Minecraft with object impermanence
aiweirdness.com
aiweirdness.com
I think there is a generation of Minecraft players that participated in the alpha, beta, and early 1.0 releases and then grew out of it. For these people, "in the game for over five years" is basically the same as "new".
(I belong to that group. I recently started introducing my four-year old to Minecraft and there is so much stuff that was not there when I played!)
Whenever I'm reminded of the existence of things like Villagers, or the End, my brain still goes "oh yeah, that new thing they added" before reality catches up and I realize just how long those things have been in the game.
Part of it is because 80%+ of my playtime was before they were added, but I think another part of it is that those things have never really quite fit into the game in my mind.
You can say "I've reached the end of Minecraft" and it is true by the letter of the words, but untrue by the spirit of the words. Beating the Ender Dragon does not mean you finished all the content in Minecraft, since there is content even beyond the Ender Dragon.
Do you have a source for this? It's the first time I've heard it.
> Beating the Ender Dragon does not mean you finished all the content in Minecraft, since there is content even beyond the Ender Dragon.
In theory, maybe. But in practice? The mere existence of a tangible end goal fundamentally changes the way people approach the game, even if there's more to do beyond it.
Here's a very good video about this topic: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ShDBJg886EA
But either way, reaching that end goal usually prompts people to ask themselves: "what now?" Once you have an Elytra, you've basically unlocked creative flight in survival, and that's pretty much where survival itself ends, now you're just playing creative except you still have to grind for building materials. There's no better item to go for, so what's the point? Most people stop playing shortly after, and this is where the whole "2 week Minecraft phase" thing originates from.
Some people can't play Minecraft until they rush the elytra, some end up abandoning a world shortly after they get it.
For example Star Factory clearly doesn't need an Ender Dragon fight, there are no bad guys at all, you're making a factory. For stars.
"The End" is clearly as much as anything a joke, the original game didn't have an end and so people asked for one, OK, here's "The End" for whatever that's worth.
But I'm also an Apple user and I mostly game on PlayStation, so it's probably just part of my personality somehow.
¹: with a good internet connection that's been used to download podcasts to go along with it
For me, Stratego, my favorite chess-esque battle simulator, is a wonderful canvas.
The game becomes infinitely better when players roll for the number of turns each player gets. This simulates the moving "tempo" of war, speeds up the game dramatically depending on the turn multiplier used, and dramatically opens up the types of play available. I've experimented with far more, including custom maps, allowing joint attacks with multiple turns (pooling attack scores), and other mods.
I don't care if this is autism or it turns off normies. The thinkpad user ricing out modded dwarf fortress has a more rewarding time with their videogames compared to macbook pro user playing vanilla skyrim in 2025.
> thinkpad user ricing out modded dwarf fortress has a more rewarding time with their videogames compared to macbook pro user
Ok, now I feel a little bit offended by the bread thing, and also: how can you just assume how rewarding my experience is playing vanilla games? We’ve already established, that you can’t relate to me.
—except, Minecraft totally breaks that! You can't really play Minecraft without a guide, how would you even make a crafting table? Maybe you could figure it out after hours of hitting your head against the wall, but it wouldn't be a good experience.
But what is the intended way to play Minecraft? Should the Minecraft Wiki be considered part of the game?
(Note: I haven't played Minecraft in years, so I'm referring to Minecraft 1.0 more-or-less.)
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† However, asking friends in real life is allowed, because sharing knowledge and discoveries within a group is a fun social experience. Except, what if someone else previously referenced a guide? Have they poisoned the well? I think about these things far too often and still don't have good answers.
I remember there used to be some writing by Notch on Minecraft's website that went something like (paraphrasing from memory):
"When thinking about whether to make the game easier or harder, I generally lean towards harder. This might make the game frustrating if there isn't some sort of goal, so I think I will have to build in a goal for players."
I'm sure this passage is long gone, I unfortunately don't have time to go digging through the Internet Archive right now. But I assume this "goal" become The End.
Same, one of my kids will randomly want me to play and I'm constantly surprised by some 'new' thing that's literally been in the game for 10 years. It's kinda cool that minecraft has existed as a thing for basically my kids' entire lives, and oldest is in college now.
