The moment that inspired this question:
A long time ago I was playing an MMO called Voyage of the Century Online. A major part of the game was sailing around on a galleon ship and having naval battles in the 1600s.
The game basically allowed you to sail around all of the oceans of the 1600s world and explore. The game was populated with a lot of NPC ships that you could raid and pick up its cargo for loot.
One time, I was sailing around the western coast of Africa and I came across some slavers. This was shocking to me at the time, and I was like “oh, I’m gonna fuck these racist slavers up!”
I proceed to engage the slave ship in battle and win. As I approach the wreckage, I’m bummed out because there wasn’t any loot. Like every ship up until this point had at least some spare cannon balls or treasure, but this one had nothing.
… then it hit me. A slave ship’s cargo would be… people. I sunk this ship and the reason there wasn’t any loot was because I killed the cargo. I felt so bad.
I just sat there for a little while and felt guilty, but I always appreciated that the developers included that detail so I could be humbled in my own self-righteousness. Not all issues can be solved with force.
It blows my mind that in minecraft the entire world is out there, waiting to be discovered. And that it gets discovered by running an algorithm. If you don’t go there, the algorithm doesn’t get run. But no matter how long it takes you to get there, when you get there the same things will be waiting for you. And the set of things that would be waiting for you is gargantuan, and it’s all waiting for you.
The fact that there are actual worlds that people can share locations in with one another, and they can address the world with a seed which defines the whole world (but only when paired with a certain algorithm). And that the world is so much more data than the seed!
Also when Halo 3 came out, it had this ability to replay whole games. An article said that they way they did that is they just stored the exact timing of all the controller inputs, then to replay the game they replayed those controller inputs into the game’s engine. That’s the smallest representation that captures what happened in a game.