How You Play the Game Quotes

“If Hard proves to be not hard enough for you, you can go “Hardcore,” which means that if you die, you stay dead. That is very hardcore indeed, as Heidegger once observed.”
― Charlie Huenemann, How You Play the Game: A Philosopher Plays Minecraft

“If Steve is not careful, his metaphysical musings will turn theological. Steve might form a belief in a “Programmer,” a being with the capability of programming pixels in such a way as to result in a law-governed world.”
― Charlie Huenemann, How You Play the Game: A Philosopher Plays Minecraft

“I live to express my innermost nature. I live and I create for the reason of discovering what it is I will do next.”
― Charlie Huenemann, How You Play the Game: A Philosopher Plays Minecraft

“I love the strangeness that comes when people get so lost in a game that the game becomes the world. Because you do get lost like that. Especially in something like Minecraft, that’s so endless. You’re actually startled to come back into your life at the end of it. So I wanted to play with that moment, where you’re between two worlds, and for a short little period you’re not sure which one is more real.”
― Charlie Huenemann, How You Play the Game: A Philosopher Plays Minecraft

“To think is to find patterns in the elements, or a program among the pixels.”
― Charlie Huenemann, How You Play the Game: A Philosopher Plays Minecraft

“mineshaft,”
― Charlie Huenemann, How You Play the Game: A Philosopher Plays Minecraft

“Appendix Tractatus Logico-Minecrafticus (An exercise in the metaphysics of virtual reality, in the fashion of Ludwig Wittgenstein.) 1. The world is everything that is the case. 1.1 The world is the totality of arrangements, not of blocks. 1.11 The world is determined by the arrangements, and by these being all the arrangements. 1.12 For how the blocks are arranged determines both what is the case, and also all that is not the case. 1.13 The actual arrangement of blocks in virtual space is the world. 2. What is the case, the arrangement, is the placement of individual blocks. 2.1 A placement is a combination of blocks (objects, things). 2.11 It is essential to a block that it can be placed in some spot or other. 2.12 If a block can be so placed, then this possibility must already lie within it; it is a parameter for the block. 2.13 The totality of blocks, as a whole, contain within themselves all of the possible placements. 2.2 An individual block is simple. 2.21 Each block is both form and matter. 2.211 (Those little chips that fly away when you chop at a”
― Charlie Huenemann, How You Play the Game: A Philosopher Plays Minecraft

“Water, for example, flows inexhaustibly from a single source block, and dissipates after eight squares, but it will also look ahead for a low spot and direct itself there if one is available within six squares. Such predictability will seem miraculous to anyone in this world who has tried plumbing.”
― Charlie Huenemann, How You Play the Game: A Philosopher Plays Minecraft

“is”
― Charlie Huenemann, How You Play the Game: A Philosopher Plays Minecraft

“the”
― Charlie Huenemann, How You Play the Game: A Philosopher Plays Minecraft

“August 2014 that Cody Littley, a Ph. D candidate in computer science and Minecraft fan, had constructed a working hard drive within the world of Minecraft. What that means is that Littley had painstakingly and ingeniously assembled redstone-powered pistons into a basic device to store about one kilobyte of data. What data Littley’s device stores, of course, can be from any world. Littley could use it as a very small address book for his real or imaginary friends, or to keep a small inventory list of items either from his real-world pantry or his Minecraft-world crafting exploits. In principle, Littley could build a piston device so massively complicated that his Steve could play Minecraft on it, or perhaps even OurworldMinecraft, a game in which Steve plays around in a virtual reality version of our world. As a matter of fact, Littley can’t do this, since the programming in Minecraft does not sustain a big enough world at any given time to support the existence of such a huge contraption.”
― Charlie Huenemann, How You Play the Game: A Philosopher Plays Minecraft

“And so Steve might then go on to found the First Temple of Notch, and sing praises unto the creator of this best of all possible worlds. . . .”
― Charlie Huenemann, How You Play the Game: A Philosopher Plays Minecraft

“If Steve is not careful, his metaphysical musings will turn theological. Steve might form a belief in a “Programmer,” a being with the capability of programming pixels in such a way as to result in a law-governed world. For certainly, if the field metaphysic is true, nothing in Steve’s world would be capable of doing this, since everything in Steve’s world is itself a product of the field metaphysic. The Programmer would have to exist beyond time and space, with powers that would be omnipotent, in Steve’s understanding. This Programmer, for whatever reason, saw it was right and good to create Steve and his world with a wonderful economy of causes and laws that reflected the Programmer’s own creative glory. And so Steve might then go on to found the First Temple of Notch, and sing praises unto the creator of this best of all possible worlds. . . . Of course, we know that Steve is basically right in these conclusions—at least, we know that there truly is a programmer of his world, or a team of them. But Steve does not know what we know, and he might be a bit more cautious in his reasoning.”
― Charlie Huenemann, How You Play the Game: A Philosopher Plays Minecraft

“To say that the phenomena of his world are routine and fairly predictable is to say that Steve’s world is governed by laws of nature. His laws are certainly not our laws. For instance, he can place a block of dirt, set another block on top of it, and then chop out the first block, and the second one will remain suspended in the air. Source blocks of water or lava will continuously produce water or lava, seemingly ex nihilo. Torches burn forever. But though all this seems magical to us, it is perfectly natural to Steve. It is how his world works, and he can rely on its own patterns of regularity. To be governed by laws of nature is not necessarily to be governed by our laws of nature; any laws, so long as they are laws, will do.”
― Charlie Huenemann, How You Play the Game: A Philosopher Plays Minecraft

“Nether is eerily indifferent to us, for the most part. The landscape consists in ugly, vomit-colored bricks, and huge falls of lava descending from a black sky. Zombie pigmen patrol the Nether, but they take no interest in us (unless we attack, and then things get ugly fast). There are “ghasts” that resemble lighting fixtures from the 1970s, and they will shoot fire at us on sight, but they are easily killed. All told, the Nether has fewer features and is less dangerous than the Overworld. But it is creepy, and we feel very much out of place. This, I think, is the genius of the Nether. Had the creators made it more adventurous, it would be more familiar. The Nether, I think, is what the Overworld becomes, when irrigated by the Void.”
― Charlie Huenemann, How You Play the Game: A Philosopher Plays Minecraft

“everyone?”
― Charlie Huenemann, How You Play the Game: A Philosopher Plays Minecraft