A Video About Digging A Hole

0:03 “How can I get my boyfriend to stop

0:07 digging his tunnel?” Spend enough time online,

0:10 and you will run across a post like this.

0:13 On reddit: “Why does digging a hole at the beach attract guys?” On tiktok:

0:17 “day 5 of digging a hole as deep as possible.” In the New York Post:

0:22 “Amateur treasure hunter plunges 130 feet to his death in hole he dug

0:27 inside his home.” I feel like I see these stories with shocking frequency.

0:32 Stories about men– and it is almost always men– driven

0:36 by nothing more than the simple urge to dig a big hole.

0:41 At the beach, in their backyard,

0:43 under their kitchen, anywhere a hole could be dug.

0:47 Ever heard of William Lyttle?

0:49 No?

0:50 Well how about his alias, The Mole Man of Hackney?

0:54 He earned this title because he dug an entire

0:57 network of tunnels underneath his district in London,

0:59 only fully discovered when his mining caused

1:02 the entire street outside his house to cave in.

1:05 After his decades of digging created a series of sinkholes,

1:09 Lyttle was evicted and re-homed into a flat on the top

1:13 floor of a nearby apartment building– where he kept digging,

1:17 boring holes in the walls between the different rooms of his apartment.

1:22 And I’ve been thinking about this phenomenon for months now.

1:26 And the thing is– you can’t think about digging

1:29 a hole for that long without also feeling the urge.

1:33 Maybe there is something special about it, I kept thinking.

1:37 Maybe… I mean I have a shovel.

1:40 I have a patch of dirt.

1:42 Surely, these dudes must be getting something out of their digs.

1:47 Shouldn’t I at least try it?

1:49 I know exactly what to blame for this most recent fixation.

1:54 On February 7, 2025,

1:55 a small developer named Cyberwave released a $5 game on Steam

2:00 with the incredible title “A Game About Digging a Hole.” It has been,

2:05 by many measures, improbably successful.

2:07 It currently has over 10,000 reviews on Steam (for reference, 1000xResist,

2:11 one of my favorite games of last year, doesn’t even have a third of that many).

2:16 But actually, nothing seems improbable about the success of “A Game About

2:20 Digging a Hole” to me– because as soon as I heard the title,

2:25 I thought “I gotta buy that thing.” A Game About Digging a Hole,

2:29 or “AGADAH” for short, starts simply enough.

2:32 A new home promises treasure buried in the backyard.

2:35 You’re armed with an upgradeable shovel called the “super

2:38 mega digger 3000 ultimate 2.0,” and access to the internet,

2:42 where you can sell the various minerals you find in the ground for profit.

2:48 An X marks the spot in your yard.

2:51 Go wild.

2:52 One of AGADAH’s best design decisions is how

2:55 modest your digging ability is at the outset.

2:58 Unlike Minecraft, where your fist is capable

3:00 of excavating a cubic meter of dirt in seconds,

3:03 the super mega digger 3000 ultimate 2.0 only

3:06 removes a small scoop of soil with each click.

3:10 Additionally, even the top layer of your yard is littered with rocks,

3:13 and after picking up only three rocks, you fill up your pockets.

3:17 So you go to your garage, sell those three rocks for three dollars,

3:21 and begin the long process of improving your ability to dig.

3:25 You return to the yard, dig up a few more rocks,

3:29 make a few more bucks, and upgrade your shovel’s digging radius.

3:32 Now, you can scoop out a few more centimeters of dirt with each click.

3:37 This is the game.

3:38 Not long into AGADAH, I realized why I felt so immediately drawn to it.

3:43 As a young gamer, one of the first games I truly “could not stop thinking

3:49 about” was “Motherload,” created by XGen Studios

3:51 and hosted on the flash game site Miniclip.com.

3:55 Motherload lodged in my young brain like no

3:58 other game ever had, and few have since.

4:01 In Motherload, you play as the pilot

4:04 of a drilling machine dropped onto the surface of Mars.

4:07 The game, unlike AGADAH, is 2D.

4:10 You can only move in 4 directions.

4:13 But really, the game is about moving in one direction.

