Minecraft Roleplay and Storytelling in the Digital Age

A hundred thousand people tuning in to watch livestreams of gamers roleplaying a revolution in Minecraft. A million people tuning in to watch a livestream commemorating the one-year anniversary of a daily upload channel and its subsequent total deletion at the end of the stream. Wildly popular virtual reality games inserting a player directly into the story they are seeing unfold, and augmented reality games taking visual elements of a story out of its own fictional universe and into ours. Widely acclaimed games that require digging around its code and deleting files for the story to advance. This is a new and thrilling age of storytelling; this is the age of metafiction. I’m utterly obsessed with it from a narrative perspective, and I think there’s no case of it that encapsulates the new age we’re in as the first example listed.

Imagine if when turning on a television show, you were given a choice of which character whose perspective you wanted to experience the story from. The events of the story are all happening in real time, no cuts between scenes, so you are following this person closely through every beat of the narrative, and while you yourself cannot affect the events of the story, the characters you are watching know you’re there and can speak directly to you. This is the unique experience of watching any Twitch or YouTube stream in the Dream SMP -- a survival multiplayer Minecraft server created by the Minecraft YouTuber Dream, wherein several streamers have taken to dramatic roleplay of battle and coup d’état as much as the standard comedic commentary of let’s plays. There’s a legitimate story being semi-improvisationally told here, of rebellion, election, and overthrow, and a viewer is presented with a number of questions when tuning in to watch it: Whose stream do I watch? Who will I experience as the main character of this story? What information will I miss by watching this person instead of another? What information will I gain by watching this person instead of another? On top of that, the presence of multiple people all doing their own thing in the same space and doing it in real time creates an illusion of a fully inhabited world. For example, just this Monday, while most people invested in the story of the SMP opted to watch TommyInnit or Wilbur Soot’s streams to witness the epic conclusion of the first “season” of the SMP saga, one could very well have chosen to instead watch GeorgeNotFound build himself a house in the same world, just away from all the action. This is not an option available in other creative mediums, and is as wildly fun and entertaining as it is endlessly interesting.

This all is, I’ll happily admit, over-analytical, and very silly of me to write so formally about. This is Minecraft after all: the sheer comedy of a sixteen-year-old boy delivering a fiery speech about the soul of a nation and the values of revolution to a block-headed avatar with two little pixelated lines for eyes cannot be understated. But the point stands that these are uncharted waters for collaborative storytelling, for improv storytelling, and for virtual storytelling, and it’s nothing if not exciting.