Noes on Minecraft

Peter's notes

Preliminary Writeup

Exploration in Minecraft is a high-level operational logic. It arises out of several other logics and basic mechanics, including:

• Navigation (e.g. movement, vehicles).
• Geography/ecology (from world generation).
• Mechanics for telling location and direction, (e.g. sun position, compass/maps, or even the debug info).
• The map item and associated mechanics.

As an operational logic, exploration supports the following myths of colonialism:

1. The idea that the colonized land was unoccupied prior to colonization.
2. The idea that the Indigenous peoples were not using the land, or were exceedingly sparse in population, and thus the arrival of the colonizers did not displace them or their activities.
3. The idea that Indigenous peoples were subhuman, and therefore any treatment at the hands of the colonizers was morally neutral.
4. The idea that Indigenous peoples had a less "advanced" civilization, and therefore the colonizer's actions were justified because they ultimately benefited the Indigenous people.

Myth 1 is mainly supported by most of the land actually being unoccupied by villagers. But the exploration mechanics furthermore encourage the player to move through this empty territory, and they make available things like landmarks that the player (but never the villagers) can relate to. This also relates to myth 2, whereby players are the only entities that explore (villagers do not), and even the maps that can be obtained from villagers are only partial, and can be amended by the player, implying that the villagers merely discover ancient maps, rather than making them themselves, or at least that villagers are inferior mappers (myth #4). Myths 3 and 4 are also supported by the fact that of the structures within the world that imply present or past sentience, many of which are the explicit targets of and rewards for exploration, the villagers only inhabit villages, and they do not undertake any activities that imply that they have the capacity to build or maintain those other structures (in fact they don't even expand their villages themselves). Thus villagers are portrayed as helpless and incapable of creating the ancient ruins that surround them.

Importantly, villagers do not have their own full-resolution maps of their own villages or surrounding territories, and the player cannot gain complete local geographical knowledge by communicating with them (the maps they do trade for are partial and focused on treasure-and-enemy-filled structures).

Furthermore, exploration is connected to looting, and structures like pyramids or jungle temples contain signs of deceased inhabitants (e.g., rotting flesh in pyramids) but no links to present cultures or peoples. The looting of these (presumably sacred to someone at some point) sites is therefore construed as at worst a victimless crime, and within the game is more naturally seen as the deservéd reward for exploration.

The woodland mansions and underwater sanctuaries are a more complex issue: they are inhabited by (semi?) sentient beings, but these are mythologized as evil and/or alien, and therefore acceptable targets for even preemptive attack. Because maps to these structures can be traded for in villages, and because after killing the defenders of these places unique treasures can be acquired, these structures reinforce the explore -> exploit connection, while at the same time portraying the players' activities as morally neutral or even good.

Note: cite minecraft education edition modules:

https://education.minecraft.net/lessons/jamestown-settlement/ https://education.minecraft.net/lessons/british-colonisation/ (note plagarism) https://education.minecraft.net/lessons/hoosland/

And wiki page (note section on pillaging):

https://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Tutorials/Colonizing

Forum comments:

https://www.minecraftforum.net/forums/minecraft-java-edition/survival-mode/294318-do-you-guys-colonize (see last comment about villages)

Writeup Draft

Topic: Exploration

Definition:

Exploration in Minecraft is a high-level operational logic. It arises out of several other logics and basic mechanics, including:

• Navigation in the simulated physical world (which in turn arise out of mechanics related to basic movement, gravity, and block properties, but also importantly vehicles and specifically boats).
• The sense of a landscape, different ecosystems/climate zones, which arises from the world generation mechanics. Particularly the fact that landscape generation is varied enough to create landmarks is important.
• Mechanics for telling location and direction, including diegetic mechanics like the regular progress of the sun across the sky and the compass item (and compass-enabled maps), and extra-diegetic mechanics like the x/y/z coordinates displayed when debug info is turned on.
• The map item and associated mechanics, mainly that it plots a map of the surface as you travel.

As an operational logic, the mechanics that support "exploration" enable interpretation of activities in the game like navigating between landmarks, navigating into unexplored/unknown regions, and mapping (and possibly marking) those regions so that they are no longer unknown. For the purposes of this discussion, we will put aside the issue of marking (and related activities like building outposts), and focus on map-making and related processes by which the "unknown" becomes "known."