4:17 In Motherload, like in AGADAH, you dig a hole, retrieve minerals,

4:21 and sell them for upgrades that let you more effectively dig the hole.

4:25 On my first several runs of Motherload as a youth,

4:28 I created a labyrinth for myself to navigate,

4:30 using the natural gaps in the dirt to guide my path.

4:34 I would see a shiny rock on the corner

4:36 of the screen and drill all the way over there,

4:38 I would zig and zag my way deeper into Mars.

4:42 But there’s an important caveat to your mining rig’s abilities in Motherload:

4:46 although you can dig down, left, and right, you cannot excavate above you.

4:52 This inability, paired with a quickly-dwindling gas tank,

4:55 creates nightmarish situations in which you’re lost underground,

4:59 running out of fuel while desperately trying

5:02 to retrace your steps to the surface.

5:05 Also, in Motherload, when you run out of gas, you explode.

5:11 I eventually realized that I needed to dig with the exact opposite strategy.

5:17 Rather than following the natural hollows of the soil,

5:20 I pointed my mining rig straight down and never deviated.

5:24 I created a mineshaft with my exact width.

5:27 Instead of wasting gas navigating back down to the bottom of the hole,

5:32 I could simply plummet straight down,

5:34 hundreds of feet, decelerating moments before impact.

5:37 Rather than winding my way back to the surface,

5:40 I could use the last of my fuel tank to fly straight back up.

5:44 As a bonus, the deeper into Mars I dug, the more valuable minerals I found.

5:49 I gained money fast, could kit out my machine to dig even faster.

5:53 But my strategy had a strange drawback– when I let curiosity guide my mining,

6:00 the hole was disorganized, inefficient, and recognizably…human.

6:04 As I dug straight down into the crust of Mars, I ceased to make decisions.

6:10 There was only one direction I cared about.

6:15 AGADAH, with its more nuanced

6:17 terrain deformation and recognizably human protagonist,

6:20 didn’t seem to incentivize quite as machine-like decision making.

6:23 At first, I dug the yard into more of an open

6:27 pit– I needed to be able to walk out of the hole,

6:30 so the deeper it got, the longer a ramp it necessitated.

6:33 Then I got the idea– with full awareness of the Junji

6:37 Ito story I was writing for myself– to dig in a spiral.

6:41 The hole could get deeper without getting wider!

6:44 I would just spiral down into the Earth,

6:47 and wander my way back up when my shovel ran out of battery.

6:51 Definitely no metaphors to read into here, no sir.

6:54 What’s striking about both AGADAH and Motherload is their ability

6:59 to instantly lock a player in, without any of the usual tricks.

7:04 No exciting story kickoff,

7:05 no preview of being overpowered, no scripted setpieces.

7:09 I realized, as I dug, that digging a hole might be the perfect

7:14 distillation of the basest appeal of a video game.

7:17 Yes, I love a thoughtful narrative

7:20 and considered art direction and nuanced mechanics.

7:22 But I think the reason so many of us get wrapped up in games is a simpler,

7:29 more instinctual satisfaction.

7:30 You do an action and get immediate, positive, feedback.

7:33 The closest relatives to AGADAH and Motherload

7:36 might not be Minecraft or Terraria,

7:39 but clicker games, the most streamlined of all video game genres.

7:43 Click and the number goes up.

7:45 Buy an upgrade and the number goes up faster.

7:49 What’s the end goal?

7:50 There isn't one.

7:51 Make the number go up faster.

7:54 Dig a deeper hole.

7:56 It’s this immediacy between action and result, that, I think,

7:59 makes digging a hole so appealing in real life as well.

8:03 You take a shovelful of dirt out of the ground,

8:06 and you can immediately see your impact on the world.

8:10 No working up the chain of bureaucracy, no waiting for approval,

8:14 no imperceptible movement towards some goal a million miles away.

8:17 You finish a day at your bullshit job,

8:19 you pay your bullshit rent, you eat your bullshit food,

8:22 you run on a million treadmills for the privilege

8:24 of continuing to run on those same treadmills until you die.

8:27 And then you go out back, and take a shovelful of dirt out of the ground,

8:33 and the hole is one shovelful bigger.

