Minecraft is a game about business. Actually, it’s a game about a lot of things, but at its core, it isn’t an adventure or RPG—it’s a game about building an enterprise of one and using natural resources in an efficient manner to accomplish your goals, whatever those may happen to be. And the game’s emergent gameplay offers an immense number of lessons for the aspiring young executive, re-enforcing real life lessons through the natural ecosystem. We already took a look at some of these lessons, but that was just the beginning. Let’s take a look at some more.
5. Human Capital And Expertise Are Immensely Valuable
Human capital is just about the least fun business buzzword there is, but it’s very much a real thing—whether in the traditional HR formulation or the more politically loaded designation of “talent.” Either way, Minecraft makes the importance of human capital very apparent very early on. When you first start, you could spend tens of hours reinventing the wheel, discovering the very basics, spending an immense amount of time discovering how to tame wolves, breed cattle, defend against creepers, and even build basic tools. Or you could save most of that time by having someone who already knows Minecraft introduce you to the game.
I don’t mean to evaluate whether learning the game yourself or having it taught to you is more fun. That’s besides the point from a business perspective. Bringing in outside talent who already knows the ropes will save the entrepreneur or Minecrafter critical early resources when they are at their most scarce. Bootstrapping your way from nothing to the top may sound more noble, but the basic human capital of education can give you a massive jumpstart.
4. Your Enemies Will Exploit Your Weak Spots Eventually
In single-player survival mode, Minecraft doesn’t have competition in the traditional sense. If you’re playing survival multiplayer, you’ll directly compete with other players for resources, but that’s a topic for another day. But even in single player, one’s enterprise will have weak points, and one’s competitors—in this case, monsters—will inevitably exploit them. It’s a simple function of time. If you’ve identified a weak spot in your base, even a rival as rock-dumb as a creeper will identify it eventually as well, and wreak havoc. You need both a good defense and a good offense to prevent such incidents. This is all the more obvious in the real world, when your competitors are people and not bits of code, and when the stakes are much higher. If you know about a business weak point, don’t simply hope your rivals don’t discover it. They will, eventually.
3. Advances In Efficiency Are Very Capital-Intensive
There’s a reason businesses don’t always have the latest and greatest, and why legacy systems in some parts of an enterprise are the norm: Staying on the cutting edge is very capital-intensive, and businesses have to allocate their capital carefully, not willy-nilly. Minecraft demonstrates this handily. Building an automated cattle farm and an automated mob farm are both relatively time-consuming endeavors. Even though you have unlimited time in Minecraft, you almost certainly don’t have unlimited time to actually play it in real life. You have to allocate your resources carefully.
Building an automated farm requires all sorts of sophisticated equipment, like hoppers, and rare circuitry with redstone—at least, these are sophisticated and rare from the perspective of a newcomer. Essentially, these ventures all have high individual start-up costs. They’ll pay off once they’re built, but you can’t build everything all at once. You have to allocate your capital.
2. Scarcity Rules All
Of course, the reason you have to allocate capital—besides for your limited time to play—is scarcity. This is no lesson for a business-type, really, since everyone knows about it already, but the game still reinforces the concept rather well. Minecraft is all about dealing with scarcity; it’s the core of the gameplay. That’s what mining is about, after all: Acquiring hard-to-get resources, and constantly finding or expanding mines in order to do so.
Compensating for scarcity, however, is a major part of Minecraft as well. That’s the fundamental purpose of building farms and cattle ranches, after all: You take a natural resource that is somewhat scarce and bring it under your direct control, so that it becomes readily available with minimal time investment. The real resource lesson in Minecraft isn’t the existence of scarcity—the lesson is the importance of taming it.
1. Don’t Neglect Yourself On The Road To Wealth
But I think the ultimate business lesson in Minecraft is a truly fundamental one, and one that’s easily neglected. In Minecraft as in life, everything you do is ultimately done—well, by you. Your body is your most important and ultimately only resource, and neglecting it, neglecting yourself, on the road to wealth is the shortest cut to failure and unhappiness. Too many times have I starved nearly to death in Minecraft because I was busy working on a construction project and neglected to bring food. Too many times have I failed to take my own personal safety into account when undertaking a risky venture, only to barely escape or die at the hands of some monster in a dark cave. And that becomes both a personal and a business setback—it’s hard to build a railway when your iron is rotting at the bottom of the dank cave you died in.
While you are unlikely to starve to death from overwork in real life, at least if you have the luxury to be playing Minecraft, the opposite problem is certainly common enough. Poor nutrition and, ahem, overnutrition are very easy traps to fall into for the person who spends too much time and energy on working. You have to take care of yourself first or all your ventures are for naught. Stay healthy, eat right, and don’t play too much Minecraft, and you’ll be on the right track.
