Hrrmmm Hrm
HAHAHAHAHAHA!
Sonic: Eggman, you're finished!
Okay, chaos emeralds blast awayyyyyy~
Disappointed Sonic: Hmm. What! that's it?
HEY
[villager noises again]
Sonic: Shoot, not my day
[Game theory intro]
Mat Pat: Hello internet, welcome to GAME THEORY!
The only show on the internet that pays its staff in Minecraft emeralds.
Uh, surprise to all of Team theorist this month!
[Angry team complaints asking to pay real money]
Mat Pat: Look guys it's February, adrates are super low
Ugh, if it makes it any better I'll throw in some doughnuts
[Team Theorists]Man, he's got a point- YAAY, it's currency! - I can eat!
Mat Pat: Anyway, with it's 10th anniversary last year, Minecraft not only saw
a massive renaissance here in Youtube
Ahem...Kicking the Fortnite to the curb
But it also rolled out some of their biggest content updates in years
Giving us everything from target blocks to bees
OH NO, NOT THE BEES! NOT THE BEES!
[Dies from the bees]
Mat Pat : But, of 'em all probably the most interesting was the revamped villager trading system.
Before last year's 'Village and Pillage' update, villagers would give randomly generated deals
that could range anywhere from:
>>Trump The worst trade, maybe ever signed anywhere.
Mat Pat: All the way up to
Uh this one dude from futurama: "Shut up and take my money"
Mat Pat: Now, after the 2019 update, that randomness is suddenly gone. Instead, all
of the trades start at a base price, and then fluctuate based on a variety of factors: the
villager's experience, your player status, and your personal demand for the deal. But
it's that baseline price that has me the most interested...
You see, for the first time, it gives us a standard value for the emerald. An emerald,
in Minecraft's world, is the equivalent of 1 stone axe, or 16 bricks, or 22 carrots or
32 sticks, or simply 1 rabbit stew. And so, that's what I wanted to look into today. What
What is the value of a Minecraft emerald, in real- world dollars? Can it actually be quantified?
Does the dollar amount even make any semblance of sense? Should Team Theorist over here be
bummed about getting paid in emeralds this year?
>> Team Theorist: Yes!
>> MatPat: Just you wait guys, because by the end of this episode I think you're all
going to be singing a very different tune. At least, I hope you'll be singing a different
tune, 'cause I don't got a lot else to pay you with...
So, because I walk up to Kay's Jewelers, drop down my bundle of 32 sticks and get Stephanie
a nice emerald necklace for our anniversary, I should probably know how much I'm gonna
be spending on her, right? Who knows! Those sticks could be very valuable. *ka-ching*
So, like I said, under the new trading system everything has a base starting price, with
1 emerald being tradable for lots of different types of items. It's worth everything from
6 bread loaves to 32 rotten fleshes, 24 sheets of paper, to 1 empty map. Which, let's face
it, is literally just 1 sheet of paper, so the cartographer over there is getting himself
one heck of a deal. Price gouging for the win!
So, the first way to look at this problem is simply by pricing out some of these items
and seeing if they all land in relatively the same price range. As I look at the items,
I'm just gonna pick out the ones that are pretty darn standard. Things that aren't really
dependent on weight or quality, like pounds of chicken or things like that. So, a loaf
of bread. Probably the most blasé, standard item out there. Keep your gluten-free seeded
fancy Whole Foods $800 rye bread loaves out of here; this is a pure Home Pride butter
top wheat channel. That's gonna run you roughly $3 at your local Target, Vons, or Food Lion
my friends, so 6 is gonna rack us up about $18 for that 1 traded emerald.
Carrots are about 30c a piece, so 22 is... $6.60. A sheet of paper is, like, 2c, so...
24 is getting us up to 48c... for that 1 emerald. Jeez, we keep going backwards, this is not
good! And already you can start to see the problem with this methodology; 1 emerald is
worth anything from 20 bucks to 50 cents! And that's without me even getting into some
of the bigger ticket items like axes and shovels. The range of value for that 1 emerald is just
all over the place, depending on what you're trading it for. There seems to be nothing
consistent about its value.
