Game Theory - The Murky History of Minecraft's Underwater Gods

Episode Date: March 7, 2024

Join Game Theory Host MatPat as he dives deep into the LORE of Minecraft's underwater biome! *Credits:* Writers: Matthew Patrick Editors: Danial "BanditRants" Keristoufi, Josh Langman, Tyler Mascola, Koen Verhagen and Shannon (Bomb0i) Assistant Editor: AlyssaBeCrazy Sound Editor: Yosi Berman

Ah, the ocean, a beautiful blue crystal on this cuboidal planet we got home. Home to sea creatures large and small. The majestic squid, the playful dolphin. The reborn souls of the dead waiting to drag it to your watery grids. All today on Game Theory. Hello internet, welcome to Game Theory, where today we're engaging in a very mature 13 plus critical analysis of a fun for all ages game, Minecraft. Does that cover me?

Not gonna get hit by any FTC finds, right? Here, let me throw in some big words just in case. Entrepreneurship, anti-disestablishmentarianism, defenestration, rampant consumerism. Today we're getting our Little Mermaid on and going down where it's wetter, down where it's better, under the sea. In Minecraft, the underwater biomes just don't seem to get enough love. Sure, everyone is always excited to make songs dedicated to the fiery death

planes of the nether, or to discuss the otherworldly void of the But the watery depths of the overworld offer just as many breathtaking sights unusual creatures and head-scratching mysteries and yet no one really seems to care It's kind of like art imitating life because here in real life we're so focused on space exploration that most of our undersea biomes here on earth have gone completely unexplored I think we've only seen like 5% of them So today I'm gonna change that not the 5% thing Heck no that water is cold no I'm just gonna sit on my butt and talk about oceans in a video game for about 18 minutes What's the deal with the guardians and the elder guardians? Where did they come from? Are they just giant fish creatures that really like hanging out in ocean monuments?

Did they build the ocean monuments? Seems pretty unlikely. And speaking of those buildings, what's the deal with those massive underwater mazes? How did the drown fit into all this? What are these trident-wielding mur people? Are they just zombies that fell into the water? Get ready to take the plunge, because today and next episode, we're diving straight into the deep end. What first started me down the path of ocean mysteries were the guardians, and their bigger grandaddies, the elder guardians.

From a mob standpoint, I mean sure, their giant sea creatures with one eye and spikes. Nothing super weird there right off the bat, but what initially got my theorist senses tingling was the way that they attack. With a literal laser beam, an underwater eye beam that requires time to charge up before it launches at you and causes massive amounts of damage. That's pretty weird for a fish, or really any sort of natural organic living creature. I mean, Minecraft is a game full of fantastical creatures, don't get me wrong, but attacking with eye laser, Cesar cannons just felt out of place for me. So I just kept swimming, just kept swimming, and stumbled across an even more unusual detail. Their inability to die. You see, if you take a guardian or elder guardian out of the water, it just Flops around on the dry land, like a cubic magic harp. But why this matters is what doesn't happen. You see, it doesn't suffocate when exposed to the air.

It literally just keeps flopping around until you carve it up to make sushi. Well, it's just a video game mechanic, I hear you saying, and you'd be right if only a other fish behave the same way. For every other fish in the game, you take it out of the water, it flops around, and eventually dies. Take a squid out of the water, it suffocates and dies. Take a salmon out of the water, it suffocates and dies. Take a pufferfish or a cod out of the water. They suffocate and they die. If you can't tell there are a lot of cuboidal animals that were harmed during the production of this video.

Anyway, the guardians and the elder guardians are the only undersea creatures that can live indefinitely on the land. So between that and the laser eye thing, there was just something, pardon the pun, fishy about them. Or actually that's completely the wrong pun because it was something that didn't feel fishy about them. Something that felt a bit less like an animal and a bit more like a machine. Let's look closer at the design of the Guardian. Notice the colors of its flesh and the cracked patterns across its body? It's nearly identical to the prismarine blocks that formed the ocean monument around them. Coincidence? I think not. And that isn't just my observation either. In Minecraft's official mob-beastiary, the in-depth guide written from the perspective of an animal researcher in the Minecraft

they specifically allude to this fact. Quote, their skin is cracked as if carved from some ancient rock and their single white eye is somehow both unknowable and cruel." Ancient rock you say, like perhaps Prismarine? The very same stone that serves as the primary building block for all ocean monuments? The only place in the game where they spawn? Further supporting the idea that the Guardians aren't made of flesh but rather of prismarine stone is their drop behavior.

