In my earlier blog post on Bastion, I looked into how the speedrunner mentality instinctively rewrites a game’s narrative. When I played, my competitive instincts took over, leading me to focus more on mastering the dodge and attack timing, obtaining the upgrade materials, and finding the fastest route to the credits. I framed Caelondia not as a graveyard to be mourned but instead an escape room to solve. Bastion anticipates this speedrunner instinct. Even though the written works we reflected on debated on the efficacy of this game design choice, it eventually halts the player’s blind momentum with a static, unskippable menu, forcing a jarring moment of reflection. But what happens when a game never hits the brakes? Enter Minecraft.
Through its infinite freedom, Minecraft shows that when left unchecked, the speedrunner mentality evolves into a relentless drive for total algorithmic control and exploitation. In the absence of friction, the player stops treating the game as a world to explore and instead rewrites it as a puzzle, turning the world into their personal automated factory. Our pursuit of progress ends up devolving into systems of industrialization that engineer the very act of ‘play’ out of existence.
This is embodied in the Minecraft, Sandboxes, and Colonialism video. In it the player sets out to try and tame a cat. The game’s design intends for the user to explore the wilderness to find a village. With a player conditioned to seek out efficiency, the notion of wandering is something to scoff at. Instead of wasting their time, the player instead creates his own environment conveniently nearby, trapping villagers into boats and hauling them across the map. As the narrator points out, this mimics the “brutal relocation policies of colonialism.” The player didn’t set out to traffic humans, they just wanted a trading post in a more optimal location. However, optimization goes hand in hand with exploitation.
This desire for control and expedition escalates from relocation to full-fledged industrialization. Instead of the slow and monotonous grind of mining or farming, the competitive player seeks to break the system. They leverage the mob pathfinding algorithms, villager mechanics, and fence/trapdoor game design to construct large scale iron-golem death traps that automate the iron obtaining process. Players build towering mob farms that can filter out specific creatures and execute the remaining ones for their drops. Players demand dominion over the environment so that nothing is left up to chance. They waste no time and extract every resource possible.
This transition from play to industrialization is encapsulated by Marshall McLuhan in Understanding Media. McLuhan argues that “the ‘content’ of a medium is like the juicy piece of meat carried by the burglar to distract the watchdog of the mind.” In Minecraft, the content is the user’s desire to build massive replicas of global monuments, to tame a cat, or to create interesting redstone builds. This distracts us from the medium’s true message.
The narrator from the Folding Ideas video attempts to justify their actions by highlighting that they just enjoy terraforming. However, McLuhan warns against this defense, calling it the “numb stance of the technological idiot.” To him, it is naive to believe that the morality of a tool is defined by the user’s intent. The intent of the player is harmless, he just wants to build and create. But when placed in the context of the sandbox combined with our culturally ingrained obsession with progress, his behavior is inevitably structured into hyper-production. We need to mass produce iron to make beacons to be able to mine faster to get more diamonds to make more gear, and so on and so forth. We make automated experience farms, symbolically highlighting how the only true experience is the automated endgame, in our eyes. Nothing is ever enough.
The tragic aspect of this unchecked efficiency is how it engineers the magic out of the game. The profound realization that gamers get out of the sandbox isn’t a jolting shock from the game’s UI. Instead, it’s the cold realization of the perfection of the optimized world. You find the pinnacle of this mentality in Minecraft. The peak, optimized experience for some is AFKing. Standing in the center of your base, you leave your player there overnight, watching automated machines harvest crops and manipulate the spawn rates. Given total freedom, we drive towards systematically eliminating all adventure and challenge. We are left inside a machine with nothing left to play. In pursuit of optimization in Minecraft, we leave the game behind.
