Thanks for sharing.

It is indeed a nice experiment to think about.
I have only played minecraft with my friends, so I can't say how I would feel if I were tested like that.

But I can say that in my case, even without war and lack of resources, we all could sense the auto-destruction mankind tend to do.
In the end, one of the main servers I played collapsed as well. The server admin (more experienced) argued with a newcomer (too excited and reckless) and decided to go creative and exploded the whole thing with TNT's.

It sounds like alot of the problems stemmed from the two players griefing on everyone else.

but of course, that was to their own end as well, but still. It'd be interesting to see what would have happened if they didn't manage to secure their sky fortress early on.

I would love to carry out/participate in an experiment like this myself, but dont know how well it will work if everyone knew what the goal was from the get go, Any one has ideas on how to execute it? I was talking to some friends who would be interested in participating so i can participate in something like this.

The idea is to not tell them it's an experiment. Obviously they'll know something is up when you raise bedrock barriers around a small chunk of land and order them not to cross it, but they won't know what you are up to. From the OP's post, it seems a few of them got the idea right away (and, if you read on, you'll notice they did pretty well with renewable water, food, wood and cobblestone, even though they took advantage of their economic superiority by griefing the others, either out of distrust, fear, or just because they could) but most of them were clueless and just played normally until resources went extinct.

Now obviously if you show them the experiment and ask them if they want to join, you've pretty much bombed it. Although another interesting experiment is to have one "smart" group which knows what is going to happen, and a "dumb" group which doesn't, and see how they interact. Will the "dumb" group meet the same fate as the one depicted in the experiment, or will they notice the "smart" group is having no issues and ask to join them - and if they do join them, will they eventually rebel and engage in self-destructive behavior?

Or, as was brought up on the MC forums, just let them all know the goal of the experiment and see if they actually manage to sustain the environment by working together, or if they all end up murdering each other anyhow. You don't have to carbon copy the experiment, you can also innovate and, well, see what happens in fact this would be a more accurate depiction of the human condition since in first world countries we're being continuously spammed with "protect the planet" ads, so we are sort of conditioned towards preserving natural resources - we "know" it's important in some sense even if we dont' really have a way of seeing the results.

Very interesting. Got some renewables?