When killed, the Guardian has a 40% chance of dropping Prisman Which for a fish doesn't make a whole lot of sense. I mean if you kill a sheep it drops you wool If you drop a cow it drops you like cow flesh, but if you're a non-organic creature built from the nearby rocks and minerals Well that could certainly explain a whole lot and speaking of their drop behavior the Mount Beastie area does a drop of its own another interesting tidbit about the guardians quote again Elder Guardians will also drop a water-absorbing sponge if killed by an adventurer and if it doesn't drop a prismarin crystal one will find raw fish of some kind in its place some scholars think that this is evidence that its diet consists of fish and other natural watery food stuff, but guardians have never been seen to wander far from their temple homes to catch them, so we cannot be sure."

End quote. It's an odd detail to include there at the end, right? To specifically call out, hey, they drop fish meaning that they might eat fish, but you know, considering the fact that they never leave the ocean monuments they spawn in, they probably don't eat the fish. Again, all the evidence seems to be pointing to these creatures not being animals, as I'm sure we've all assumed them to be, but rather some sort of sort of artificial creation. A defense mechanism built of the surrounding materials somehow mixed with real-life fish, or real-life fish DNA to protect the very monument that they spawn inside. Even the creature's anatomical design inside the mob beastie area seems to contain some level of secrets.

For most other mobs in the game, the book has this incredible illustration of their inner workings, the dense skeletons of the creeper, the humanoid brains of the Enderman. But for the Elder Guardian, we get ourselves a piece-by-piece dissection of the eye, with components that look kind of like wires, leading to panels meant to charge up its laser. And underneath that thick, rocky skin, nothing much. A thin layer of pink with a gray area that appears to be stone. It's certainly not any sort of bony structure. It's not anything that resembles the inner workings of a fish,

and it's certainly not anything that looks remotely organic. Lastly, it's worth noting that the elder guardian's eye will still have the ability to track a player who's invisible, seeming to suggest that this mob is dealing in the thermal spectrum, tracking your heat signature rather than any sort of visual sign of your movement patterns. So again, another weird, interesting detail about these creatures. I mean, even the name seems to allude to it. Guardian, considering they only spawn inside ocean monuments and they're called guardians, if they were indeed man-made, well, clearly they were made to act as some sort of security mechanism. But then, what are they supposed to be protecting?

Well, despite ocean monuments being massive complexes, there's really only two unusual rooms worth calling out inside of them. The sponge room and the treasure. and the treasure room. The first is fairly self-explanatory. It's the sponge room. It is a room full of sponges. There's not much more to say there. I'm personally more of a lufa man myself, but still, it's odd that whoever built this enormous building deemed it necessary to dedicate a room to this one oddly specific item. More on that in a minute because it's the treasure room that I, and I think the guardians, want to focus on. You see, while every monument may not necessarily contain itself a sponge room, all monuments do contain themselves a treasure chamber. A central area with a tall ceiling and eight gold blocks located in the middle. Gold blocks that are encased or hidden behind a layer of dark prismarie.

And it's this right here that is perhaps the most oddly specific design choice hidden in the entire game. Here we are in the middle of this massive underwater complex made entirely of one material. Just varieties of prismarine everywhere. That's it. And yet smack in the middle, the designers decide to include this massive golden box. All right, that alone would make some kind of... Kind of sense, I guess, displaying your prized treasure like it's a core to the entire building, but it's the fact that the gold is hidden under another layer That the gold is literally encased within a box of dark prismarine Within a box of another stone hidden away that really strikes me as noteworthy here and it's those details

coupled with the overall design of the structure that leads me to believe that the ocean monuments were made to be Religious buildings first let's just start by looking at the overall design of the ocean monument. It's a classic ziggarot structure, a staircase like building with wide flat landings that get narrower each level up. Basically it's like a big pyramid but with some stopping points as you get higher Whereas a more traditional pyramid like those in Egypt consist of a smooth continuous line all the way to the peak Ziggurots were famous in ancient Mesopotamia basically the first place you learn about in world history class and never fully Understand or care about cradle of civilization have no idea what that is let's just get to ancient Greece and Egypt already Those are the cool ones or at least that's how I felt when I was learning those units so I went back

Refreshed myself on all that information and let me clear it up for you Mesopotamia back in the day was where modern-day Iraq and part of Syria are today So basically it's an ancient civilization located in the Middle East that is where you would find structures like the one that we see depicted here in Minecraft So knowing the real-life structure that these monuments are based on he can start to get clues as to what their intended use was in the Minecraft war You see in ancient Mesopotamia a ziggurot's main purpose was religious it was meant to connect heaven and earth They're thought to have been built to literally house the god As such, only priests were allowed to get inside of the ziggurots. And this hypothetical religious use seems to be supported by Minecraft.

