Long before I ever purchased Minecraft, I watched it on YouTube. From vanilla survival servers to custom modpacks and multiplayer competitions, I skipped the honeymoon phase of discovery within Minecraft before I ever played myself. When I did, I spawned into the typical experience: trees, empty fists, and no instruction narrative or otherwise. While I knew what one was supposed to do (defeat the Ender Dragon), I found that I really didn’t want to; I had stepped into the sandbox, but had no desire to build the same sandcastles as everyone else.
Sandboxes like Minecraft reflect human nature. Some build, some explore, and—as Olsen points out—some conquer. But to say Minecraft encourages colonialist behavior would be foolish; it merely opens a space and allows the player to fill it with their own desires. As a text, Minecraft acts to reflect the player’s nature by allowing them to do whatever they want. As such, the game results in polar experiences from different players—which is why Minecraft is capable of being read as encouraging of colonialist behavior. But to think that the possible enactment of colonialism more strongly represents the game than the player would be overlooking the medium for its content—and that would be asinine.
As McLuhan states in The Medium is the Message, “it is only too typical that the ‘content’ of any medium blinds us to the character of the medium.” McLuhan argues that a medium’s affordances matter more than the objects within it. For Minecraft, this is complicated: a sandbox affords full enactment of human nature, so its content may be misinterpreted as fully representative of the medium’s character. Therefore, reading Minecraft as a text is to read the game as a venue of creative agency and reflection of the player’s nature. This is supported by McLuhan’s view of mediums as extensions of the human body that amplify—but not neutrally. As McLuhan notes of money, it “reorganized the sense life of people just because it is an extension of our sense lives, and this change does not depend upon approval or disapproval of those living in society.” Mediums reshape the wielder regardless of intent; for Minecraft, players extended into a world of near-unlimited agency act out their human nature implicitly, regardless of intent or reflection.
For Olsen, who prioritizes efficiency over ethicality in treating fictional creatures, this manifests in colonialist practices. In their summary of McLuhan’s piece, Olsen refers to the metaphor that “when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail,” suggesting a view that a medium inspires colonialist behavior purely because it allows such. What this overlooks is the extremely minor role villagers actually play in Minecraft. Olsen was not handed only a hammer, but still highlights its possession to justify its use. This mirrors Sarnoff’s claim (ridiculed by McLuhan) to solely blame the user, absolving the medium of all responsibility. Olsen argues the inverse of Sarnoff with equal naïveté, similarly scapegoating the problematic behavior of the user by arguing that the medium allows it to occur. Olsen focuses so strongly on a small portion of the medium’s content that he overlooks the broader message: since the player can do anything, what they do inherently reflects their nature. This is why the game results in such polar experiences, for not everyone prioritizes efficiency and progression like Olsen.
Me? I prioritize polar bears.
When I play, I strive toward a single goal: travel to Ice Spikes biomes to build a base near polar bears. Not to tame them (not that it’s possible to do so), or extract the measly scraps of salmon one drops when killed, but simply because I like them. They make me happy. That’s the entire story. Every resource I gather and biome I cross acts to enact my nature of desire to stand in a frozen landscape and watch some polar bears trek about. I left the village near spawn almost immediately and took nothing. Beyond the bears, I choose to ignore all else.
I don’t mind that the bears just stand there, or that I risk getting attacked, because it’s the goal I wished to obtain—and one the medium allows within its infinite realm of possibility.
In a sandbox where you can literally create a functional computer, the only honest measure of play is what the player pursues. In granting near-infinite agency, the medium acts as a mirror reflecting the player’s nature back to them in the purest form. Similarly discussed with Slay the Princess, this reveals just how different players’ enacted natures diverge. The wide polarity this game has to offer helps rationalize how the game doesn’t necessarily encourage colonial behavior even if some people’s experiences end with enacting colonialist desires.
My polar experiences? They happen to end with watching the bears.
