Minecraft often seems to me to capture the essence of problems in my real life more than other games do. I have all these objects and space and I have to figure out how to usefully organize the objects in the space. I constantly think of things I should do and don’t know which ones to do first, or how to remember what they all are, and always feel like I should have a better mental schema for even knowing what the possible things are that I should maybe do. In the process of doing one thing, I am reminded of several other ones that I should imminently do. It is bed time way too often. I constantly forget to eat. If I’m doing a thing and its night time or I’m dying of starvation or something else to do comes up, it’s never clear if I should actually stop immediately. (When will I finish the thing? How will I remember?) Less importantly or intensely in real life than in Minecraft, I often suspect that I’ve been in this exact place many times before, and yet I can’t tell it from similar places. And I forget which direction is which every time I turn a corner.

Basically, I think Minecraft gets at something about organizing the information required to be an agent, given limited memory. As you walk around, you see a lot of things, and have a lot of options, such that at any given point, the relevant options are not just a set of salient paths ahead, as in a sophisticated choose your own adventure book. Most of the best courses of action are not physically represented in front of you, and can only be seen at all because of structures in your own mind constructed to keep them available.

https://worldspiritsockpuppet.substack.com/p/mine-craft-20-07-03