You see, one other key feature of the ocean monument is the fact that underneath the monument are 23 giant pillars that stretch down to the ocean floor. And it's always 23, unless of course there's some weird spawn hiccup. But that 23 number, I've said it so many times this episode, it seems so oddly specific, right? It has got to mean something. And wouldn't you should be? know it, I think it does. You see, the number 23 is just one of those numbers that's considered to be really important to humans. It's a prime number, which already makes it special. It's the number of chromosome pairs that we have in our body. It's basketball star Michael Jordan's number. There's a really bad Jim Carrey movie all about the number 23. So, you know, really important stuff here. But all joking aside, there's even something called the 23 Enigma.

Essentially a belief that the number has some sort of magical or mystical significance because of how much it shows up in our day-to-day lives. So when it comes to numbers, 23 is kind of a big deal. Just behind top 10, lucky 7, and I guess unlucky 13. But when it comes to religion, 23 is an even bigger deal. You see, in the Islamic faith, there's the Quran. It's the Islamic sacred book, just like Christians have themselves the Bible, and Judaism has the Torah. The Quran is believed to be the Word of God as dictated to the Prophet Muhammad. And it took, get this, 23 years for the entire book to be revealed to Muhammad.

It's also Muslim belief that the first verses of the Quran were revealed to the Prophet Muhammad on the 23rd night of the 9th Islamic month. So again, in the Islamic faith, the number 23 matters a lot. Meaning that those 23 pillars in the Minecraft Ocean Monument could very easily be referencing important pieces of religious architecture found around the Middle East. No, Ziggurats aren't mosques, where Islamic faith is currently practiced, but they are connected by geographic region and religious connotation. Now, here is where everything comes together.

If Minecraft's Ocean Monuments were indeed, where an ancient race of people believed gods could come down onto the earth and live it could explain the box of gold encased in dark prismarine with sea lanterns in each of its corners but to understand why you have to be familiar with the kaba the kaba is a black cube building at the center of islam's most important mosque the great mosque of mecca it is the most important place in the Islamic faith so important that practitioners of islam are almost required to take a pilgrimage to see this once in their life and give worship there. Why? Well, it's thought that the Kaba is the house of God. The sacred house, the connection between heaven and the earth. The Kaba is a sacred place with an inside of golden marble, but on the

outside, it appears to just be a large black cube of dark granite. Just like we see in the game with the dark prismarine being on the outside of those golden cubes. In each of the corners in Minecraft is a sea lantern, and what you know it, each corner of the Kaba also has itself a special symbolic security. Most often pointing to one key location from Islamic history. So could it be that the Guardians of Minecraft are protecting the most sacred treasure of all? The location, or at least the perceived location, of God himself. It sounds crazy, but remember, the ending of Minecraft does indeed have two godlike figures

speaking with each other about your gameplay. The fact that gods exist in the canonical universe of Minecraft is an established part of the lore. I mean, a lot of the details really line up. up here. The Ziggarot structure connects us to the Middle East and Islamic tradition. The 23 pillars and their importance to Islamic faith. Covering up the golden important interior of a building with a dark stone exterior just like the Kaaba. The perfect cubic shape of both of those structures. The importance of each of the corners. The need to have the guardians protecting this place at all. Heck, even the name! This is the ocean monument. It isn't a ruin, it's not a temple, it's a monument.

Monument is a word used to honor a place of historical significance, a place of the dead or an important figure like a god. You don't call the building that houses your sponge room a monument. Oh yeah, and it's worth mentioning here as one last final note. The one practical function of the ziggurat was actually to serve as just a high place on which the priests could escape rising water that would flood the Mesopotamian areas every year. Rising water, huh? Maybe the underwater monuments weren't quite so underwater. So we have ourselves the heat-seeking laser-shooting fish that might have been man-made to protect an underwater monument dedicated to what may or may or may may not be an ancient god. Now the only question is, who built it? Why is it here underwater? And that, my friends, is explained through two words, the drown. But that theory will have to wait for another day. In the meantime, remember, that's just a theory. A game theory! Thanks for watching!