Work Text:
In the corner of a world caged in by a coded barrier, there is a valley made from pixelated blocks. Flowers cover the valley, a bright array of yellows and reds that add definition to the saturated green of the grass. A wooden wall meanders along the horizon line, stripped planks of spruce overlapping grained oak to create protection.
In the time it takes to blink, this wall catches fire.
Flames flicker across the crest of one of the hills, jumping from block to block. The light illuminates the rounded top of a nearby stone: a grave, with dirt freshly overturned at its foot.
Once, there was life here. Once, two people shouted joyful greetings across a clear blue lake. They planted seeds in the sun, trading poppies and fish and promises. There were sheep to tend to, houses to build, armour and tools to craft. There was love here.
Now, cobblestone blocks off the door to one of the houses. The wall has been rebuilt with stone, making it both less flammable and less welcoming. This place is empty. There’s no sound except for the hum of cows that had once been hidden in a fruitless attempt at ensuring survival. One lover buried the other in the grave at the top of the hill, and then threw himself into revenge until his screen glowed with familiar words: “You Died!” [1]
A screen is the informer of death for the same reason that this valley has a coded barrier and pixelated blocks: It exists within Minecraft, the popular sandbox videogame released in 2009. The valley – and the whole world, or server, as it’s referred to in-game – is made entirely of blocks measuring a meter cubed. The in-game avatars stand two blocks tall, and are controlled by the players, real people who click away on screens thousands of miles away from each other.
This specific world, with its valley of flowers and its farther-away desert mountains, is colloquially referred to as Third Life. The world functions differently from basic Minecraft, using the structure of the classical videogame to create circumstances so unique that the server earns its own name.
Minecraft’s nature as a sandbox game means that there is no linear path for the players to take. Instead, the game presents the player with a world that extends infinitely in all directions, allowing for exploration and creative building. There are dangers within gameplay, of course: monsters come out at night to terrorize the player, and natural elements like fire and heights can hurt the health of the avatar. But there is no end goal, no moment where play stops.
This also means that death isn’t the end of the line. In many popular videogames, player death is, at a minimum, a severe disrupter of progress – in games like Undertale or Breath of the Wild, death halts linear progression through the world. It sends the player backwards in time, forcing them to redo actions that they’ve already done, such as fight scenes or conversations with side characters. Minecraft doesn’t follow this concept. Instead, death is about physical location and item collection. The player will respawn in their bed, maybe without many of their items but with all of their progress exactly as it was.
In traditional Minecraft, players can remain in a world for years in real-life time, switching between building and exploring as they see fit. When I play, I’m likely to fight a monster, die, and return to work on the house I started building two years prior. But this is not possible in Third Life.
Third Life’s modifications mean that instead of an infinite world, the server has barriers seven hundred blocks wide, boxing the players in. Each player has only three lives, color-coded like a traffic light on the name tag floating above the head of their avatar. They begin green, move from yellow, and spend their final life red. When red, the avatar becomes “hostile, and [has] to take out everyone else on the server.” [2] And when they die on their red life – because it’s inevitable – the game ends for them, and that player loses access to the world entirely.
Videogames are “fundamentally systems of rules.” [3] That’s how Brendan Keogh phrased it in 2013, when he wrote about the fact that often, players of games like Minecraft will make additional rules surrounding within their worlds – rules that still fit within the original constraints of gameplay, but change things so drastically that the world becomes like a game within a game. This is what Third Life does – its additions to Minecraft’s structure means that playing on the server feels fundamentally different.
In videogames, the idea of death meaning the end of gameplay is referred to as “permanent death,” [4] and it is the crux of Keogh’s writing. He writes that when death gains additional meaning, the tone of the world changes. In Minecraft, you can fling yourself off a cliff and respawn in your house, the world saved. In Third Life, when the avatar dies, that’s one step closer to the world being unplayable. Carelessness stops being an option. You play with shaking hands. The groan of a zombie could mean the end of the series, the end of the world.
