Wel­come to Minecraft Beta, a multi-player web browser video game that lets you join with friends and fam­ily from any­where on the globe to build your vir­tual col­lec­tive world. My brother bought me a gift code to the game for Christ­mas, which gives me ac­cess to his and his friends’ server.

He walks me through their king­dom-of-sorts. It all starts with har­vest­ing trees and min­ing cob­ble­stone, and a spe­cial thing called a craft­ing chest, which al­lows you to mix basic ma­te­ri­als in spe­cific pat­terns to cre­ate more com­plex tools or ma­te­ri­als. From the­ses first re­sources avail­able for use, my brother has some­how cre­ated an elab­o­rate glass house with large pieces of framed art­work and an in­door veg­etable gar­den. The more you cre­ate, the more you can har­vest and the more you har­vest, the more you can cre­ate. Basic ma­te­ri­als com­bine and form tools and tools help you har­vest pre­vi­ously un-har­vestable items. You can also har­vest fire and use heat as the cat­a­lyst for cre­ation.

My brother leads me through an ad­join­ing room, where he has built a mu­seum to show­case the items one can make in the game (the dis­play wall seems in­fi­nitely long). On the op­po­site wall he has painted a rain­bow. His friend Mario, who built a cas­tle, is his clos­est neigh­bor and to­gether they con­structed a long, nar­row stone bridge that joins their two homes. Of course, no game would be com­plete with­out a dark el­e­ment to pro­vide a lit­tle dan­ger. Chris, who has just joined the tour, re­minds me to be­ware of the zom­bie mon­sters that come out at night­fall.

Minecraft sets a frame­work where so­cial or­ga­ni­za­tion must be chore­o­graphed, re­gard­less of the level of in­ten­tion. I asked my brother a se­ries of ques­tions to find out how his world ac­tu­al­izes that or­ga­ni­za­tion:

Are there any dis­tinctly com­mu­nity struc­tures?

We built a “safe house” that peo­ple can stay in when they first come to life. It pro­vides shel­ter from the mon­sters at night and has a stash of basic liv­ing sup­plies. A path of torches leads you from the spot where you first gen­er­ate to the door of the house. I also built a giant roller coaster that stretches from the top of a moun­tain and winds around the land. Any­one can ride it if they have a friend to give them a push at the start.

Do you ever build pro­jects at the same time?

Every­one’s sched­ule is dif­fer­ent, so it’s dif­fi­cult to be in the world at the same time. Usu­ally, you’ll just log on and see what oth­ers have done in your ab­sence. Con­se­quently, there aren’t many struc­tures that we build col­lec­tively, al­though Chris and I re­cently started build­ing a col­lec­tion of sky­scrap­ers to­gether. Maybe ver­bal com­mu­ni­ca­tion would help, but it’s hard to com­mu­ni­cate with only text chat­ting. Not every­one agrees on de­tails and aes­thet­ics ei­ther, so peo­ple usu­ally avoid a po­ten­tially hairy sit­u­a­tion.

Does your group have a forum?

We send text mes­sages be­fore we are about to play to see if the other per­son can meet us in the world. We also leave short notes in each other’s homes.

Do you share re­sources? Do you have a col­lec­tive re­source stor­age area?

We ini­tially had pub­lic chests of re­sources, but it was hard to re­mem­ber to fill it, so they often ended up empty. We built them so peo­ple who weren’t pre­pared could have basic liv­ing sup­plies in emer­gency sit­u­a­tions. That fell by the way­side, but it’s an un­der­stood rule that every­one’s per­sonal stash in their home is open to any­one. For rare items it’s cour­tesy to ask or to leave an “IOU” note by the chest().

Is there a de­ci­sion-by-con­sen­sus ap­proach to new struc­tures?

Right now Chris and I are col­lab­o­rat­ing on build­ing a col­lec­tion of sky­scrap­ers, which took some plan­ning, but usu­ally no, and it’s caused prob­lems in the past. One time, my friend built a giant mon­ster-har­vest­ing ma­chine in the sky(), but he un­know­ingly built it over Mario’s house, which caused a deep shadow to fall on the prop­erty. Mon­sters ma­te­ri­al­ized in this dark­ness and roamed the prop­erty, and trees couldn’t grow. Both in­di­vid­u­als re­fused to de­stroy their cre­ations, and for a while Mario stub­bornly lived in per­pet­ual dan­ger. He even­tu­ally left and started build­ing a cas­tle, but it caused some drama for a bit.

Mon­sters and roller coast­ers aside, this vir­tual world re­sem­bles the ide­al­is­tic mus­ings my friends and I have about form­ing an in­ten­tional com­mu­nity. I have al­ways been fas­ci­nated by all things civic, the dy­namic that oc­curs when in­di­vid­ual minds come to­gether to cre­ate some­thing be­yond any one per­son’s po­ten­tial and the so­cial or­ga­ni­za­tion that must take place. This game of­fers many of these pos­si­bil­i­ties for col­lec­tive in­vest­ment in a shared com­mu­nity ideal, for cre­at­ing through com­bined ef­forts by like-minded in­di­vid­u­als. Minecraft ac­cesses a deeply buried and very real de­sire we all share about com­mu­nal liv­ing.

I play be­cause I get to par­tic­i­pate in this vi­sion, and be­cause I can spend time with my brother, who lives 2,000 miles away, and the friends we grew up with that are scat­tered across the na­tion. Al­though there is noth­ing tac­tile about our in­ter­ac­tions, my mind fills in the gaps from past mem­o­ries: he might have cat hair on his clothes or smell like grilling meats. These pro­jected mem­o­ries are sat­is­fac­tory and there are enough out­lets in the game for in­di­vid­ual idio­syn­crasies to be ex­pressed. All in all, I can run around this vir­tual world with a sem­blance of a brother. His friends’ per­son­al­i­ties are like­wise ac­cu­rately por­trayed by their cre­ations in this game that of­fers lim­it­less cre­ative po­ten­tial.