The End is Not the End

This piece is part of our series with Naive Yearly, a conference on the odd, quiet, and poetic web. Naive Yearly’s second edition was held in Ljubljana, Slovenia in September 2024, and we’re now publishing essay versions of the conference talks. Read Kristoffer Tjalve’s foreword to the series, and the talks from last year, here.

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For the uninitiated, Mattia Polibio is a prototypical TikTok influencer, part of the first wave of influencers that gained prominence in the platform’s early days (circa 2018). He lip-syncs, he dances, he makes skits. I certainly wasn’t aware of him until I watched a video titled “Mattia Polibio World” on my favorite YouTube channel “Slushy Noobz,” hosted by Hamzah Al-Emad and Martin Andrijasevic, who both also initially gained a following on TikTok.

The video starts off as an interview with Mattia, conducted while starting a (presumably) new game in Minecraft. Mattia has never played before, so the two hosts guide him through it while sporadically asking inane questions like, “Life can get cray, man. How did you find that balance between social media fame and personal life?” It seems like they don’t know or care much about Mattia at all.

About halfway through, the video shifts in tone. They discover a path made of powered mine-cart rails — obviously player-made, but to someone unfamiliar with the game, believably a found object. They follow the path, and after a long ride it leads to a huge labyrinthine structure that Hamzah and Martin had built beforehand, filled with impressively specific details of Mattia’s life: old social media posts, a recreation of his childhood home, and vignettes like his birth and his first time playing soccer. They eventually reach a cavernous space filled with hundreds of copies of his house, each one representing a moment in his life. By the end of these shenanigans, Mattia is incapacitated with fits of incredulous laughter. 

Then, in half-sincere, half-deadpan tones, Hamzah and Martin say to Mattia: 

We brought you here […] to make you realize that the future’s actually in your hands. [...] You have control, at every decision, every fork in the road, to pick your destiny. I hope this resonates with you and makes you realize how delicate life is and how fragile it is. [...] This is Mattia world. This is Mattia Polibio world. And we’re just living in it. All your friends, your family, your TikTok trends you started, toilet bowl licking and whatnot […] it wasn’t an accident. Do you understand the message we’re trying to tell you?

Mattia, catching his breath from laughing so hard, replies, “Yes, I think so... Where are we going now?”

Hamzah answers, with as much profundity as he can muster, “We’re going right back to where we started.”

That’s where the video ends. Admittedly, the profound tone is more tongue-in-cheek than sincere, but as that characteristically introspective Minecraft music kicked in towards the end, I wondered if the expression left on Mattia’s face betrayed actual uncanny reflection as he was confronted with his life, his past, and his memories spatialized as a sprawling dream-like grid of suburban homes — in a video game, of all places.

I was especially struck by the last shot of the video, a trancelike ascension back toward the surface. They had gotten me. It reminded me of similar numinous feelings I've had while playing other video games and suddenly finding extreme beauty in their vistas. After investing hours of playtime, these virtual environments felt like a part of me, even though I could never actually enter them.

Mattia Polibio World, while being one of the dumbest videos I’ve ever seen, also made me realize that a critical examination of Minecraft could help tease out the relationship between virtual game worlds, the physical world, and the inner world of the psyche. I sketched out a diagram of how they bleed into each other, how they operate under similar metaphors, and how “space” and “world” themselves were metaphors I often took for granted.

To explain the diagram:

1. [Physical world – Game world] Games like Minecraft are simulations of the physical world and of nature.

2. [Physical world – Psychic world] We form symbolic and archetypal relationships between our interiority and what’s in our environment.

3. [Game world — Psychic world] We project our psyche onto the games we play and the virtual worlds we inhabit.

