Minecraft: Virtual Colonialism?
As the semester comes to an end, I theoretically should have more time and mental space to relax. As study responsibilities ease up I am attracted to a pastime that my friends and I have often shared: Minecraft.
From its full release in 2011, Minecraft has become the best-selling video game of all time, with over 238 million copies sold. It has been ported across many platforms, making it accessible on PC, iOS, Android, Playstation, and Xbox. It is a big deal. It has been praised for its creative benefits and its child-friendly nature. Moreover, the game has been seen to have educational benefits and has expanded into formal education settings, and through supporting sites like minecraftteacher.tumblr.com, it can offer supporting curriculum for educators. As my friends and I have moved to different towns, the occasional game together has brought connection despite the distance.
However, is it as “good” as it seems?
Colonialism in Minecraft
Throughout my studies, I have largely managed to keep my thought-life and my gaming as separate spaces. However, some trusted friends sent me a video to shatter such separation.
Folding Ideas, a YouTube channel, released a while ago a video titled “Minecraft, Sandboxes, and Colonialism,” and perhaps better phrased in its clickbait title “OOPS! Did I Do A Colonialism In Minecraft?!” It’s well worth the watch, as it observes how Minecraft, though unintentionally, has developed a ‘meta’ of using the villagers in ways that has some pretty intense similarities to colonialism, conquest, and the displacement of slaves.
Folding Ideas notes, quoting Jules Skotnes-Brown, “In sandbox-building games such as Minecraft, the player arrives, like Robinson Crusoe, into a terra nullius and encourages him to ‘improve’ this land – by clearing jungles draining marshes, building infrastructure and mining minerals. Its inhabitants – hostile monsters or local villagers – appear simply as obstacles in the path of development, or as resources to exploit.” Though there are many different ways to play the game, Skotnes-Brown here articulates a haunting parallel to colonialism through a common way of playing the game.
One major parallel Folding Ideas notes is the treatment of the villagers as a game mechanic. In the game, trading with villagers is a way to acquire a range of resources that may take quite a while if one tries to gain them via farming and mining. However, such a mechanic is significantly more helpful if accessible in your own base you have created. As the video notes, when one takes a step back and listens to what is being done, its colonialist overtones become significantly more unsettling. The moving of villagers in Minecraft is difficult, and one of the most common ways people have learned to do so is by putting a villager in a boat so that you can row them across the seas and bring them to your own home. Once you get them to your base, it becomes easy to store them in small places with just their workstation to make them easy to locate and trade with. People even show how to make “farms” to make this mechanic more efficient, whether it be converting the villagers to zombie villagers and then back so they lower their prices (I assume ‘out of gratitude’), utilising their fear mechanic in iron golem farms, or even creating “villager breeders” so you can have more villagers accessible to trade with. What is more unsettling is when you realise what differentiates the villagers from you: their peculiar language and noticeably larger and more awkward noses from the default main character skin. This is but a small part of what the YouTube video raises, but even that is challenging, as all of these things I have done in Minecraft, even just this year. I was on a server with some mates earlier this year and displaced villagers to abuse the mechanic. Through all this, I did not see anything wrong.
After the literal hours I spent interacting with the villagers in that game, it makes me think how I have not once realised that the villagers were the humans of the game, the people of its world. How did I not sit back for a bit and realise the unsettling actions I was doing?
Formation and Gaming
“The moving of villagers in Minecraft is difficult, and one of the most common ways people have learned to do so is by putting a villager in a boat so that you can row them across the seas and bring them to your own home.”
Such a haunting observation leads me to the question of whether games (and other forms of entertainment) are formative. The connection between video games and violence has been a topic consistently brought up in my life; particularly how gaming can glorify violence, desensitise one to death, and bring violence into the real world. Most of these critiques focus on what Michael Goerger calls the contamination thesis, claiming that violent gameplay negatively impacts ordinary interpersonal relations or real-world interactions. However, Goerger articulates the need to take a step back and assess games based on the values expressed by the games, regardless of how they affect real-world actions; as forms of entertainment they can teach and form those who engage with them. Therefore, the question moves away from whether games negatively enhance violent tendencies but instead focuses on how games form the individual and teach them what it means to function in the world and have the ‘good life.’
One’s formation is something that is of crucial importance for Christians, as we seek to continuously be formed into a Christ-likeness and thus avoid formation in ways that are contrary to such. For example, James K. A. Smith holds that humans are primarily loving people, not intellectual people. Therefore, he claims our formation should be centred on crafting what we love rather than increasing what we know. He also argues the habits or practices that one participates are formative practices that shape what one loves. Cultural practices, even what are seen as thin or non-formative, ultimately try to make us certain kinds of people. For example, a walk through the mall continuously bombards you with images of what is the good life, and forms your understanding of such a life.
As a Christian and a gamer, it is important to wonder and wrestle with whether and how my forms of entertainment inform and teach values. Christians often talk about violence in more explicit video games but rarely reflect on the cultural-colonial undertones of more “vanilla” games like Minecraft. Specifically for Minecraft, it becomes important to dwell on whether it shapes our understanding of human flourishing. In the pursuit of resource management and efficiency in Minecraft, does it teach me to hold resources and progress higher than that of human life? I hope not. However, the values the game can teach need to be kept in check. Just as Smith sees his children calling the mall a ‘temple’ a small victory as it shows their awareness to the mall’s formative powers, an awareness of the narratives and metaphors that video games portray is important. It is still important to assess how our methods of entertainment teach us and form us, how they shape our non-cognitive picture of the good life, what they form our understanding about what we should love. As Folding Ideas shows, Minecraft is a game that can be seen as glorifying the use of wilderness to gain its resources, and done at the expense of the nature and beings in those spaces, villagers included.
Will I stop playing the game? No. As mentioned above, there are many good benefits of Minecraft. But these thoughts will linger in my mind, to keep in check how I play such games and how they form me. Maybe the first step is to care more about the villagers in the game.
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Timote Naulivou is currently editor at Metanoia.