8:36 No one can deny that impact.

8:40 That theory didn’t quite stand up to real-life testing, however.

8:46 On a cool March morning,

8:48 I couldn’t stand to keep this fixation theoretical any longer.

8:52 I went outside, took a shovel, and started to dig.

8:56 My first couple shovelfuls were tricky,

8:58 as I tore through the dense lattice of grass and weeds on top of the dirt.

9:03 I thought, “it’ll probably get a little easier after

9:06 this.” Those first shovelfuls were the easiest part of my morning.

9:10 My problem, as I should have predicted, was the soil itself.

9:15 I live in North Carolina, a state that, left to its own devices,

9:19 would be a single massive forest.

9:21 I started digging at least 15 feet from the nearest tree,

9:25 but every single time I sunk my shovel into the ground I hit a root.

9:30 Roots!

9:30 The rebar of the dirt!

9:32 I cut through them and dug around them,

9:35 but as deep as I dug, they burrowed deeper.

9:38 Also an issue is the makeup of North Carolina earth;

9:42 that is, it’s almost entirely clay.

9:44 Only about four inches into the ground, I started pulling up pure red clay.

9:49 Clay is wet, sticky, and seemingly weighs about a thousand pounds per shovel.

9:54 It stuck to my blade, I pushed it off with my boot, it stuck to my boot.

9:59 Just an hour into my dig, my feet seemed to be encased in cinder blocks,

10:04 the hole was filling with water, and I felt like I hadn’t gotten anywhere.

10:08 I took the L.

10:09 I wiped off my boots, picked up the shovel,

10:13 and grudgingly filled the hole back in.

10:16 As a young person, I feel I was misled

10:19 on the ease of digging a hole by Louis Sachar’s 1998 novel…Holes.

10:23 In Holes, a 14-year-old boy named Stanley Yelnats is sent to Camp Green Lake,

10:30 a sort of juvenile detention facility where boys are made

10:33 to dig circular holes every day in a dry lake bed, 5 feet wide and 5 feet deep.

10:40 This is an enormous hole.

10:43 This is, perhaps intentionally, digging most of a grave every single day.

10:48 And Stanley absolutely struggles to dig the holes, but he does it,

10:52 and look maybe it’s just the power of a kid’s book

10:54 or maybe it’s the sick song they wrote for the movie,

10:59 [song] but even though I knew the holes were punishment,

11:05 I still wanted to dig something that big and undeniable.

11:09 Creating an impact on the bottom of the lake

11:12 like a crater on the surface of the moon.

11:17 Eventually I stopped spiraling in AGADAH;

11:20 but that’s not to say I stopped digging.

11:22 Instead, I reached the same realization I had in Motherload all those years ago:

11:27 for maximum efficiency, I should just go straight down.

11:30 I bought a jetpack in the game, and improved it enough that I could simply jet

11:35 straight up to the surface when my pockets were full.

11:38 Like Motherload, the most valuable ore lay hundreds of feet below ground.

11:43 This is not a unique design element– in the world’s most popular digging game,

11:48 Minecraft, everyone knows that diamonds can only

11:50 be found near the bottom of the world.

11:52 I spent many, many hours strip-mining the bottom of my Minecraft map,

11:57 trying to maximize the efficiency of my search for these gems.

12:01 However, most players also know the “first rule” of Minecraft:

12:06 to avoid an unexpected fall into a cave,

12:09 or a fatal swim in lava, never dig straight down.

12:13 To dig straight down is to consign yourself

12:16 to whatever the ground happens to be hiding.

12:19 And this is exactly what I did in A Game About Digging a Hole.

12:24 Eventually, I upgraded my super mega digger 3000 ultimate 2.0 so much that I

12:29 no longer needed to scoop individual parcels of dirt out of the earth.

12:33 My shovel became a drill– I could hold down the button

12:37 and easily sink through layer upon layer of the ground.

12:40 Occasionally, I’d encounter a rock that blocked my drill,

12:44 but even these were quickly removed with a stick of dynamite.

12:48 My previous pit, my spiral, these were the vestiges of a hole-digging amateur.