But then I redrew the diagram from another perspective, one which includes Jung’s idea of the collective unconscious as existing both inside and outside of the psyche. The diagram presents an isomorphism between “physic” and “psyche,” as elaborated by the work Jung had done in the 1930s in collaboration with quantum physicist Wolfgang Pauli to reconcile their two disciplines. In a similar vein, French philosopher and theologian Henry Corbin describes a process he calls “topographical inversion,” in which further and further inward exploration of the unconscious through depth psychology paradoxically leads one to some exterior symbolic world.¹

Where do game worlds fit within this collapsed dichotomy? Virtual worlds like Minecraft make apparent the metaphorical and representational role that landscape has in linking one’s internal psyche with our external environment. Material reality encompasses both virtual and psychic spaces. Even though we tend to separate mind from matter, and the virtual from the real, these immaterial spaces are still human inventions. Humans make media, but nature makes us. 

The experiences people have while playing video games are incredibly meaningful despite the medium’s cultural inferiority to film, music, and fine art — which have long been accepted as vessels of the transcendent. Minecraft, and other virtual worlds like it, are arguably even more ripe for the numinous because they can be inhabited more readily, offering a landscape in which archetypes can be enacted and embodied.

Why Minecraft? 

Minecraft was created by Mojang, a Swedish game development studio founded by Markus “Notch” Persson. It was released in 2011, acquired by Microsoft in 2014 for $2.5 billion, and is the best-selling video game of all time with over 300 million sales to date. It’s a great source of meaning and nostalgia for a fan base that spans across generations, and yet its cultural importance remains critically under-examined.

Minecraft is an open-world sandbox game in which players explore a near-infinite, procedurally generated landscape. The environment is entirely made of various types of blocks, like dirt, cobblestone, sand, and many more exotic materials. As the name suggests, a large part of the game involves venturing underground to mine blocks for materials. Players can then craft items and tools from these materials, and build practically anything. 

The game has very few guardrails. Players create their own structures, both architecturally and in terms of structuring one’s playstyle. Media researchers Joel Schneier and Nicholas Taylor make a distinction between two popular behavioral patterns within Minecraft: time-biased “monumentary” play — which entails building long-lasting structures, grounding oneself to specific landmarks, and returning to the same Minecraft world; and space-biased “momentary” play, which is characterized by nomadic exploration, survivalist fantasies, and ephemeral worlds that are routinely deleted and replaced.

Game designer Frank Lantz calls video games “operas made out of bridges,” combining the technical complexity of engineering bridges with the artistic complexity of composing operas. One of Jung’s foundational precepts is about “holding the tension of the opposites” — learning how to make space for seemingly diametrically-opposed ideas or perspectives. Minecraft holds a certain tension between its systematic procedural side, and its emotional creative side. Some players dive deep into the technical mechanics of the game, learning how to create the most yield-optimal crop and livestock farms, for example. Others are more into narrative role-playing. 

But describing the totality of Minecraft cannot be done just by looking at what happens within the game itself. Minecraft exemplifies the ways in which video game culture has been transformed by extensive online participatory culture in the past two decades, blurring the lines between media production and consumption. The total ecosystem of Minecraft includes thousands of content-creators and streamers whose massive popularity cannot be understated. The “Minecraft video” is, at this point, a cornerstone genre on YouTube. Minecraft is a vocabulary and grammar that people use to create things both within and without the actual software. The “game” does not just constitute its procedural structure, but also the player’s idiosyncratic activation of the software, and the entire ecosystem of players interacting on other platforms.

The “metagaming” of interacting with the online community is essentially built into the experience of Minecraft, because the game itself does nothing to orient players on how they should interact with the software. As author Robin Sloan puts it, Minecraft is “a generative, networked system laced throughout with secrets.”² To gain fluency, one has to rely on trial and error, assumptions carried from other video games, and information from wikis, forums, YouTube, and other platforms. There is no tutorial.

Interior Landscapes

Landscape has served as a metaphor for inner life throughout many points in the history of art and literature. Thoreau wrote in Walden that “the lake is the most beautiful and expressive feature of the landscape; it is the eye of the earth, and by looking into it we can measure the depth of our own heart.” Romanticist art movements like the Hudson River School depict the sublime of nature as a means to a more intuitive way of being.