Death is a very human fear. It’s the one thing in life that’s entirely unavoidable, the one thing we haven’t managed to stop. Videogames, with their frequently callous approach to life, often alleviate this fear. When you add death back in as a major concept, you tap into that human fear. It becomes instinctual to cling to life, to make the most of it. Keogh uses this within his work. “As death mattered,” he wrote, “so did life.” [5] Suddenly the player cares about the life of their avatar, the life of the character that they are playing within the world. Permanent death, like what we see in Third Life, gives the world what Keogh calls “narrative weight.” [6]
Death in Third Life means that the players and their characters lose access to the world forever. Any bonds they’ve made in that world, anything they’ve built – it’s all gone. Players, then, must make careful choices with their avatars. They build walls, set fires, and form relationships. These choices to protect the avatar become choices to protect the avatar’s whole world. As this attachment grows, the avatars become characters, living out a life of value. What the avatars are doing matters now, unlike in many other worlds. It matters, because life could disappear in a second. And when life does disappear, the characters will grieve that loss like any person would, because there’s weight, now. There’s a story.
Third Life itself was played and recorded by a group of fourteen YouTubers in 2021 – they are the players, their in-game avatars the characters. There were eight three-hour sessions, where all players were active on the Minecraft world at the same time, unless they’d already lost all of their lives. Each session then became a complete episode, cut down to less than an hour, with each YouTuber posting their own perspective — meaning there were fourteen different perspectives, fourteen different bits of context. Audiences would anxiously await the Tuesday video release, closely following what was quickly becoming an entirely unscripted yet still intricate plot of humanity and loss.
For my part, I sat curled up on my couch, watching Scott Smajor – on YouTube as Dangthatsalongname – the teal-haired lover who lived in the valley of flowers. I watched as he found Jimmy, another player-character, giving him flowers, a home, and eventually, a title: husband. I watched, gripping my phone, as Jimmy died, and Scott screamed. And I felt, in that moment, like I did when I sat in the audience of the tour of Les Miserables: utterly emotionally devastated. Because death is what gives Third Life weight. Death was the driver. And death is hauntingly inevitable, so much so that any character in Third Life, no matter the perspective, began to create a compelling story through their attempts to escape and subvert that death.
In the 1980 foreword to The Death of Tragedy, George Stiener defines absolute tragedy as when “man is taken to be an unwanted guest in this world.” [7] He says plays or texts of this nature are both often ancient and exceedingly rare; he says even Shakespeare doesn’t do tragedy in this manner. Third Life isn’t an absolute tragedy – its nature as a videogame provides it with a sense of lightness that can make it seem, at times, nearly comedic. But the world fits neatly into the idea that the characters are unwanted guests. The entire purpose of the game is to be the last person alive, which inherently implies that each character wants everyone else gone. Every Minecraft monster in the server is a threat, designed to kill and hurt. Each player, once they get to their red life, is the same; the world itself is hostile. These people – this whole place – want the characters gone.
The inevitability of death, the growing horror at this hostile world – it breeds tragedy. Third Life starts seeming structurally absolute, but throughout the episodes, the atmosphere and story begin to fall in line with the ancient Aristotelian model of theatrical tragedy. Aristotle outlines this in his Poetics, but I best understand it using Dr. Matthew Cornish’s essay The Tragic Model. Either way, starts simply: with inherent tension. [8]
Scott enters the server of Third Life, utterly alone in the middle of a forest, his name a bright green. It should be a peaceful beginning, but it’s not: already, Scott is planning ahead. One of the first things he says is in reference to his future house, which he plans to build pressed up against the coded border, so he can only be attacked from three sides. He knows, even in these opening moments, that the hostility of the end is inevitable.
Scott finds Jimmy early, and immediately gravitates towards him. He goes mining with Jimmy, and tells him to be careful so many times that the words seem to lose meaning. The two of them run into Ren and Martyn, two other characters, who offer them trade deals for access to enchant better tools. Ren and Martyn have power, and Scott and Jimmy note it immediately. It’s a potential threat.
Jimmy’s voice is light as he watches Scott advance towards Minecraft’s nighttime terrors, mere minutes later. “Hey,” he says, “you’re sounding like you wanna lose a life.” [9] His lightness doesn’t hide the reference to the weight of death that hangs over everything they do.
And within that very first episode, Scar, another character, loses his first life to the same monsters that Jimmy watched Scott fight.