So, let's approach the problem another way. Consider this, when you trade 22 carrots for
an emerald, the farmer isn't just paying you for the carrots. The carrots are usually right
there, literally right next to that villager. I mean, we've all felt like evil capitalists
before clearing out a villager's garden, only to sell it back to him, but that's exactly
what he wants - or, at least, that's what I tell myself he wants to make the guilt go
away. No, the villager isn't just paying an emerald for the carrots, he's paying
you an emerald for the carrots plus the labour costs it took to pull them out of the ground.
How much labour are we talking about?
[breaking carrot noises]
>> MatPat: Oh boy, that is not really a lot of labour. Or, is it? Sure, as the player
we can clear out a field of carrots in seconds using our superpowers, but villagers clearly
don't have the same abilities we do. They can't instantly build things. They can't
defend themselves against monsters, and they farm way, WAY slower than we do.
So, to get a sense of true value that 22 carrots would have to a villager, I mixed things up
a bit. I set up a village with 5 villagers and watched them farm their plots of carrots
for a full day. It was boring. Maybe boring isn't the right word to describe this - it
was frustrating in the same way that watching someone else struggle through a video game
that you're really good at is frustrating. You just gotta sit there while they just that
ONE plot of carrots just unpicked for no apparent reason! I mean, villager! Just grab it! Just
grab the top of the carrot and pull! Just, pull a little bit. Seriously, why! Why are
you just leaving that one block unharvested?!?! Oh my gosh, it's like, messing with my OCD.
It is literally the opposite of a "Try Not to Get Dissatisfied" challenge.
[Shivers in dissatisfaction ] >> MatPat: Alright.
Over the course of the 5 minute 45 second working day of the villager, the 5 villagers
managed to clear out 54 plots of carrots which, if harvested without a fortune tool, yielded
124 carrots. That means, on average, each villager was collecting just over 4 carrots
a minute. But remember that we're talking about in-game time. Minecraft day is only
20 minutes long, which means we need to count each 1 minute as 1.2 hours of our time. So,
in other words, the villagers are picking 4 carrots every 72 minutes, or 1 carrot every 18 minutes.
THAT IS..., not efficient, my friends. So, to collect 22 carrots, it's taking a single
villager 6 and a half hours - a bit more than one of their full working days. Rounding
things out here, that means a novice farmer is making roughly 1 EMERALD per day in wages.
Mat Pat: Since picking carrots isn't particularly skilled labour, and since the carrot trade
is happening at the novice level for farmers in Minecraft world, I'm gonna imagine that
these villagers would be expecting the lower end of the pay scale for their equivalent
real-life position. So, looking up salaries for farm workers in crop fields on the website
PayScale.com, we see that the average hourly rate for an unskilled worker is about $10.50.
Since the Minecraft farmer is working 6 hours per day and getting a single emerald out of
it, it means that 1 emerald is gonna worth 63 bucks. That... is shockingly low. Definitely
a bit better than the 50 FRICKEN' cents that we calculated earlier but still..-!
This is an emerald that we're talking about here. These things are called precious gemstones
for a reason. Clearly something is not lining up here. The values of these stones is nowhere
close to what we would expect 'em to be. Which means that it's time to do our calculations
a third way. This time, by working in reverse. We know that emeralds are valuable, right?
That's why it costs an arm, a leg, and your firstborn child to buy a decent piece of jewelry
for your loved one's anniversary gift.
[Knocks in happiness]
>> Stephanie: Oh hey! Oh, sorry to interrupt recording, I- I just wanted to say thank you.
Thanks for the new necklace! I love it.
>> MatPat: Well I'm glad you liked it. It was either that or a bundle of sticks.
>> Stephanie: Oh, by the way, have you seen Ollie?
[MatPat is thinking about ever decision in his entire life...and whistling]
>> MatPat: So, what if, we start with real life prices and work backwards into the game?