Chinese landscape paintings possibly invoke a stronger version of this connection. In particular, landscape paintings from the late-Ming era were regarded not as closed objects available to the viewer for mere aesthetic appreciation, but were thought to possess an interiority that afforded space for the human spirit to roam.

These paintings bridge an empirical distance separating the inner mind from the external world. This particular mode of perception has its roots in Daoist thought, which suggests that human beings and landscapes are connected through a shared interiority, an ontological realm where the self is no longer defined by social identity but through its symbolic equivalence with environment, world, and cosmos. In this view, the ontology of a landscape is equivalent to that of a human being, and vice versa; so much so that they are formulated in each other’s image. As above, so below.

There’s a certain teleology associated with the practice of viewing Chinese landscape paintings, which involves merging the viewer’s body with a purported broader cosmic body, thereby also giving interiority to the physical world. Access to this space, or “entering the mountains,”³ allowed for a momentary yet reproducible experience of transcendence.

This sounds a lot like Carl Jung’s technique of “active imagination,” which he developed to explore his unconscious through dreams and visions, as extensively documented in Jung’s The Red Book. Active imagination is a process of consciously engaging with one’s unconscious and its manifold characters and symbols, entering the “imaginal realm,” or mundus imaginalis, as Corbin calls it. There is an actual “place-ness” at work here, and I’m speaking in a manner that’s a bit more real than metaphor.

When you venture deep within yourself, you encounter the terrain of the collective unconscious, which permeates the world, the anima mundi or “world-soul,” which makes itself accessible to all of us. This is what Corbin means by “topographical inversion:” at some point when we delve so deep in our interiority, we find ourselves in some sort of outside place.

There’s a distinction to be made between “imaginal” and “imaginary.” The latter, “imaginary” refers to consciously making stuff up. “Imaginal” has more to do with the word “image” rather than “imagination,” and refers to images that “come through to us” from the unconscious. Not “in the mind's eye,” but in an actual sensory way, like what happens during dreams and hypnagogic states.

Various new media scholars have made the analog between video games and dreams. Scholar Matthew Horrigan writes that “dreams, digital games, and the imagination all involve imaginary worlds, with digital games intersubjectively distributing the practice of imagination by means of audiovisual signifiers and interaction patterns.”⁴ Beyond interactivity, what a video game promises is not just rendered image and sound, not just narrative, not even just the joy of play, but inhabitation of an imaginal realm that is both deeply interior and collectively shared.

Corbin traces the idea of the imaginal realm to the ideas of Sohravardi, a notable 12th century Persian philosopher who describes a place he calls “Na-Koja-Abad” — literally “no-where-land” — a “realm of suspended images” that is not geographically locatable yet ontologically “real.”

I’d like to posit Minecraft as a “no-where:” a virtual place that one can’t actually physically enter, yet exists nonetheless. A place with almost no built-in history or myth, but in which the player creates their own lore. In a randomly generated landscape that is essentially homogeneous from a zoomed out view — a place with no "placeness” — it is up to the player to construct the “where,” to build and recognize landmarks that become imbued with meaning through exploration of the world.

Magic Circles

The construction of a “place outside of place” segues very neatly into what Jung has written about liminal space. The concept of liminality was originally used in anthropology to refer to a transitory stage during a rite of passage, in which one has left one state of being but has yet to reach the next. In psychotherapy, Jung defines a liminal space more broadly as a space in which a transformation occurs, and cites a therapist’s office as a liminal space, which has an outside-of-normal-life quality that allows psychological transformation to happen.

