How Minecraft Can be Used as a Media for Storytelling
Has it ever crossed your mind that Minecraft, yes, the block game created by Mojang Studios, can be used to make a movie?
Considering the game is a sandbox which means you can do virtually everything you want to your liking, even modify the game to suit your playstyle through mods, it looks very possible to make a movie with Minecraft, and that’s what the Minecraft YouTuber, Wifies, created.
The ‘movie’ in question is the Alternate Reality Game (ARG) “Searching for a World that Doesn’t Exist” which can be watched through the YouTube link here. The story follows Wifies trying to explain the story of AveryTheMayo who found an old laptop he found from a storage locker. That laptop came with Minecraft installed, and when Avery opened the world, one of the things he found in a Minecraft world within that laptop is a book that says ‘At the crossroads, don’t turn left’. Upon solving a few strange cypher within the video of AveryTheMayo, Wifies uncovers a Google Drive folder that contains the point of view of d3rlord3, the original owner of the laptop. Videos in said folder contains d3rlord3’s point of view playing the world, and sure enough, when faced with any kind of crossroads within the world, d3rlord3 always turns left.
This is only a small bit of the ARG “Searching for a World that Doesn’t Exist”. It is a 2 part video series which can be watched on Wifies’ YouTube channel.
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This ARG does a very good job in answering the flaw that many other horror Minecraft ARG have: “Why doesn’t the protagonist just quit the game and be done with it?” with Avery’s very curious personality and d3rlord3’s…
well, you will have to watch everything if you want to know.
Other than that, Wifies approach in making this horror ARG is not with jumpscares scattered every once in a while to make the viewers feel scared, but with suspense and the feeling that an unknown and omnipresent entity is always watching and chasing the main character, even though we never saw the entity in question.
In an interview with RetroGamingNow, Wifies stated that his main inspiration is The King in Yellow, a short story collection by Robert W. Chambers, which tells a story about a play that corrupts the minds of everyone who watches it. Wifies portrays this in the character d3rlord3, who had his mind so corrupted by looking at a mysterious gate in the Minecraft world that even not looking at his PC monitor drives him crazy. This series is a very good watch if you know a little bit about Minecraft and you really like mystery and horror stories, because the entire time, you will feel like something is watching the player and is chasing the player, but you don’t know what it is.
Watch the ARG here:
Part 1 “Searching for a World that doesn’t Exist” : https://youtu.be/3V7Rvo4Gvic
Part 2 “Destroying a World that doesn’t Exist” : https://youtu.be/NnTycJg1MIo