I still play a lot of 1.7.10 though, because of gtnh. Loving that modpack quite a bit.
I played a bunch around the 2010 timeframe, then around 2015, then around 2021. It was a strange mix of familiar and new each time.
Instead, people are apparently suing them because Microsoft banned gun mods.
America in a nutshell.
My partner and I are each on our second copy because at some point it was just not worth the hassle of recovering our old accounts.
I'm pretty sure you have literal years to migrate. I suspect you still can if you contact their support.
For an organization of Microsoft’s size, to be so incompetent at migrating accounts was a choice. If their underlying system was incapable of linking the product to my account, they could have just emailed brand new codes to everyone registered with the “lifetime” mojang entitlement.
I made a hacked version of the old launcher after that and now a couple friends and colleagues and I run a custom server and play on that occasionally.
If you bought the game back in the Notch-owned Mojang days, you have a license guaranteeing your right to access all future Minecraft versions. It's a pretty open-and-shut case.
I did play a lot of Vechs' survival/complete the monument maps, which to this day I think are marvels of top game design.
https://howoldisminecraft1710.today
Oh look, there's GTNH! https://www.gtnewhorizons.com
Where they've brought 1.7.10 to modern Java, and replaced Optifine, and done some other minor changes ;)
A decade later it turns out my sister got into it that she had a realms server with friends and I joined. Basically a completely different game, which is mostly a positive.
Though mojang really needs to fix inventory management bullshit, which is not fun. There are many more possible items now, but with the same inventory space as the game started with, meaning anything you do results in inventory constantly filling up.
I’m working on fixing this with mods.
This does not address the fundamental problem of having just 27 inventory + 9 hotbar slots over 1000 possible items (which is constantly increasing) that can be picked up, many of which don’t even stack, and having to manually move things where you want them.
Dealing with that turns exploring+looting into the promise of a grinding chore unless you simply don’t collect things. Which will hurt during future building projects.
I would not enjoy a game where I manually swapped out memory to disk. Yet often games demand the same as part of their “gameplay”.
The only viable fix is mods.
What if there is no such module and whenever you believe you have experienced permanence it is because your brain confabulated it from what it actually observed?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight_(Watts_novel) for those who need new stuff in their TBR list.
I know it's a over-simplification, but maybe too much of it? 100% of your periphery isn't "generated" by your brain based only on what you've seen before, otherwise it wouldn't be possible to see stuff "at the corner of your eyes" or "looking while not looking" where you can see stuff without actually focusing straight on on the thing itself.
Techniques for lucid dreaming rely on this fact for you to be able to "detect" that you are in a dream. There is one where you need to look at time, look away and look again. The time will change or be in an impossible format if you're dreaming. Then if you're aware you're dreaming you can start to "control" the dream.
Saddest one was when I realized I was walking my dead dog. She was actually exhibiting behaviors I know she had been used to have, but not ones I had consciously remembered much when thinking about her after her death. I lingered on that one a bit. Still, dreams are dreams, and there was some weirdness, and I knew them for what they were. But that time, I did not fight the script.
> But that time, I did not fight the script.
That's a good way of putting it. In the past when I realized I was dreaming, I would take advantage of the situation and change things, give myself superpowers, etc. But in recent years my few lucid dreams have had really interesting plots, so I consciously chose to let things be and just see where they go.
I can relate. I saw my dead dog several times in my dream, and in the dream, it felt like she was never dead in the first place, not like I reunited with her, but it was just another of those regular days with her. So, even though I enjoyed the dream, I didn't have that euphoric joy of reuniting with her. I perceive everything as 100% absolute truth and only realize what's wrong after I wake up.
The funny thing is, I really do have an old alarm clock that does that. It's the most useless alarm clock ever, because not only can it not tell you the time, it can't even tell you if you're awake.
I did a bunch of lucid dreaming when I was younger (seems it was a lot easier then?), and even knowing things like that can end up making sense in the dream, you sometimes end up thinking "Well, it kind of makes sense the time went from 11:00 to 14:00 when I looked away, I did look away for quite a while".