12:53 Nothing could stop my descent now.

12:56 The hole became its own story,

12:58 my own personal history of how I engaged with the ground.

13:02 Really, it’s hard to deny the narrative utility of digging a hole.

13:06 In Holes, they serve as physical metaphors

13:09 for the empty promises of Camp Green Lake,

13:12 each hole filled neither with treasure nor

13:14 the ability to rehabilitate its adolescent inhabitants.

13:17 In the beautifully stupid 2003 film “The Core,”

13:21 the Earth’s core has somehow stopped rotating, and a team of “scientists”– I use

13:26 that term extremely loosely– are tasked with piloting

13:29 a vessel down to the core of the planet

13:32 and restarting its rotation using nuclear bombs.

13:35 In Wes Anderson’s adaptation of the Roald Dahl novel “Fantastic Mr.

13:40 Fox,” digging a hole is the primary verb of both the pro- and antagonists.

13:45 Mr.

13:45 Fox digs into the farms of the evil Boggis,

13:49 Bunce, and Bean to steal their livestock and cider.

13:52 In response, the three farmers excavate away Mr.

13:55 Fox’s entire home.

13:56 Digging a hole is an art that the foxes do with precision,

14:01 and simultaneously a destructive capability humans wield with abandon.

14:06 One of cinema’s greatest digs is one we don’t even get to see.

14:10 In The Shawshank Redemption, Andy Dufresne digs a hole out of his cell,

14:15 millimeters at a time, over the course of twenty years.

14:18 The painstaking process is left to our imagination.

14:20 We just see the cell wall, see the tiny hammer Andy used,

14:25 and understand the magnitude of what he’s done.

14:28 As Morgan Freeman tells us,

14:30 “It turns out Andy's favorite hobby was totin' his wall

14:34 out into the yard a handful at a time…” And maybe it’s because I was swept up

14:44 in that same narrative power that I found myself driving west,

14:48 bright and early on a Saturday morning.

14:50 My failure to dig even a reasonably deep hole was eating away at me.

14:55 Surely I could do better than a muddy, knee-deep pit.

14:58 So I did some research, I asked my local subreddit,

15:01 got a lot of responses assuming I was trying to bury a body,

15:05 but then, some brilliant soul told me about Hiddenite, North Carolina.

15:11 Hiddenite is a town– no, sorry,

15:14 a “census-designated place” about halfway between where I

15:17 live and the more mountainous regions of North Carolina.

15:20 It has a population of about 500 people.

15:23 And it has a gemstone mine.

15:26 Hiddenite itself actually got its name from a particular kind of gemstone;

15:31 it’s a town that loves rocks.

15:33 And in that spirit, Hiddenite is home to the “Emerald

15:36 Hollow Mine,” a common destination for field trips,

15:39 family excursions, and at least one youtuber trying to dig a big hole.

15:45 So, along with two friends who immediately understood the appeal of my quest,

15:49 I set off for Hiddenite.

15:51 We drove past a circus tent.

15:53 We drove past an American flag so large it was the subject of a lawsuit.

15:57 We got driven past by a Corvette with a spoiler that said

16:01 “penis extension.” And eventually we wandered into the Emerald Hollow Mine.

16:07 Now you have probably seen sluiceways similar to what Emerald Hollow has,

16:10 where you get a bucket of dirt and sift

16:13 it through running water to find shiny rocks.

16:15 That’s what most visitors were there for.

16:17 But we were there because the mine was more than happy to give

16:20 us a couple shovels and a patch of land and simply let us dig.

16:26 The soil was dry and firm.

16:29 Roots were non-existent.

16:30 Nothing could stop us.

16:51 I am so glad that I went to Hiddenite, to this optimal digging location,

16:56 because my experience there genuinely did teach me so much about digging a hole.

17:01 The most obvious observation is that the complexity of a dig

17:06 increases exponentially the further into the earth you go.

17:09 When we began, every shovelful was easy.

17:11 We outlined a broad circle where we each had plenty of room

17:15 and started piling the dirt we removed from the hole wherever was convenient.

17:19 But the natural shape of a hole isn’t cylindrical, it’s conical.