Other psychologists write similarly about the physical and psychic space of a therapist’s office. The psychologist Carl Rogers reports a “trance-like feeling” that client and therapist emerge from at the end of a therapeutic session, “as if from a deep well or tunnel.” Psychoanalyst Marion Milner describes it as “a temporal-spatial frame [that] marks off [a] special kind of reality.” Jung also calls it “a magic circle […] in which the transformation inherent in the patient’s condition would be allowed to take place.”

Games echo the language of ritual space. The metaphor of a “magic circle” is also used by video game theorists to describe game-space,⁵ in which the normal rules and reality of the world are suspended and replaced by the artificial reality of a game world, separate from the typical routines of life, and occupying its own time and space.

If we frame Minecraft as liminal space, then what is the transformation it allows? What Minecraft enables is, of course, not necessarily a therapeutic breakthrough. However, the boundary between the ego and the unconscious diffuses in a space that allows for free enactment of creation and destruction — a server of one’s own, as Virgina Woolf might have called it if she was a gamer. An alchemy occurs in this space, another metaphor Jung uses extensively to describe internal transformation. Literally, crafting within Minecraft functions like alchemy — through specific recipes, players turn base materials into more valuable ones.⁶ On another level, Minecraft transforms the space between players, creating an environment in which friends can have deeper conversations, like the atmosphere of sitting around a campfire at night, or on a long train ride (another liminal space). Sociality in Minecraft becomes intrinsically linked to the terrain—which simultaneously becomes an artifact of being together. The Minecraft world becomes a preserved and revisitable record of time spent together with someone. This is why “losing one’s world” is a huge point of grief.

The nostalgia of the game is crystalized in the trope of the “two week Minecraft phase,” which describes the phenomena of how people who grew up with the game occasionally get the urge to pick it back up, yet inevitably quickly abandon it again. Nostalgia pulls us back into the magic circle, but as many Jungians have noted, there are two mistakes one can make in regards to these spaces: we provide no ritual space at all in our lives, or we stay in them too long. The two-week phase of Minecraft represents a re-centering, a necessary but temporary enclave to step outside of daily life.

Simulations of Nature

The beauty of Minecraft comes from the emptiness of its terrains, dotted with only a few sentient creatures and no industrial communities. There is plenty of space, literally and figuratively, for coexisting with the natural world rather than conquering it. There are processes in Minecraft that go on without user interaction, marking the passage of time. Player and game both exert will and influence over the landscape. Some game mechanics even suggest the value of stewardship. For example, killing a sheep yields 1 block of wool, but shearing it yields 3 blocks of wool, plus the sheep can then grow more wool. Whether one sees the bountiful resources of each block as a gift or as something to take is dependent on the player’s perspective.

Simulations of nature are ways of imagining alternate relations with nature. Often, these simulations can easily be read as fantasies of capitalist frontier expansionism, enabled by the reduced material constraints of the digital. While it’s true that colonial frontier archetypes are present in Minecraft, it also offers many more options for co-existing with the landscape. In writing about games that strive to model ecological principles, media theorist Alenda Chang observes that one fundamental mistake video game designers make is that they relegate environments to the background.⁷ But everything in Minecraft is interactable. The whole point of the game is that the environment is entirely foregrounded. The block-based geometry of Minecraft renders nature in obvious artifice, but it’s conducive to a type of exploratory play that elucidates structures and patterns in nature, similar to how children play with things like legos and wooden blocks. 

Wooden toys have a long association with timelessness and craftsmanship, especially within Scandinavia (remember Mojang’s Swedish origins). In Minecraft, wood is of particular symbolic importance. It’s the first resource new players can gather just by punching a tree with their bare hands. Gathering wood allows players to build tools that can harvest other materials. It’s a catalyst for all other possible actions in the game.