That worry for their lives develops into the irreconcilable conflict that Aristotle mentions and Cornish specifies. Fundamentally, Scott wants to live. It’s apparent that he wants Jimmy to live, too – but by the rules of the game, two people surviving isn’t possible. And they’re up against twelve other people who also have that same fundamental want. All of the characters are aware that it won’t take much to push them towards violence as a means of securing life, that victory, for themselves. Scott and Jimmy living together in a happy retirement in their flower valley can’t exist, not within the confines of the game. Nobody else on the server plans to lose the game or their life without fighting, either. The promise of conflict is inevitable. It hangs over the server, like the electricity in the air moments before a lightning strike.
The overarching conflict manifests in smaller ways, at first. In their fortress of stone, Ren and Martyn expand their business of tool enchantment into a whole kingdom, slowly pulling other characters to their side. Grian and Scar live in a fortified sandcastle, deep in the desert. They try to grab monopolies; they assume resources are as limited as their lives. Tucked away in the valley, Scott and Jimmy steal cows, build walls, and try to maintain friendships with both Grian and Martyn. Scott’s priority has always been the social game – if he can maintain relationships with people, they’re less likely to leave him dead.
The game spins on, gaining speed as it hurtles towards an inevitable explosion. Jimmy slips from green to red in a single episode, and both times, Scott watches him die, unable to stop what he knows is inevitable. Ren, too, slips from green to red, but not from natural causes – instead he has Martyn, his closest friend, kill him with an axe so that he can enact his will on the server.
Cornish describes these escalating conflicts as “the wind of a drama,” and marks Aristotle’s reversal as the moment where the ship tacks, changing direction against a consistent wind. [10] The conflict doesn’t stop or drastically change, but the characters understand something new about the circumstances, and it sends them in a downwards spiral towards the inevitable end. For Scott, the ship tacks when a newly red Ren shows up to the flower valley with Martyn in tow. The Red King of Dogwarts, Ren calls himself. He leads a kingdom, one that offers nothing in return for the implied servitude of the flower valley. And Scott is ready to comply – he’ll do anything to stay safe, anything to keep threats off his and Jimmy’s back. He’ll do anything to keep them both alive.
It’s Jimmy who puts the unbalanced deal to a stop – Jimmy, who is red and so very close to a permanent death. “You’re gonna end up on that altar,” [11] he says. There is desperation dripping from his voice, so palpable that it’s impossible to ignore.
The conflict – the attempts to escape death paired with the faction-based hostility of the other server members – is exactly as it's always been, at this moment. But when Jimmy steps in front, when he challenges Ren and Martyn and sticks their banner into the fire, the ship tacks. This moment is a reversal: the game they’re playing isn’t just a quest for survival. It’s a war, one where Ren and Martyn have put peaceful people from the flower valley on their list of enemies. And it’s Scott’s moment of recognition: he knows, in this moment, that the game is vicious, and he and Jimmy will not get out of it unscathed.
After this tacking, it doesn’t take long for the server to explode, literally and metaphorically. Cornish writes that “death follows death,” [12] and that after a scene of recognition, all that’s left is suffering. We see this in Third Life, albeit slowly at first: Scott and Jimmy team up with Grian and Scar, who are gentler and more compromising. The four of them rig the far-off desert to explode, and Jimmy dies in the process. He’s the server’s first permanent death, and a newly-widowed Scott screams, something raw and broken in his tone.
The explosion fails to stop Dogwarts – instead, it sends Scott and Grian to yellow, and leaves Jimmy for dead. Two has one, and Scott buries Jimmy in a grave at the top of the hill that looks over the valley they called home. “Beloved husband,” the grave reads. [13]
The suffering continues, picking up its pace. The series begins a downward spiral towards its end – Scott throws himself into revenge, losing himself in grief. The man who was once so careful and intentional with his life seems to throw everything away. Jimmy is gone. Jimmy will never come back. Scott grieves this, changes as a result of this – death matters.
Scott’s revenge is ultimately unsuccessful, and he’s hunted down by Ren and Martyn, in a forest much like the one he first spawned in. He falls from red to dead, unable to deal a killing blow on the people who had hurt him and his lover. Scott dies, and this ends his connection to the world.