Back when I calculated the value of Minecraft's diamond armour, we walked through the four
C's of gemstone pricing - carat, cut, clarity, and colour, where more expensive
gemstones are those that are bigger, aren't cloudy or scratched, have themselves a vibrant
color (or colour), and have a nice cut or design. The same holds true for emeralds just as much
as it does for diamonds. These things are huge, and have themselves a great vibrant
green colour, but they definitely aren't transparent, meaning that they're cloudy,
and they haven't been cut in any sort of way - they're fresh out of the ground.
So, technically, we're gonna go conservative, and price them on the lower end of the emerald
pricing scale. Size seems like it should be our biggest challenge, since
who knows how large these things are. However, all we need to do are some simple calculations
to know for sure. We know that 9, raw emeralds can craft together to create one large emerald
block. And the dimensions of that emerald block are gonna be 1 cubic meter. Since emerald
has a density of 2.78 grams per cubic centimetre, our emerald block there is gonna weigh in
at 2,780 kg, or 6,128 lbs. For ONE block of gemstone. Remember what I said last week about
how Link would maybe not beat, but could certainly hold his own against Minecraft Steve in a
strength competition? ...Yeah, forget I said that one. Now, divide that weight of an emerald
block by 9, since it took 9 emeralds to make it, to get the weight of 1 single emerald,
and we get ourselves 680 lbs (309 kg) for one, BASIC emerald in Minecraft. That is one
HECK of a necklace! Since gemstones are measured in carats, and
one kilogram equals 5,000 carats, a single Minecraft emerald is clocking in at the scale-breaking
weight of 1.545 million carats. According to Singhal Gems International, a low quality
emerald larger than 5 carats is gonna cost at absolute minimum $300 per carat, and as
high as $7,500 per carat. Which means that our one single emerald valued at 24 sheets
of paper, 1 rabbit stew, or just 32 slices of rotten flesh, would have a real world value
on the LOW-END of $463,500,000 - or, if it just so happens to be a highly desirable
emerald, $11,587,500,000 at absolute most.
So, wait, we have ourselves an emerald worth 50c, $60,
or 11 BILLION dollars, depending on how we calculate it. The. Same. Emerald. All using
perfectly valid ways of calculating the value of this thing. So, which one is it? Am I just
wrong in the way that I'm calculating this? Well, no. You see, it all goes back to something
I said earlier in this episode.
>> Past MatPat: We know that emeralds are valuable, right? That's why it costs an
arm, a leg, and your firstborn child to buy a decent piece of jewelry for your loved
one's anniversary gift.
>> Present MatPat: The thing is, we DON'T know that emeralds are valuable. In fact, we have a
pretty solid understanding that in Minecraft, they're not. Outside of being used as a
trading item, emeralds have very limited use in the gameplay world. You can't build tools
or weapons out of them, you can't build Armour out of them, you can't eat them.
Their one and only other use is to select powers from a beacon - the player has to
select one of the available powers and then insert an emerald into the item slot, and
even here the emerald can just be replaced with iron and gold ingots, or just a diamond.
In the world of Minecraft, it has zero unique, functional properties.
The issue that we're facing with this episode is that we're basing the value of an emerald
off of how we price things. And we live in a very different society than Minecraft's world.
We can mass produce paper, we can harvest carrots by the thousands, we have machines
that bake bread around the clock. But in Minecraft, everything is done by hand; it takes a lot
of time to make a single bread loaf. And a single rabbit stew? Just think about what
you're asking! It requires a carrot, a mushroom, a baked potato, and cooked rabbit. As we discussed,
the carrot alone is taking 18 minutes to pick, and that's without even factoring in the
time and resources it takes to grow it in the first place. Same with the potato, then
you gotta catch and kill and clean and cook the rabbit, then you gotta forage for mushrooms.