17:23 As nice as it would have been to keep an even,

17:27 flat floor as we ventured downwards,

17:29 our standing positions and the natural paths of our shovels

17:32 inevitably sloped the sides of our quickly-growing pit.

17:35 After half an hour, the hole was too steep

17:39 for even one of us to stand inside it, let alone three full adults.

17:43 Another issue that none of my experience with Motherload, Minecraft,

17:47 or AGADAH prepared me for was the logistics of simply lifting a shovel.

17:53 Namely- shovels are really long.

17:54 In any of those digging games,

17:57 the dirt simply disappears after you “hit” it with your tool,

18:00 but in real life, the arc of a shovel requires a huge amount of space.

18:05 If your hole is five feet deep,

18:07 that means a shovelful of dirt needs to travel at least

18:10 five feet upwards before it can be deposited on the ground.

18:14 Actions we could do thoughtlessly at the beginning

18:16 of our dig eventually required a huge amount of coordination.

18:19 We dug steps into the side of the hole so one of us

18:23 could brace ourselves against the sides while pulling dirt from the very bottom.

18:28 Let me be clear about two things.

18:31 One: we dug a very deep hole.

18:33 It might not fully come through in the footage,

18:36 but multiple people walked by, casually glanced in, and then fully

18:39 stopped to say “holy shit.” And two: it was a blast.

18:43 I knew it would be physically taxing to dig a big hole,

18:47 but I had no idea how much legit problem-solving it would entail.

18:51 Every foot down presented a new challenge,

18:54 and we approached each stage of our dig in a new way.

18:58 You may be wondering, well you were at Emerald Hollow Mine,

19:02 did you find any emeralds?

19:03 Or at least any cool rocks?

19:06 The answer, my friend, is no.

19:08 Not even one.

19:10 But we found something better.

19:12 “I’m Jacob Geller, and I finally dug a really deep hole!” Eventually,

19:17 we had to tear ourselves away.

19:19 But maybe inspired by years of playground conversations,

19:23 I couldn’t help thinking “what if we just kept going?” Don’t go inside,

19:28 don’t go back to our regular lives,

19:30 just keep on digging a hole– to China, of course.

19:34 Dig straight through the Earth, come out the other side.

19:37 Although in our case, in Hiddenite North Carolina,

19:40 a hole straight through the Earth would have

19:42 us emerging in the middle of the ocean,

19:44 about a thousand miles from the western shore of Australia.

19:48 And there are places on Earth where people have

19:51 “just kept digging,” places that are both nightmarishly deep,

19:54 but somehow also…almost comically shallow.

19:58 The deepest humans have ever stood underground,

20:03 deeper than any naturally-occuring cave we’ve explored,

20:06 is in the depths of a gold mine.

20:09 Specifically the Mponeng gold mine in South Africa,

20:13 which is nearly 4 kilometers deep,

20:16 or two thousand six hundred times the depth of the hold we dug in Hiddenite.

20:22 It is so deep that in the depths of the mine,

20:26 the surface of the rock itself is 150 degrees fahrenheit,

20:30 so deep that a new type of microorganism was discovered there,

20:34 one that exists and subsists on the radioactive decay of its surroundings.

20:39 It’s also– I mean, it’s also 4 kilometers, 2 and a half miles.

20:45 It’s a nice Sunday stroll.

20:48 It’s not even half of the Marianas trench.

20:51 The deepest we’ve ever dug,

20:53 dug with no concept of a human ever reaching the bottom,

20:56 is the Kola Superdeep Borehole in Russia,

20:59 a 20th century science project with the goal

21:03 of…drilling down as far as possible.

21:05 And it did, for almost 25 years, boring tens of thousands of feet down.

21:11 It surpassed the depth of the Krubera cave,

21:14 the Mponeng mine, the Marianas Trench.

21:17 It dug and dug and dug,

21:18 finally spinning to a stop more than 7 and a half miles under the ground.

21:23 It dug so deep that it spawned an iconic urban legend,

21:27 of a borehole in Russia that pierced the caverns of hell itself.

21:32 It dug so deep, it made it…maybe a third

21:36 through the very first layer of the Earth.

