People often describe Minecraft as “virtual legos.” This is true in the same way that calling a knife “sharp metal” is true: it captures the material fact without the context. With legos, you are free to make your wildest creations with bricks. While that is still true in Minecraft, in the game, the brick has to be taken from somewhere. You break down the tree, you mine the ore, you kill the cow, and you are rewarded with new things to use and build. Its argument lives in its verbs. Mine. Craft. With its sandbox style, Minecraft turns the anxiety of an uncontrollable world into the pleasure of a controllable one, where every object can be broken down and made useful.
This fact exemplifies Marshall McLuhan’s ideas in “The Medium is the Message.” In the reading, McLuhan describes how media not only communicates ideas but has the power to reorganize attention and social relations, and how it is important to look beyond the content of the medium and look to the character of the medium. For Minecraft, for example, the content may be the building blocks, the crafting mechanics, and the villagers and other mobs you can interact with. But the medium-level message is in the affordances: what can be moved and broken down, and what exists as a resource. What matters for Minecraft is the perceptions of the world that they create.
Because of this, it’s not surprising that this game produces its own version of the Tetris effect. After playing Tetris, people have started seeing falling blocks in everyday life. After playing Minecraft, people also described seeing the real world as Minecraft structures. For example, a person on Reddit describes seeing the trees in a Colorado nature preserve and thinking “… It looked like Minecraft.” This effect demonstrates how Minecraft does not merely let you play in a block world; it teaches you to look at the world in usable blocks and think about what you can do to it.
[Image of the Minecraft blocky natural landscape.]
This is part of why Minecraft works so powerfully as an escape, especially for people living urban lives. In a city, you can’t redesign your terribly arranged street or knock down your apartment wall because it would look better one block to the left. You live inside architectures of permission: leases, zoning, etc. Minecraft offers the opposite fantasy. The world yields to you.
But the freedom games afford is rarely neutral. Minecraft feels free because you can do almost anything, but the game still makes some actions easier, more rewarding, and more sensible than others. It is easier to extract materials than to restore them. The hunger mechanic makes this especially literal: survival requires constant killing and farming, and the game biologically compels extraction. Animals are easier to see as future resources to enclose than as creatures to coexist with. As a player, you don’t need to care about other living beings in the game; you only have to manage them well enough for them to remain useful.
Nowhere is this clearer than with villagers. You can protect them from zombies and falls, but that protection is often economic rather than ethical—you keep them safe because you still need to trade with them, or because you want them to farm for you. In Dan Olsen’s “Minecraft, Sandboxes, and Colonialism,” he points out that the game makes it difficult to generate villagers where you want them, so the most efficient solution becomes moving them manually. The designers may not have intended “kidnapping,” but the mechanics still incentivize it. This extractive logic isn’t confined to the overworld either. The Nether and End dimensions follow the same pattern: you travel to entirely foreign worlds, take what they offer, and leave. There is no reason to stay or build there; they exist structurally to be depleted. The progression system reinforces this at every level, nudging you from wood to stone to iron to diamond. Advancement is always measured in what you have taken, never in what you have left intact.
[Image from Folding Ideas’ video forcing the villagers onto a boat to translocate them.]
I’m usually hesitant to apply sweeping labels like “colonialist” to a game as open-ended as Minecraft, especially when so much of its appeal comes from creative expression. But Olsen’s point is useful because it shifts the question away from intention and toward incentive. The issue is not that Minecraft is simply colonialist propaganda, but that its systems make control and extraction feel like typical problem-solving.
This is where Ian Bogost’s argument about game criticism from “How to Talk About Videogames” becomes useful. Bogost argues that games are not just stories or images to interpret, but objects we operate. That is to say, their meaning comes from what they let us do. For Minecraft, then, the question is not really “what story does the game tell?” but “what kinds of behavior does the game make feel natural?”
The answer, unfortunately, is extraction, expansion, and resource collection. The game’s wonder and its violence are not separate features. They are two readings of the same mechanic. This does not mean every player moving a villager is reenacting colonialism. But Minecraft does create a sandbox fantasy that deserves scrutiny: the fantasy of arriving in a world and “improving” it.
[Image of a Minecraft video thumbnail of a person rebuilding the village to their liking.]