For people who haven't lucid dreamed before, it might sound simple and almost stupid, but a lot harder when you're trying to look at your watch and everything makes sense but also not.
I wish I could figure out how to do that, anytime I'm dreaming all the weird inconsistencies and people morphing from one person to another and such all just seem to be normal.
Anyway, as a kid I thought, silly author, that's not how computer games work. But it turns out Orson Scott Card is smarter than me. Give this kind of thing a few years and we'll have it.
As we know, object permanence is not really needed in any videogame, so this makes sense. It's also easy to add in, they just didn't do it because they didn't feel like it.
Snark aside, not sure what that is supposed to mean. This isn't interactive in the same sense that games are, its not a world because it doesn't have any properties of a world, its just a video generator you can steer with keys. Cool, but not what we would call an interactive world
JL Borges, Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius
This is probably the model trying to generate kelp is the ocean. When water is in chunks on the edge of the loaded world, you can see through the water to the sky at that angle, so you also see the outline of the kelp kinda like that.
This is pretty common to see in the game nowadays, but the AI model might be having a hard time since kelp was only added a few years ago and isn't as well represented in the training data.
Oh come now, that's not true and is showing a lack of imagination, especially from someone who's been covering generative models this long. There's lots of things you can do with an accurate differentiable model of Minecraft - just like there's lots of things you can do with a LLM or a diffusion model beyond just 'generate a random sample'. (Just think about all the things you can do with CLIP steering a diffusion model...) Imagine describing GPT-3 as saying 'as far as I can tell, if this all works perfectly, this will simply be Common Crawl, except far more expensive to read'!
With modern LLMs, they still get occasionally tripped up, but you could go for pages without a minor detail not making sense.
Something similar might happen with these game models, given enough time.
Interactive demo: https://oasis.decart.ai/
How could you achieve object permanence this way? Will it 'automatically' appear given more training data or more hidden layers? How is this handled in other approaches?
Presumably if you were to take that and build a large enough NN to accommodate all the necessary state it needs to carry and all the rules it needs to be able to execute, then after training it on enough game input you'd have a proper world simulation. Of course, as the article rightly notes, then you have just successfully reimplemented Minecraft in a way that is orders of magnitude more computationally expensive...
To achieve object permanence, there needs to be some persistent off-screen data from frame to frame. There's a way to achieve this: train on frame+input+woldstate -> frame+woldstate
Diffusion for World Modeling
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41826402
Direct link to a video, apologies for the xitter source: https://x.com/Sentdex/status/1845146540555243615?mx=2
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XqLm0qbLJqY
edit: I'll add this great take too:
That is of course dependant on running inference locally being somehow less intensive than just running the game. But there we go, it's an interesting thought at least!
A side of me hopes that this technology gets used to drive progress in self-driving cars, robotics etc. My intuition says that having a sandbox that looks similar yet functions unexpectedly could greatly help with sniffing out edge cases.
On the other side I fear that this ends up in the next generation of social media - never ending generative short-form content. Obviously, in its current state the effects on the brain regarding object permanence could be... devastating?
Tiktok already is never ending generative short form content, it's just humans doing the grunt work of figuring out which video performed well and making more like it or pushing the weighting of what they think made it successful higher.
Listening to someone talk about "their chat with ChatGPT" etc. feels very annoying. It's like they are explaining a dream they had in detail but even less informative or useful because a dream might suggest something about their state of mind. However, content like this (to be fair, this specific one isn't that annoying to me especially compared to "AI said this and that" kind of stuff) has absolutely no constructive value (to me) and feels almost schizophrenic. Maybe I feel this way because people around me, unlike the average HN user's social circle, have only superficial idea about how AI works but are very interested in using it.
Also, in a way, comparing GenAI/LLMs to how our brain neural nets work (which isn't exact, but have similar outputs).
When we are asleep, our eyes are closed.
It’s also why writing good fiction is hard. You have an idea and try to put it down and it’s a mess because your idea is just a loose prediction of what you want to achieve. Then it has to be thought out deliberately or the edges don’t meet up. I’m sure the same goes for painting, etc.
Source: am a fiction writer