All tragedies end, either with what Cornish calls a “restoration of order” [14] or something that reveals a life of further tragedy. For Scott, an extra scene is recorded for his final episode, the only example of any pre-recorded details being added. In that scene, he meets Jimmy in an alternate version of their flower valley. Color returns to Scott’s vision as the two run to greet each other, and Jimmy declares this place “home.” [15]
Across the server, Grian, the creator of the series, pummels Scar to death in a cactus ring to secure his status as the winner of Third Life, before launching himself off a cliff. Death follows death with such ferocity that even the winner must die. And Grian’s final moments do not include a happy reunion. Instead, he does what can only be done by the creator of a videogame series: he announces that there will be a second series. In doing so, he announces a future where this tragedy can repeat itself. While that portion of the ending isn’t done by character-Grian as much as it’s done by player-Grian, the announcement functions much like a Greek chorus might, providing context as the world shudders to a close.
Third Life’s plot journeys through Aristotle’s tragic model very naturally. The world opens to tension, the ship tacks, and the result is continued suffering. The server has clear weight attached to it, and from this weight comes a devastating tragedy. By using an Aristotelian model of tragedy, we have already placed the series into the world of the theater. Poetics is analyzing theatrical tragedy; since Third Life fits so cleanly into Poetics’ structure, it’s natural to consider the world as theatrical, also.
Richard Schechner defines performance as “any action that is framed, presented, highlighted, or displayed.” [16] This definition encompasses practically everything, from ritual to traditionally understood performance arts to social interaction. Indeed, through this lens, everything we do is performance. Rarely do we ever do anything without some framing or presentation. We get dressed in the morning, and that simple action shows something about us as humans.
This basic definition is straightforward in its application to Third Life. The series is a collection of actions by various different characters, which is then recorded and made available to an audience on YouTube. The act of playing and recording both frames and presents the action within the series. And Third Life is also a game, so it’s a form of play, which Schechner outlines specifically as an example of basic performance. [17] Definitionally, Third Life is performance.
In 2009, only four months after the earliest versions of Minecraft were made available, Clara Fernandez-Vara used Schechner’s performance studies model to begin to analyze how videogames could be viewed as theatre. She dove deeper than just framed actions, focusing instead on the structure of a performance. She started with Schechner’s understanding of time – specifically, event time, or the idea that time is “determined by the completion of a series of steps.” [18] Minecraft itself doesn’t run on event time, but Third Life does: the performance lasts until the metaphorical steps of the three deaths have been completed by each player.
Within a performance, objects often gain more value than they would if they existed in the natural world. Fernandez-Vara extrapolates on this, interpreting object value as being related to the effect on the avatar. Minecraft, like many videogames, takes the effect of items on the avatar very seriously. Armour gains different amounts of value depending on how much protection they offer, different foods are more important if they heal more hearts, and each tool has use for specific tasks. And due to the already-ingrained framing of actions within Third Life, the series takes the idea of object value a step further. In-game items gain symbolic value: a rabbit’s foot becomes Ren’s ultimate bargaining chip with Scott and Jimmy; Scar turns pieces of paper into reputation points to denote where a person stands with him, which forms the base of Scar and Grian’s alliance with the flower valley. A rabbit’s foot and a piece of paper mean very little in both the real world and in Minecraft, but due to the narrative weight of Third Life, these objects become the difference between life and death.
Third Life also runs on rules, both the basic rules of Minecraft, and the rules of death and hostility that make the series so unique. These, too, link it to Schechner’s ideas – Fernandez-Vara writes that performances are inherently regulated. [19] By the end of Third Life, the rules are more suggestions than anything, but it’s the rules that give permanent death a primary role, which in turn gives the series its story and weight.
Fernandez-Vara also references the theater performance model – the building blocks that make a piece of theater. The base is the dramatic text, which is then interpreted by the performance itself, done by the actors. The performance is brought to life by the mise-en-scène, or the design of the lighting and sound, the costumes, and the general energy of the stage. [20] The rules and structure of both Third Life and Minecraft gain relevance here, as a comparison to the dramatic text in the theater performance model. The rules of the game become the launching point for the players to begin their performance. The players interpret these rules, and then follow them. This happens during the three-hour playtime that makes up each episode, during which the players’ respective avatars become characters through the aforementioned narrative weight.
