Featured image: original (dumb) Minecraft villager.
As I take it, Dan Olsen’s overarching argument is that “emergent systems can sometimes reproduce the values of the cultures that they are borne from.” Okay, fine, perhaps that is largely true. But… I don’t know if Minecraft is really the most pertinent example of this.
His thesis goes somewhat like this: I want to make a new village. Because it is extremely difficult to get villagers to relocate, you must forcibly kidnap villagers in boats and put them in a new village. This looks a lot like displacing Native Americans or other forms of colonialism. Therefore Minecraft inadvertently incentivizes colonialism/displacement and performs a “fantasy” of colonialism that is morally sanctionable. This also applies to other sandbox games which are colonialist fantasies.
One thing is that it’s not immediately clear whether MINECRAFT categorizes villagers (NPCs) as “human beings,” or, perhaps, more specifically, agents that we have a moral duty to. This is — say — in opposition to Grand Theft Auto, where you are a human being running amok in a human being society that pretty much directly correlates to this world. If you can rape a girl in GTA and keep her in your basement, that seems to me quite fucked up. GTA is TRYING to be a facsimile of the real world, and the whole point of that mechanic seems to be satisfying the player’s darkest sadistic urges.
But I don’t think villagers belong in the same “mental” category as these GTA girls. The role that the villagers play is much like the role other passive/friendly mobs play: as resources. In “original” Minecraft, they are programmed to be much like the cows or chickens or other mobs in the game. When they were first introduced, they had the same AI as pigs. They had no trading abilities; they were useless. As the game has developed, they have have gotten fancier features like breeding and trading, etc., but their behavior is still quizzical, obviously AI-driven, and mob-like. They make weird funny noises and they walk around mutely without much thought. When you do anything to them, they just stare at you like all the other non-human mobs. Unlike humans, they do not cry in distress when they are removed from their “family”; they can breed with their children and not give a care in the world (which is why you can start a village with only 2 villagers); they display absolutely 0 sense of interiority. The villagers might resemble people, but they do not BEHAVE like people. Fundamentally, mechanically, they are just like the pigs, but instead of getting meat when you kill them, you can get Potions of Weakness. They are a resource; players therefore use them like resources, min-maxing them.
(I already hear the “But that’s what a colonialist would say about other humans — that they aren’t human!” argument — but in this case, dude, they actually aren’t human, they are programmed to be mobs. “But we have moral duty to all living beings!” Yeah, but we don’t get in a quibble when we “displace” cows from their family or pull plants, because we owe different living things differing degrees of morality because of their sense of harm — WHATEVER! Let’s not get into that bag of worms.)
I think this colonialism argument also falls into the same boat as other “sensitization to violence”! arguments. Pushing villagers into a boat doesn’t REALLY teach colonialism, which is actually only the “narrative dressing”; rather, it teaches you resource management, trading patterns, etc. Just like how killing minions in League of Legends is about timing when to click when in response to certain visual cues, not actually about murdering little children-like beings. Or how Pokemon teaches you the most powerful move-types to use in battle and not how to start a puppy mill or enslave wild animals.
Okay, then you might say: what about the subliminal messaging that we should manage resources — “extract” and “exploit” resources. By being about resource management, Minecraft is SUBTLY encouraging or a descendant of the legacy of exploitation and repurposing of the natural world! Which is just like colonialism! Specifically WESTERN/AMERICAN COLONIALISM! RAHHHHHH!
The problem with that is… most games are about resource management, a value-neutral concept. Minecraft with a different more woke plot-line would still teach resource management (as the comments note, Minecraft with a different “mod” that’s about restoring the earth). I feel like it’s just a stretch to say teaching resource management = Western civilization = COLONIALISM. I mean, what did the Native Americans do when they came upon an unoccupied land filled with animals and creatures? Yeah, that’s right, they built shit, and managed their resources. And why do we think that Western civilization is a homogeneous through-line between Notch (a SWEDISH guy, whose family presumably did NOT massacre Native Americans) and us…? Whoever us is?
He also says the solution is to write “alternative stories” which depict the values of indigenous/colonized communities, etc. (treating, of course, “alternative” as a monolith, just as Hudson River or bridges or boats are implicitly “Western culture”). Yeah, but what’s probably more important is the fact that the reason why we don’t see the “values of indigenous communities” depicted in popular media is because indigenous/colonized people are excluded from the symbolic professions (e.g. game developing) due to disproportionate distribution of money capital and other things… a different problem that requires different solutions than an imaginary representative politics, solved by “representation,” and a redistribution of cultural capital.
Personally, I think what is more valuable to analyze would be the social organizations that Minecraft enables. I would critique Minecraft maybe on the level of servers, monetization, maybe danger of kids being groomed in those servers, maybe, but I also know that Minecraft resulted in kids having lots of fun together in different ways, remote friendships, etc. THIS is the real “medium as the message” thing, meaning, the values “embedded” in art are transmitted through the social practices surrounding art — the discourse, the pedagogy, etc. etc., and not really at the surface level of the story it seems to instantiate.
When I was in elementary school, our teachers used Minecraft to teach us how government works. We had Minecraft-based elections and we had to collectively manage resources and collaborate. The teachers then pretended to be hackers causing problems in the society which we kids had to solve collectively. I’d say that’s pretty darn collective and “alternative.” I surely wasn’t making village breeders (exploiting the game)… I was just mining, collecting diamonds, fishing. I also happened to be elected the Minecraft governor of our little village. It was a social platform that allowed me to engage with my peers in a different way.
In the end, just because you are displacing villagers does not mean you are actually displacing villagers. We shouldn’t be analyzing games as if they are repositories for cultural values like this — it’s a shallow misreading of what Minecraft is really about.
