someone recently described Hermitcraft as part reality drama, part scripted roleplay, part improv comedy, and part art show.
and I want to point out: yes, and, the roleplay part consistently plays with one of my favorite themes, across all the hermits' perspectives: post-scarcity economics.
if you're just coming in now, welcome! Hermitcraft is unironically my new Homestuck. Its got music, animation, weird puzzle shit, and loads and loads of characters, all of whom have canonically died at least once (see: Demise).
Its primary format is Minecraft Let's Play videos posted on YouTube, with the gimmick being that each video is recorded and edited by one of over twenty separate players, each working in isolation (hence "Hermits"). The series gets rebooted about once every two years, with new participants, a new Minecraft world, and usually some subtle tinkering with the game through mods or configs. Once in a while, a Hermit may begin constructon of a "mega base", a project designed to soak up their blocks and resources for the rest of the season. Some of these get finished during the season, some of them get finished in a post-season epilogue, some of them get abandoned, and one of them was recently abandoned, blown up, paved over, rebuilt, and then abandoned a second time.
And thats where the post-scarcity economics comes in! See, by default, Minecraft's "survival" is laughable. You lose almost nothing on death, it takes hardly any effort to acquire food and shelter, and a dedicated player can get endgame weapons and armor in just a few hours. So, what do you do when all your survival needs are met? Why, you spend all your time and money on luxury goods. Build a theme park with your beloved cat as its mascot, design a card game with your friends as the characters, collect every mob in the game that can be dangled from a lead and make a flying zoo!
And how do you get the tens of thousands of wood, metal, glass, and stone, in a variety of designer colors of course, for your enormous full-time building project? You farm some of them yourself, and trade for the rest. Hermits typically trade in diamonds, since they're easy but time consuming to collect and have an established in-game value. But its not unheard of to trade blank check favors, crates of sand, or one's own moustache, either.
These trades facilitate a luxury-based economy, so everyone can get their hands on bulk quantity of cyan terracotta, or stop down to the corner store and buy a new personal jetpack if they accidentally lose one in The Void. And if you're out of money and don't want to part with your facial hair, you can always dig a hole for an hour and the game will reward you with a fairly consistent amount of shiny rocks.
Which like... is a really optimistic idea for how I think a real post-scarcity economy could work! People build factories that spit out sustainably-grown food and medicine. Automation drives down the price and public subsidies ensure that everyone gets enough to live comfortably. If you want more than that, you can write a book, or a song, and if that fails you can go dig, because there's always a hole that needs digging, and you can use the money to buy art, or a cool car, or a dream home, but you can also quit whenever you like and still have food and shelter for life. Work is always available but never mandatory.
And yeah if we do it right then I like to think that all the funny little guys with weird hair will be able to travel the world to their heart's content and tell wild fishing stories. We always need more of those.
todo: consider potholing the heck out of this article with links to the stuff being referenced