There’s a particular set of wooden blocks called Fröbelgaben (literally “Fröbel gifts”) that remains a popular educational toy for children. It was developed by Friedrich Fröbel, a German pedagogue who also invented the concept of kindergarten.The main idea behind Fröbelgaben is that children would be presented with progressively more complex sets of blocks as they get older. Fröbel claimed that his wooden blocks would illustrate the “spiritual connectedness of all things.” They would start with simple shapes, build up to more complex patterns, begin to see these patterns in the world around them, and then see the connection between human life and life in nature. Many modernist architects were exposed as children to Fröbel’s ideas about geometry, including Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier, and Buckminster Fuller. Wright, in particular, cites in his autobiography how playing with Fröbelgaben awakened his “child-mind” to the “rhythmic structures of nature.”

For generations of people who grew up with childhoods entangled in Minecraft worlds, how did that affect their relationship with nature? Their relationship with media? And how do nature and media relate to each other?

All media has something to do with resisting entropy and mortality. I always find myself returning to the writing of media theorist John Durham Peters, who frames media as something ecological and existential:

Media show up wherever we humans face the unmanageable mortality of our material existence: the melancholy facts that memory cannot hold up and body cannot last, that time is, at base, the merciless and generous habitat for humans and things. Media lift us out of time by providing a symbolic world that can store and process data, in the widest sense of that word.⁸

Media offers us a magic circle, a space outside of space, and a time outside of time. I want to posit artifice as the most natural thing to human beings. The greatest gift of being human is that we have the ability to make media: artifacts of not just information, but also of play, art, emotion, and profundity. It’s a gift that we are able to bring interiority outward and imbue artifacts with meaning. This is something so fundamental that it can be hard to see from the outside, since we are constantly enmeshed within media. As Peters puts it, “culture is part of our natural history,” which means that the internet is a naturally occurring phenomenon. As is computation. As is metaphor itself.

A Minecraft Walkthrough for Jungians

To do a Jungian reading of Minecraft might be to ask: what can Minecraft teach us about being and becoming human? Despite having no set plot or narrative, both game structure and player behavior can be read archetypally. 

Even something as mechanical as procedural terrain generation gains importance when one frames it as a cosmological genesis. Minecraft starts with a random seed, a numeric string that determines the procedurally generated terrain. There are 2^64 possible seeds, equaling 18 quintillion possible unique worlds. A world entails a cosmology (how and why the world is): in the beginning was the random seed, from which the universe was born of predetermined functions like Brownian motion and Perlin noise. It’s an apt metaphor for the idea that every individual’s psychic landscape is unique, yet subject to the same underlying processes and structures.

Overarchingly, Minecraft is about the tension of opposing desires to create and to destroy. Player conflicts lead to “griefing” (intentionally destroying other people’s creations), new goals necessitate the destruction of old structures, and exploration demands the abandonment of old basecamps. Playing the game reflects the very rhythms of life: birth, death, and rebirth.

Another tension within Minecraft is that between the underground and the surface. The image of the underground has always been archetypally linked to the unconscious. Jung himself has a famous dream, described in his autobiography Memories, Dreams, Reflections, in which he descends down a previously undiscovered basement of a house. Each level he descends is filled with artifacts from earlier and earlier eras of human history, until he reaches an underground cave filled with dusty bones and pottery shards — a prehistoric grave that he comes to realize represents the collective unconscious. In Minecraft, the ore a player mines underground has to be brought back to the surface to be put to use, just as knowledge and insight from the unconscious has to be integrated in conscious life, all the while getting through the trials and tribulations of monsters, lava, and potential cave-ins. The surface of a Minecraft world is agentive and adaptive — dig to expose a couple of layers of dirt to air, and grass will grow to form a new surface. Then, during the preconscious of twilight and night, monsters from the unconscious slip up to the surface. Nighttime presents an early challenge within Minecraft, since that’s when hostile mobs start to attack. The first goal most players undertake is to build a base for security and protection from darkness. To me, this evokes childhood instincts towards pillow-forts and treehouses, and relates to what video game theorist Christopher Goetz describes as two primary motivations for playing Minecraft: “tether” and “accretion” fantasies. Tether fantasies are about the “the pleasurable process of oscillating between feeling safe and feeling exposed,” while accretion fantasies are about “the pleasurable process of correcting a weak or vulnerable body by accruing objects from the world of gameplay.”⁹ In Minecraft, a base is built out of accrued materials and is known, mapped, and bounded by artificial walls or fences. Most importantly, it is well lit. Artificial light becomes a signal of psychological safety. Goetz writes, “home base comes to rely on artificial, internal lighting like torches or a burning oven. If players are caught outside after sunset, they might spot torchlight through those same home-base windows as they scurry back to safety.”