Exploration is an immensely satisfying experience in the real world, and bringing into one's personal knowledge more details of the world is an activity that we take joy in even as babies [cite?]. But personal exploration is not strictly necessary in a world where we can communicate with others: an alternative to exploring is asking for information, and as long as we trust the descriptions we are given, we can obtain vast knowledge of geography from books and atlases without travelling at all. But within the operation of colonialism, exploration takes on a very particular character: instead of seeking to understand the knowledge of geography that the people living in a colonized area already possess, colonizers create their own maps, sometimes asking natives to act as guides but never accepting their knowledge as fact. This is in contrast to how colonial powers exchanged knowledge freely with each other, and maps sent back from the colonies were generally accepted and used by other colonizers as the basis for further colonial projects (despite frequent and wild inaccuracies) [cite].

Two possible reasons for this distinction present themselves: first, that Indigenous knowledge of geography was incompatible in form with the knowledge of the colonizers, e.g., memorized oral recitations or even stories that encoded geographical information as opposed to two-dimensional pictures on paper. In many cases the colonizers likely lacked the capacity to even comprehend Indigenous knowledge of geography in its original form, because they did not understand the languages, they did not have the necessary personal experience of landmarks, or they simply did not have sufficiently developed oral memorization skills to correctly receive and retain the knowledge.

But another reason likely also contributed to the colonizers' preference for (re)making their own maps: they did not respect the Indigenous peoples, and either did not believe that the knowledge they wanted was available, or intentionally avoided it because its existence contradicted the world view of colonialism that justified their exploitative actions. Several common justifications for colonialism are directly contradicted by the existence of Indigenous knowledge of geography:

1. The idea that the colonized land was unoccupied prior to colonization. If there were no indigenous people, or at least none that claimed a particular territory, then it is not possible for there to have been Indigenous maps of the land.
2. The idea that the Indigenous peoples were not using the land, or were exceedingly sparse in population, and thus the arrival of the colonizers did not displace them or their activities. Again in this case, Indigenous knowledge of geography implies that the native populations had already explored the land, understood it, and maintained active relationships with it (as was actually the case).
3. The idea that Indigenous peoples were subhuman, and therefore any treatment at the hands of the colonizers was morally neutral. The existence of Indigenous maps (along with other Indigenous technologies) directly contradicts this idea.
4. The idea that Indigenous peoples had a less "advanced" civilization, and therefore the colonizer's actions were justified because they ultimately benefited the Indigenous people. The colonizers' mapping technology must be established as totally superior to Indigenous technologies to support this narrative, and the existence of Indigenous maps contradicts this. In particular, the idea that Indigenous might teach the colonizers anything undermines this myth.

In the end, regardless of the specific reasons that colonizers had for disregarding Indigenous knowledge of geography and reproducing it (poorly) with their own maps, the present-day view of colonization denies this knowledge, which serves the purpose of helping to ameliorate modern-day opinions about colonization via the myths detailed above. The most obvious example of this is the idea of an "age of exploration" that is still present in contemporary history textbooks [cite!].

To unpack the problems with this idea briefly, consider the definition of "exploration:" [cite]

...

To truly explore an area, the area must be unknown, but that fact can only be established relative to a base of knowledge. For example, many areas of the world are unknown to me personally, and thus I could be said to, for example "explore Paris," even though someone who lived there could not. But when we talk about exploration by institutions (e.g., nations), again there must be some assumption that the institution is unaware of the area to be explored prior to the exploration. So for example, contemporary Germany could not "explore" contemporary France, because those institutions already have intimate knowledge of each other. Exactly who within those institutions has access to the knowledge and where it is kept may vary, but the institutional knowledge exists.

So during the "age of exploration," we see European nations for the first time acquiring knowledge (and in part specifically geographic knowledge) of the Americas, parts of Africa, parts of India and Southeast Asia, and Australia and various Pacific islands [cite]. This new knowledge (for these institutions) was coincident with brutal subjugation and the beginnings of colonization throughout these regions. So from the perspective of a few European nations, this era really did coincide with a great deal of institutional exploration. At the same time, from the perspective of most of the world, although contact was established with the exploring powers and thus some institutional knowledge was gained, similar geographic knowledge was not provided by the colonizers to the Indigenous populations that they interacted with, and those populations did not effectively "explore" Europe.

