At first, Minecraft didn’t seem like the type of game that can be read as a text with something to “say”. There is no plot, fixed ending, or dialogue, and players are given an open-ended world, making Minecraft feel very neutral. But as I interacted with villagers, this neutrality started to become fuzzy. Villagers are autonomous with houses, jobs, and routines, but the more time I spent around them, I realized that the game does not really encourage me to treat them as independent, but rather as transactional parts of the system.
Although it is a sandbox game, Minecraft can still be understood as a text – not because its meaning comes from directly telling a story like a traditional text, but from the habits it trains the player to have. Through villagers, Minecraft “says” that community is not something the player joins, but something the player uses. While the village is a home to the current villagers, the game encourages the player to treat it as a system of trades, labor, and resources.
McLuhan’s ideas argue that the real message of a medium is not just the content, but the “pattern that it introduces into human affairs”. Olsen further explains this as mediums having the ability to get to the root of “how we think about ourselves and our ability to interact with the world”. In Minecraft, the content takes the form of blocks, animals, monsters, and more. The pattern that the game teaches, however, is deeper: interact with this content in a way to make it serve a purpose.
This pattern is good when we deal with inanimate objects like wood or stones – we can turn a tree into a door or rocks into tools. This idea becomes complicated when villagers are involved, because they are living, human-like beings. The game’s system reduces villagers to a more transactional form. When I first encountered a villager, I couldn’t speak to or understand them, but I discovered that I could trade with them. As I explored the village, I met more villagers who could sell, trade, and take on roles to help me expand a village of my own.
If I chose to build a new village in the location of my choice, I would need villagers to help me. The primary way we can do this is to transport villagers from their current home. As Olsen describes, if villagers “get into a vehicle, like a boat…they can’t get out on their own”, which means we can essentially trap them and force them to move. By doing this, we essentially kidnap and displace them, but the game system frames it as a simple transportation of goods. When I first played, I had a different experience than Olsen. I chose to simply expand the existing village rather than move them to a new place. I still found the essence the same though. I still wanted to control where villagers worked and where they were exactly located. This highlights how the issue isn’t only displacement, but that the game turns the villager’s home into the player’s creative project.
From this, we can see how Minecraft does not need an actual storyline to have meaning. Olsen describes how the normalization of the villager treatment is not necessarily intentional by the designers, but rather a “weird, emergent outcome of systems interacting”. Minecraft shows how games don’t only communicate through explicit intention, but also through repeated actions and rewards.
Thus, a sandbox game can be understood as a text. This is exemplified by Minecraft, which does not need to tell a typical story in order to say something. The message lies in the habits and actions it encourages. This game tries to teach the player to view the world as creative and exploratory, but villagers illuminate the cost of this creativity. In this world where everything can be moved and optimized, even a village can transform from a community and home to a project.