Outside of the game, stories can get spun out of the cultural life of Minecraft and become embedded in the collective mythos of the fandom. The most famous example of this is probably Herobrine, a figure from a creepypasta on Minecraft Forum in 2010, in which the original poster describes being stalked by an entity that looks exactly like Steve (the default avatar of the player), except with glowing white eyes. Herobrine has remained a central figure in the Minecraft fan canon despite never officially being part of the game. The fact that Steve and Herobrine share the same appearance suggests a “splitting” which might be resolved through the integration of the shadow archetype — the things we repress that don’t align with our ideal image of the self. Herobrine allegedly has the power to create unnatural constructions and will stalk the player from afar. You cannot run from the shadow.

The End is Not the End

The only actual “plot” that Minecraft suggests is the journey to reach the two other realms that exist besides the main overworld. The Nether is an eerie hell-world containing seas of lava and hostile mobs, and The End is a dark, sparse world containing one large island surrounded by many smaller islands, all floating in a void. Here, players encounter the supposed “final boss” — the Ender Dragon — although defeating the Ender Dragon is merely one available telos of the game out of many.

The End is where the hero archetype is most saliently played out, where the player defeats the archetypal monster to be confronted in the heart of the underworld. However, this is a somewhat arbitrary ending that’s meant more to satisfy the desire for a concrete goal, a cheeky response to the question how do you “win” Minecraft? The End is not actually the end — actually, individuation turns out to be a constant, life-long process.

After the Ender Dragon is slain, it drops an egg — a classic symbol of rebirth. Then the player is presented with the End Poem, and sent back to the Overworld. From that point on, they can continue playing Minecraft as usual.

The End Poem was written by Julian Gough, an author who was friends with Notch (the creator of Minecraft) during the game’s early development days. The poem was technically never acquired by Microsoft, and was made public domain by Gough in 2022.

The conceit of the poem is that two god-like entities are speaking about the player — the real player, not Steve the avatar. They are aware that the player, who has now transcended into a higher plane after defeating the Ender Dragon, is reading the poem. 

They directly compare Minecraft to a dream, while making a distinction between “the long dream of life” and “the short dream of a game.” To these two entities, words are an “interface,” just like the interface of the game screen. In fact, they call “dreams” the original interface. “A million years old, and it still works.”

The two beings make deeply archetypal references:

The two beings are embodiments of the universe, the anima mundi, the collective unconscious, speaking to the player in the form of distinct archetypal entities, essentially mirroring Jung’s own journey into mundus imaginalis. Minecraft is our collective Red Book.

Overall, the poem has an “everything is everything” kind of ethos that emphasizes the structural similarities of the microcosm and the macrocosm — of the game, the player, and the universe. The whole thing feels like a Terrence Malick movie. The two beings urge the player to see the interconnectedness of all things, from atoms to forests to stories to stars, and to live life in meatspace just as voraciously as the player has lived in cubespace. At the end, they ask the player to wake up. But it's unclear if this means waking up to the Overworld, or waking up to our world.

Gough says about the End Poem,

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. 

In the short dream of a game and in the long dream of life, we feel the vastness of that which exists outside of the contours of the self, and the vastness of that which exists inside.

So. That was my very incomplete reading of Minecraft, one of the richest texts of the 21st century. 

And now it’s time to wake up.