21:39 The Earth’s crust is the thinnest part,

21:41 the apple skin in comparison to the apple,

21:44 a postage stamp stuck to the outside of a basketball.

21:48 A quarter century of drilling,

21:49 to make it not even halfway through the postage stamp.

21:55 The drill stopped turning in 1995– at present,

22:00 the facility that housed the borehole is decrepit, abandoned and falling apart.

22:05 A small metal cap seals off the deepest hole humanity has ever dug.

22:14 It’s hard for games– or any media– to give

22:18 a satisfying conclusion to an unimaginably deep dig.

22:21 My narrative, while I played these games was the gradual

22:25 disregard of everything except the hole– buying more upgrades,

22:29 removing more obstacles, anything to make the world I created

22:33 inside the earth the only one that mattered.

22:36 But this is not, ultimately,

22:38 the narrative these media are interested in delivering.

22:41 AGADAH ends with you falling into a surprise network of giant moles.

22:46 Motherload’s finale, some unknown thousand feet under the surface,

22:49 is a boss fight against your boss, who turns out to be Satan himself.

22:54 The game retroactively tells us that there was a purpose to our digging.

22:59 “Didn’t you realize– you were digging to find the giant moles,

23:03 digging to fight the boss!” In Holes,

23:06 in Shawshank, the hole was ultimately a method of escape from something.

23:11 They were eventually able to dig far

23:14 enough that they left poverty and prison behind.

23:17 But for me playing these games, for me going to hiddenite,

23:21 for the stories that continue to pop up about these fixations,

23:25 the hole isn’t a means to an escape– it, itself, is the escape.

23:31 One shovelful after the other,

23:34 an undeniable effect on an otherwise inscrutable world.

23:39 When I was playing Minecraft, fifteen years ago at this point,

23:42 the game had no final boss, no ultimate goal to work towards.

23:46 It was a smaller game– and I mean that literally.

23:50 The possible depth of each generated world was half what it is now.

23:54 Again and again, I would dig down as far as possible,

23:57 only to hit “bedrock,” the bottom of the world,

24:01 the unbreakable crust of Minecraft’s landmass.

24:04 But sometimes, for some unknown technical reason,

24:08 one of the blocks securing the bottom of the map would simply not spawn in.

24:14 I would reach the bottom of the world,

24:17 and then catch a glimpse of something farther still.

24:20 An infinite abyss stretching out in front of me–

24:24 if only I had a shovel that could reach it.

24:38 You might know that, for years now,

24:40 I’ve been making a collection of entirely separate

24:43 bonus videos that I put up on Nebula.

24:45 Well, at the end of my months-long fixation on digging holes,

24:49 there seemed to be only one option on what to make:

24:53 a video on Holes, both the book and the 2003 movie adaptation.

24:57 So if you sign up right now for Nebula,

25:00 you can watch a nearly hour-long video where I and my wonderful

25:04 fiance Annie talk about our experience

25:07 revisiting this landmark of children’s literature.

25:09 To cut to the chase: Holes is still a remarkable story,

25:14 and I had so much fun re-experiencing this part of my childhood.

25:18 That’s not the only thing I’ve got on Nebula though, not by a long shot.

25:22 Don’t care for Holes?

25:23 How about entire video essays on Peggle,

25:26 or Arkham Knight, or Six Days in Fallujah?

25:28 Or bonus episodes of my podcast, Something Rotten,

25:31 where we’re currently covering the original God of War Trilogy.

25:34 Or, take a step away from my channel

25:37 and watch other stuff you can only get on Nebula,

25:40 like monthly extra videos by Big Joel.

25:42 I find new things I didn’t even know I wanted constantly on Nebula,

25:46 and you can too– with 40% off an annual subscription!

25:50 by signing up at Nebula.tv/JacobGeller.

25:52 This video on Holes is really just a chance to hang out and talk

25:58 about great movies and kids literature– I had such a good time recording it,

26:02 and I think you will really enjoy watching it.

26:04 Check it out today by signing up to Nebula for only $3 a month,

26:09 40% off the regular price, using my URL in the description.