That one dish - that one rabbit stew - to us as players living in modern times, and
as Steve who is literally a superhuman in this world, is completely unremarkable. But
to a villager in this primitive society, that one steaming bowl of soup is sucking up a
huge amount of time and resources - for just one meal. Which makes it worth its weight
in gold - quite literally.
The long and short of it is that currency is only worth the value that we ourselves
place on it. The earliest currencies back in 9,000 BC were cattle and other livestock,
mostly because people knew that those things were valuable. Animals provided labour, food,
transportation, and that value could be calculated. Fast forward to 1,200 BC, and you see China
changing the game by using cowrie shells as currency. You know, those shells that today
they make necklaces out of and sell in beach souvenir shops next to shark teeth, sand dollars,
and novelty soda koozies. In fact, cowrie shells are one of the longest and most widely
used currencies in history. They could've bought you a cow, or a tract of land, but
today they're on a rung below boogie board and fun noodle. Sure, at this point we all
jump around Minecraft's over-world without a care in the world, but if you look at it
from the perspective of the villagers, it's a brutal existence, where every night could
mean death at the hands of the rampaging mobs. It's a rudimentary society where people
aren't just wearing jewelry around for the heck of it. Here, the things that are
valuable are food to survive, weaponry and armour to defend yourself, basic shelter to
help you live through the night. When you're operating at that level, a shiny green stone
with limited function, while certainly special and pretty, isn't particularly valuable.
It's only worth the days labour that it saves you, the 6 bread loaves that it buys.
But today, we're beyond all of that. Food is plentiful, we have ourselves shelter to
keep us warm, angry mobs aren't knocking on our door every night - hopefully... So
for us, it's about prestige, it's about signs of wealth - the bigger TV, the fancier
car - and that is why suddenly a shiny green stone mined out from the earth is much more
valuable. It's frivolous, it's rare, it's unnecessary, and thereby worth millions. Kind
of makes you wonder what our currency will be in the future, thousands of years from
now. Fibre optic bits, plants from pre-global warming days, or maybe nothing at all. The
age of Bitcoin and digital currency, where our wealth is literally numbers in a cloud,
are here. Currency is worth whatever society needs it to be worth, and it could be that
we're fast approaching a time when society tells us a bunch of 0s and 1s are now the
better currency than gold, or paper, or gemstones, or cowrie shells, or anything else.
So how much is a Minecraft emerald worth? I dunno, how much is it worth to you? Watch
out Steph, it looks like it's gonna be a bundle of sticks for our next anniversary.
But hey, that's just a theory - a Game Theory!!!!! Thanks for watching.
And hey, if you wanna watch me calculate the actual value of Minecraft's diamond armour,
which that one does have a solid result in the end, click the box that you see on screen
right now. That is a very special episode of the show, it was the first one that my
friend Ronnie Oni Edwards worked on - our first ever team member - and one that we've
sadly lost since then so, if you want to check out that one, we much appreciate it; and heck,
while you're at it clicking buttons on screen, consider clicking the subscribe button. Doesn't
mean a whole lot, but you know what, that number helps, because it adds to another meaningless
number in the cloud - the subscriber count. It helps tell YouTube this is a channel that
matters, and you care about it. Ooo, last thing that I'll mention, and this is really
important actually - YouTube is currently doing a lot of manual surveys on the platform,
so after you watch this video, or one of our other videos, you might see the thumbnail
pop up and YouTube being like, "What did you think of this video? How would you rate
it? 1-5 stars?". Please rate it a 5. Please do; it is actually the single most powerful
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be like, "Wow! This is a really good channel, let's share it more widely across the platform",
so! If you could rate us 5 stars - it sounds so stupid, right? It sounds so antiquated
but, this is how they're doing it now so, if you see a survey with a Game Theory video,
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know. It's a weird metric that YouTube's currently using right now, a satisfaction-based
algorithm but, you would tell them that you're really satisfied about it, that would be great.
Thank you all so much for watching, I got another Minecraft theory up my sleeve that's
gonna be coming out in the next couple of weeks, but in the meantime, something different
next week. Alright, see ya then.
[Outro Music]