The social experiment on a Minecraft server has been running for two months. Players are founding nations, writing laws, and maintaining diplomatic relations.
When people meet in multiplayer games, anything can happen. In survival games like Rust, people go for each other’s throats, while in Fallout 76, they tend to help each other out.
But what happens when over 1,200 players gather on a shared Minecraft server with specific rules? An experiment is now showing this, with astonishing results.
Nations springing up from the ground
The Minecraft server Eden was launched more than two months ago. There are no rules of conduct or server administrators here; players are largely left to their own devices. However, a very special game mode was designed for Eden: playing alone is extremely difficult, and important raw materials are limited to certain biomes or regions.
The inhabitants of the server are thus more or less forced to cooperate, trade, and form larger associations. What was a lawless wasteland at the beginning of the experiment has now developed into a world with its own laws, states, and diplomatic relations:
Update: I tracked 1,200+ unique players in a Minecraft world with no rules/admins for 60 days. Here is how the political map has changed.
by
u/Tylerrr93 in
gaming
One of the server operators, Tylerrr93, shows the current political map on Reddit. It shows several large empires
that have brought entire biomes or smaller parts of the map under their control:
Yeetistan
controls an archipelago with mushroom forests, and the country mainly exports leather and beef.Tianguo
is an Asian-inspired nation that has little interaction with other states.BedEx
is a city-state focused on trade, which already created its own legislation.
The driving force behind international relations on the Minecraft server is trade. Since certain resources are only available in some regions, some states control materials that are important for progress, such as sand or certain ores. Although it is theoretically possible to poach in another nation’s territory or smuggle resources, that nation is also allowed to defend itself against such attempts.
Trade routes are therefore extremely important for the world of Eden. Although it would also be possible to secure important resources by force, so far the exchange between the different states seems to be largely peaceful. We are already excited to see how the story of Eden will unfold. Will alliances emerge, superpowers or many small states with their own interests? Or will wars break out at some point?
