Mining Minecraft · Spurious charts
Popularity of the first name Steve correlates with Minecraft copies sold
As Minecraft sold more copies, fewer U.S. babies were named Steve.
Steve births vs Minecraft copies sold
Green = total Minecraft copies sold (millions). Orange = U.S. baby boys named Steve that year.
AI explanation
As Minecraft copies sold climbed, more households already had a Steve in the living room — the blocky default one. Parents who might have reached for the name on a birth certificate found it taken by a video-game character, a skin, and a decade of “Steve fell in lava” stories. Baby-name lists quietly slid toward anything that did not already spawn at the world origin. Who would have thought that selling more Minecraft copies could thin out an entire generation of Steves?
Show prompt for explanation
Model: gpt-style (adapted from Tyler Vigen’s Spurious Correlations prompt pattern)
System prompt: You provide humorous responses in the form of plausible sounding explanations for correlations. You assume the correlation is causative for the purpose of the explanation even if it is ridiculous. You do not chat with the user, you only reply with the causal connection explanation and nothing else.
User prompt: Please make up a funny explanation for how an increase in Minecraft copies sold caused a decrease in the popularity of the first name Steve. Make it feel plausible.
AI academic paper
(Because p < 0.01)
Show prompt used to generate this paper
Model: gpt-style (adapted from Tyler Vigen’s multi-step academic-paper prompt pattern)
System prompt: You are a researcher writing an academic paper. Your writing sounds like it belongs in a medical or economics journal. However, you frequently crack jokes, make puns, and add unexpected twists. You write dry methods with hidden offhand remarks about Minecraft, baby names, and statistics.
User prompt (title & abstract): Pretend you are an academic researcher. Draft the title and abstract of a goofy academic research paper on the connection between Popularity of the first name Steve and Minecraft copies sold. Make the title a clever pun. Your team used data from the US Social Security Administration and public Minecraft sales milestones. You found a correlation coefficient of −0.9545871 and p < 0.01 for 2011 to 2022 (n = 12). Respond with [[TITLE]] and [[ABSTRACT]].
Follow-ups: Separate short prompts asked for Introduction, Literature Review, Methods, Results, Discussion, and Conclusion in the same dry-but-punny voice. Sections were assembled into a PDF for Mining Minecraft (not a live multi-model pipeline on this page).
The data
| Year | Minecraft copies sold (millions, running total) | U.S. baby boys named Steve |
|---|---|---|
| 2011 | 4 | 324 |
| 2012 | 9 | 303 |
| 2013 | 33 | 242 |
| 2014 | 54 | 257 |
| 2015 | 72 | 224 |
| 2016 | 100 | 205 |
| 2017 | 122 | 189 |
| 2018 | 154 | 167 |
| 2019 | 176 | 159 |
| 2020 | 200 | 148 |
| 2021 | 242 | 135 |
| 2022 | 275 | 122 |
Steve counts are U.S. Social Security birth records for boys. Copies sold are a running total from public announcements and yearly press tables — not how many people are playing right now.
How I calculated it
Anchor: cumulative Minecraft copies sold (millions), yearly ladder from public milestones / press tables (2011–2022 overlap with names). Hard milestone check (2014–2021 only): Pearson r ≈ −0.97 (*n* = 6). Outside series: SSA baby names, male Steve yearly counts. Overlap: 2011 through 2022 · n = 12. Pearson r = −0.955 · Year-over-year % Pearson r = −0.453 (11 pairs). Parent hunt: 47 yearly outside series (USDA dairy/cheese, Wikipedia culture yearly means, baby names) ranked against the same copies-sold ladder.
Sources
- Minecraft copies sold: public milestones (for example Microsoft/Xbox 200M in 2020; Minecraft Live 2023 / 300M; Mojang–Guinness 350M in 2025) plus the yearly ladder used in the table.
- U.S. Social Security Administration: national baby names — boys named Steve.
- Parent hunt: 47 yearly outside series vs the same copies-sold ladder.
- Flow inspired by Tyler Vigen’s Spurious Correlations.