And then, when the rules have become a performance, the players add in the mise-en-scène: they edit the recorded sessions into comprehensible content. To fit into the typical model of a YouTube video, long recording sessions must be cut into chunks small enough to keep audiences engaged. Extraneous or boring moments get removed – much like the process of running theatrical scenes until awkward gaps in speech run smoothly. The background music often associated with a good YouTube video functions much like sound design, and creators in Third Life are known to use ambient music or heartbeat sound effects to draw the audience in. Onscreen visual edits are also common, although they take the form of subtitles more often than lightning design. Much like the mise-en-scène, these edits are the final touches on the performance, creating both a technically smooth and emotionally engaging experience for the audience.
Third Life, however, is not done live. Much of the charm of theater and performance is simply that it’s experienced in real time; when you watch episodes once a week, it feels much more like engaging with a TV show. This isn’t wrong. When I sat on my couch all those years ago, gripping my phone, I knew it was easier to explain what I was watching as a show. But the basic structure of Third Life simply isn’t like that of a show. The actual performance of the series is done live, within those three hour chunks. In film or TV, you have takes of scenes. You can cut out variations you don’t like. This isn’t possible in Third Life, due to both the nature of unscripted play, and the fact that fourteen people release their perspective. An action one player might not have liked could’ve been a character-defining moment for another, and is likely to show up in at least one video. The story unfolds without much control, almost as if it was live. The players can add lighting and sound, but the performance is exactly like one in a theater: untouchable the second it has been done.
It’s easy to expect watching Third Life to feel like simply watching somebody else play a videogame. These characters are avatars, manipulated by the players, who are real people tapping on keyboards, cities and continents away from one another. But from the second the series starts, there is death lurking. It forces the players to put value on their avatars, and in doing so, creates characters. These characters exist in a world with rules that are set up for them to fail – and yet, they hold on to each other anyway. To ignore these characters is to ignore a story about the persevering nature connection in a world that doesn’t want you there.
You see the characters of Third Life put into impossible situations – you see Scott struggle to defend himself and Jimmy, and ultimately, when he is unable to do so, lose himself to revenge. You can hear it. His voice goes flat, a fake neutral that masks a barely controlled anger. And Grian spends his final moments frantically apologizing to Scar as he kills him with his bare hands – Scar, the man he pledged his life to but must kill in order to win. Martyn cares so much for Ren that he’s willing to chop off the man’s head when asked.
These violent things, these terrible things, are done to other people for other people. These decisions are made for glory and love; these two motivators are so tangled that they’re impossible to separate. Fourteen people are put into a seven hundred block wide box, with the knowledge that they will either die or be left with the blood of everyone else on their hands. Neither option is desirable. A devastating outcome is inevitable.
There is nothing more powerful than to look at this story with that lens. It is more than a game – it matters.
Stories like this can be told simply through people existing alongside each other in a world with stakes.They don’t need to be scripted or written out – you can find elements of theater in a videogame. Interpreting this story as theater allows us to begin to see the unique storytelling of the performance world everywhere, from the stage to the YouTube tab on our computers.
Scott makes his way up the hill that protects the valley he calls home. Below him, thousands of pixelated flowers are bright pinpricks of yellow and red – yellow, like his name, a reminder that he’s only two deaths from his final end. And red like Jimmy, before he died. The grass is green, full of life. It’s life that Scott wanted, but he knows, just like how you know it will storm based on the way the clouds hang heavy on the horizon, that he will not get it.
Scott buries Jimmy on this hill. Beloved Husband, he writes, and there are a million worlds where husband would be a title for another player, not an avatar turned character. There are a million Minecraft servers where that third death wouldn’t have mattered at all. But here, in this landscape that’s been nearly demolished from eight sessions of warfare, it matters in a way that has changed everything.
References
Aristotle. “Poetics.” Trans Philip Freeman. Princeton University Press: 2022.
Cornish, Matthew. The Tragic Model. August 2025.
Dangthatsalongname. 3rd Life SMP. April 20, 2021. https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLh4_JC5Ca09tD1rvcTNaH10C-sCTVKmuT
Fernandez-Vara, Clara. Play's the Thing: A Framework to Study Videogames as Performance. 2009 DiGRA International Conference: Breaking New Ground: Innovation in Games, Play, Practice and Theory: September 2009.
Keogh, Brendan. When Game Over Means Game Over: Using Permanent Death to Create Living Stories in Minecraft. RMIT University School of Media and Communications: 2013.
Schechner, Richard. Performance Studies: an Introduction. London: Routledge, 2002.
Steiner, George. The Death of Tragedy. Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.: 1961.