When I was younger, I was very into Minecraft. The summer after 5th grade, 2016, the first summer I truly remember in full – I’d hop on FaceTime for months with my classmate and we’d open the Mineplex server, sometimes inviting other classmates along. As a child at that age and time, I thought myself the appropriate age for the game – a social platform to gain points in, to enjoy and play with friends. But this wasn’t where my interest started. In years prior I’d played creative Pocket Edition with my brother, building wool farms to search for the elusive pink sheep. In years since I’ve played survival mode with my partner, gathering resources to create the world in our image – analyzing choice-based frameworks through Minecraft story mode with my parents. Rarely did I play Minecraft by myself; Minecraft is a social endeavor that reflects social systems. In each of these phases of my life, as I grew and changed and whose perspective I valued and time I spent with shifted, so did the skills offerings of Minecraft. I argue that it is through Minecraft’s accessible design and blocky style that it appeals to such a wide range of players, and that its updates implying colonialist settlement and labor exploitation since release reflect – and shape – the colonialist, individualistic social patterns of the Western countries it is made in.
It should be obvious that Minecraft appeals to so many players due to the sandbox medium itself. The sandbox medium of video games, as McLuhan would argue, may have itself changed the creative approach to my generation as a whole, inspiring us to be builders and self-expressive and wholly individualistic – common traits associated with Gen Z, who grew up with Minecraft since childhood. The blocky style, rendered with higher graphics and beauty over time, has been maintained – giving the game an air of accessibility in its style, in that all structures can be rendered down to its base components, and in that structures can be built. The accessibility framework of Universal Design for Learning reflects the design of Minecraft – in that the player is welcome to craft the playstyles that work best for them, that relationships between objects are made explicit and clear (redstone is a physical circuit, crafting requires particular objects). The player can learn through Minecraft. These same design principles give, or return, a certain sense of power to the player, not common in structured games that are not intentionally open world or sandboxes.
The dual threads of increased egalitarian access and, in doing so, perhaps simultaneously allowing for a reading of exploitation and colonialist leanings, presents a fascinating tension. Particularly, that an open world game, designed specifically to be accessible to players of all skill levels, may also encourage the dominance of the player themselves over other animals, mobs, and worlds. In other words, the world is created in our image, for all of us – and, through the personal growth of exploration, its design is ours for the taking.
Minecraft updates specifically reflect the ideals of the Western countries it is popular in. A potential reading of the above is that these design decisions formed due to the tension between stereotypically democratic and conservative ideals – that the democratized idealism of youth often gives way to the conservative, individualistic reality of living in the capitalist economic system over a lifetime, where one is pushed towards placing themselves and their family first. But another reading is simply that the creators are following cultural trends as they develop. One of the most recent additions to Minecraft, in the last few months, was copper golems. Unlike the humanoid villagers – and I don’t need to recount the very true arguments in the Folding Ideas colonialism video here – these golems are implied to be robots of some kind. When objects are placed into a particular chest, through a simple guess-and-check algorithm the golems will sort them neatly into other chests, without you needing to do it yourself. Moving away from the ethics of villager farms – now the player can have dominance over robots to do their automated bidding. Minecraft reflects colonialism in its villager and piglin interactions, and its most recent updates move towards automation and a lack of labor. Through this, Minecraft is clearly a reflection of changing reality and our individual role with technology usage, though it is a sandbox game.
Sources:
The Medium is the Message, McLuhan
Universal Design for Learning – https://udlguidelines.cast.org/
Minecraft by country: https://www.g-portal.com/wiki/en/how-many-people-play-minecraft/
