Minecraft wiki entry for Creating_a_data_pack, associated text: For example, if two data packs add two new minigame mechanisms to Minecraft and both have a function named start. Without namespaces, these two functions would clash and the minigames would be broken. But if they have different namespaces of minigame_one and minigame_two, the functions would become minigame_one:start and minigame_two:start, which no longer conflict.