When geographic knowledge was disseminated to Indigenous institutions, it more often was communicated: the Indigenous did not create their own maps of Europe by exploring it in person, but instead gained knowledge of Europe by talking with Europeans, something that the Europeans refused to do themselves. Thus the label "age of exploration" is only valid from a very narrow historical perspective. In particular, we can contrast the events of the "age of exploration" with the discovery and exploration of the continent of Antarctica, where no humans had previously been. Once again, only specific institutions actually gained geographic knowledge of Antarctica originally, but at the same time this was not knowledge that could have been transferred from some existing institution or group of people, but instead genuinely new knowledge in human history. Accordingly, the exploration of Antarctica stands out from the "discoveries" of the "age of exploration" as a different kind of event. But in the colonial mythology, there is no such distinction. Exploration of the Americas, Africa, India, Southeast Asia, Australia, and the Pacific islands is depicted as an outstanding feat of human achievement with no mention of the alternative that such knowledge could have been gained by communication rather than being painstakingly re-created by European explorers.

""" Antarctica is therefore one of the few places in the world that can truly be described as having been discovered, rather than there being people already living there who had known about it for hundreds or thousands of years before its "discovery". """

https://www.coolantarctica.com/Antarctica%20fact%20file/science/can_you_live_in_antarctica.php

This idea of exploring an "unknown" world whereby the perspective of certain European nations is universalized is an important justificatory fiction for colonialism. It not only glorifies the explorers (while carefully omitting their systematic abuse of Indigenous populations), but also subtly implies that had their voyages not taken place, the various peoples that they contacted around the world would never have come into contact, and no global geographical knowledge (as is ubiquitous today) would ever have been assembled. By avoiding any discussion of alternatives to the re-mapping of well-known territories and the European unwillingness and inability to receive or comprehend Indigenous geographical knowledge, colonialist histories conveniently sidestep questions about the legitimacy and value of the "exploration" that took place.

The glorification of exploration and erasure of Indigenous geographical knowledge serves today to maintain a Eurocentric historical perspective and thus help prevent modern questioning of the legitimacy of colonial institutions. And Minecraft has its part to play in this, as its mechanics and operational logics support the idea of a world without Indigenous geographical knowledge.

In fact, for much of its history before the first official 1.0 release, Minecraft did not have any mechanics interpretable as representing Indigenous inhabitants of the generated terrain, except for hostile mobs like zombies and skeletons which appeared sentient but absolutely malevolent, and which showed no behavior besides aggression towards the player. Long before villagers were added (in the Beta 1.8 release a.k.a. the "Adventure Update" on September 14, 2011).

1.0 release on November 18, 2011),

\footnote{Until the Exploration update on November 14, 2016; Minecraft version 1.0 was released November 18, 2011

Timeline of Indigeneity in Minecraft

• May 17, 2009: Classic mode was publicly released.
• September 1, 2009: Survival Test was released, introducing mobs.
• June 25th, 2010: Dungeons, spawners, and saddles are added to Infdev (version 20100625-2). Dungeons are the first structures that hint at creative non-player sentience.
• July 22nd, 2010: Alpha v1.0.11 adds books, but they can only be crafted by the player, and are only used to craft bookshelves.
• October 30th, 2010: Halloween update introduces the Nether and Zombie Pigment, who appear sentient and have reactive AI.
• March 31st, 2011: Beta 1.4 introduces wolves, the first tameable mob.
• April 19, 2011: Beta 1.5 adds statistics and achievements.
• May 26th, 2011: Beta 1.6 adds maps.
• September 14th, 2011: Adventure update/Beta 1.6 introduces lots of stuff:
  • Abandoned mineshafts
  • Villages (but villagers are not yet really interactive)
  • Strongholds (which have books, paper, and empty maps in their library chests)
  • TODO: HERE
• August 1st, 2012: Java Edition 1.3.1 adds trading, allowing things like books to be purchased from villagers. Books can now also be written in. This update also adds jungle temples and desert pyramids.

List of Mechanics

Play Logs

• Monday 2019-6-24
  • Period 1
    • Looking for sheep
    • Wool for bed
    • Chopping wood and planting trees
    • Waiting for bed/sleeping
    • Mining (shaft construction)
    • Fighting monsters
    • Lighting caves
    • Making chests/arranging stuff
    • Smelting & crafting
  • Period 2
    • Mining resources
    • Fighting Illagers that showed up and attacked
    • Organizing inventory/chests in the house
    • Changing architecture to be a bit nicer looking
    • Building a flow-based easy-to-harvest farm
    • Sleeping
  • Period 3
    • Mining resources
    • Exploring by boat
    • Planting sugar cane
    • Fighting skeletons in caves
    • Died once
    • Sleeping
    • Put up banner from defeated Illager captain (was stuck in a tree)