September 2025 – Behind-the-scenes update

Hiya patrons—both those who've just joined and those who were here from the very beginning!

Here's your behind-the-scenes update for September 2025.

Virtual democracies.

I'm taking a break from the world of Minecraft finance, and I'm currently researching for another video on virtual democracies (as it's been 9 months since I published my last video on that topic)!

I'm currently researching some of the stories that have come from "the Trollipocalypse" (also known as "the Trolligarch wave"), which I briefly wrote about on the 2nd January 2025. This was when virtual democracies across multiple platforms, including Reddit, Discord, and Minecraft, saw a surge of new players joining.

I'm also in the process of writing a long read article related to this topic, but the article has gotten so long that I'm thinking I could turn that into a video as well. We'll see for now, though.

The DC Short III.

In case you've somehow missed it, I've released the final instalment of The DC Short trilogy, which you can watch here! The 1-hour 45-minute documentary can be watched either as a standalone video or as Part 3 of the series.

Thanks to everyone who has sent me really kind comments about the video, and thanks to all of the new patrons who joined precisely because of it! I was glad to hear that people enjoyed watching it as much as I did in producing the series on-and-off over the past ... (checks) ... eight months (oh dear).

Despite the docuseries being three hours long, it shouldn't come as a surprise that there were many things that I didn't have time to cover.

I don't have any plans to make a Part 4 to cover these, since I intended for Part 3 to be the conclusive end to the trilogy. As such, I may end up writing additional articles covering these side-topics, or covering them in other videos where relevant.

That said, I briefly explored one of these side-topics (which some of you may find interesting) in response to a comment I received two weeks ago, which read:

DC [DemocracyCraft] has 12 people logged in, CItyRP has 2, the other two servers mentioned at the beginning of the video have none.

This seems like it is all made up, or this shit murdered those servers.

My response was as follows:

There was a very amusing quote I read recently from an academic called Alex Goulb who, in describing World of Warcraft, wrote: "Rather than describe people who turn databases into worlds, I will describe a community which has taken a virtual world and turned it back into a database."

You've just picked up a common complaint among the players of DemocracyCraft and related servers—that most of the gameplay has shifted away from the actual servers themselves and into other platforms like Discord servers and forums. This phenomeon has been discussed so much it has a name—"Discordcrafting."

DemocracyCraft has its own capitol building, but I don't think I've ever seen it used by lawmakers, for example. Instead, most bills are either debated and voted on in the Discord server and its official forums.

DemocracyCraft has buildings for courts, and even though there is a legal right to have a court hearing inside the server (and a legal right to do trial by combat!), this is almost never done*. In most cases, people fight their legal cases on the forums.

One of the observations that I didn't mention because it was cut for time was the disparity between the players who were "Discordcrafting" and the players who were ... well ... actual Minecrafting.

If you were a wealthy player on the server, you basically never needed to set foot on the server. I mentioned how players can transfer cash using a simple command (/transfer)—but you can actually use that command on the Discord server. If you wanted to own stocks, you could just buy them on the Discord server. If you wanted to own real estate, you could just contact a real estate agent to do that for you (and, as mentioned in Part 2, you could get them to set up a trust for you as well to circumvent playtime requirements).

The same, however, doesn't apply if you weren't a wealthy player. Assuming you don't just buy DemocracyCraft dollars for real-life currency, the only real way to earn your first wad of cash is to actually play on the server—be it mining diamonds, logging trees, or robbing pedestrians. If you wanted to claim benefit payments, you also have to play on the server as those are directly tied to server playtime. (And it should go without saying that the wealthy don't need or depend on welfare).

So if the rich are playing Minecraft Bloomberg Terminal outside of the server, and the middle class are playing lawmaking, litigating, and accounting outside of the server, who else do you have left to play on the server? :^)

*But there are definitely examples, such as in this July 2025 case where "[b]oth parties [in the lawsuit] agreed to a Trial by Combat by chess."