After the next goal, twenty-nine thousand two hundred and twenty dollars, was met, on August 12, 2012, I pressed F3, to find I had travelled six hundred and ninety-nine thousand four hundred and ninety-two metres,’ he says.

The date and time of Mac’s arrival in the Far Lands is much debated. It’s agreed that in a completely flat
Minecraft
world it would take a player 820 hours of continuous walking to reach the edge of the universe. But Mac is playing in a world that’s interrupted by mountains, oceans, and other obstacles, all of which affect the pace of his travel. And he often stops to admire his surroundings.

‘Some say it will take more than three thousand episodes to reach my destination at my current rate,’ he says. ‘But I never really take the time to think about it myself. My mantra has always been that this is about the journey and not the destination.’

Nevertheless, Mac is already beginning to see clues that he is on course.

‘I’ve started to experience some of the effects of travelling so far from spawn,’ he says. ‘Items and entities are somewhat disjointed from the terrain around them, causing a jitter as I walk.’

Some people expect these problems to increase as Mac walks
farther from his starting point, and some think that the game will be unplayable long before he reaches the Far Lands. Mac is philosophical.

‘We will see when we get there,’ he says.

This urge for players to explore the extremities of existence has been a part of video games since the very beginning.

In 1961, members of MIT’s Tech Model Railroad Club created
Spacewar!
, one of the first video games that ran on the university’s hulking $120,000 PDP-1 mainframe computer.
Spacewar!
, like so many of the video games that would follow, took place in the cosmos. The setting was, in part, a practical decision: it was far easier for the earliest computers to render the blank canvas of space than the comparable complexities of rocks, hills, or cities. But, for games like
Space Invaders, Asteroids
, and
Defender
, there’s more to the choice of space as a backdrop than utilitarian function. Space has always fascinated storytellers, and with the birth of the video game, humans finally discovered a way to explore its farthest reaches from the crunchy comfort of terra firma.

Early video games kept the stories simple, but it wasn’t long before these representations of space offered more than merely a place to defend humanity from an alien threat. Through video-game simulations, which have become ever more sophisticated with technology’s advance, we’ve had the opportunity to visit the otherwise unreachable and, increasingly, to discover truths about our own galaxy.

One of the first truly ambitious simulations of space was
Elite
, a spaceship game created in 1984 by two university undergraduates,
one aged nineteen, the other twenty, working out of a cramped dormitory in Jesus College, Cambridge. In the game, players tour the universe in a dogfighting mining vessel; the program employed vector mathematics to create vast swaths of space, filled with line-art asteroids and spacecraft, which tilted and spun as if their blueprints had popped into three-dimensional life. Every time the game loaded, there was a digital equivalent of the Big Bang: unimaginable vastness was created from almost nothing.

‘In the early 1980s, a typical home computer would have just thirty-two kilobytes of memory—less than a typical e-mail today,’ David Braben, the programmer who created the game with Ian Bell, tells me. Rather than manually plot star systems by typing the coordinates of stars and planets into a database, Braben tried using randomly generated numbers. This method reduced the amount of designer time required to birth a universe, but at a cost: every time the game was loaded, its suns, moons, planets, and stars would be in a new arrangement. To overcome the randomness problem, Braben used the Fibonacci sequence as a seed from which identical galaxies would be generated each time the game was played, all within a computer program a fraction of the size of a photograph taken with a mobile phone today.