Colonialism and Games

• Colonialism seeks to both justify and valorize colonial domination, such as the ongoing domination of Native Americans by the United States of America.
• Popular culture spreads colonialist beliefs.¹
• Games can promote ideologies.²
• Besides their 2D art, text, and sound, games include rules, also known as “mechanics.”
• Rules themselves can communicate messages, including colonialist messages.

Minecraft

• The best-selling game of all time (>176 million copies).
• A blocky world where any block can be mined.
  • Craft blocks into tools and other blocks.
  • Blocks can be placed to build things.
• Generated terrain includes various climates, underground caves, and “natural resources” like ore.
• Populated by passive animals, aggressive monsters, benign “villagers,” and evil “illagers.”
  • Animals include livestock, pets, and wild animals.
  • Monsters appear at night and attack on sight.
  • Villagers live in villages and can be traded with.
  • Illagers appear randomly and attack immediately.

Colonialist Myths

• Game mechanics dictate what is true in the game world, and imply things about the real world.
• Several Minecraft mechanics support colonialist myths which help justify past and present colonial domination.³

Accumulating Blocks

• Ore is finite, but can always find more by moving on.
• No large-scale consequences of extraction.
  • Reinforces myth that ‘natural resources’ are plentiful and extracting them is harmless.
• Mass extraction is made easy due to enormous inventory.

Terrain and Exploration

• Most generated terrain is uninhabited.
  • Reinforces myth of the ‘wild/empty frontier.’
• Villagers don’t use land outside of their small villages.
• Maps position player as discoverer.
  • Reinforces myth of Western ‘discovery’ of Indigenous territories as creation of new knowledge.

 

 

Monsters and Illagers

• Intelligent, but unconditionally attack player on sight.
• Implies some creatures are inherently/irredeemably evil.
  • Reinforces myth that morality/behavior is biologically determined, and justifies aggression as self-defense.

Villagers

• No combat, building, or crafting ability (despite living in constructed dwellings).
• Not shown as builders of advanced ruins like shipwrecks.
  • Reinforces myth that Natives had no technology.
• Depend on player for defense against monsters.
  • Ironically, monsters are only attracted by player.
  • Sets up player as “savior,” villagers as beneficiaries.
  • Reinforces myth that Natives were helpless and therefore benefited from colonialism.

Advancements

• Tutorial & achievement system rewards certain actions.
  • Incentivizes colonialist activities (even killing villagers).
• Provides an overarching narrative of progress.

Impacts

• Explicitly colonialist fantasies (“…who doesn’t want to be all barbarian and destroy every village[?]” from the Minecraft Wiki tutorial on Colonizing).
• Colonialist myths in education (for example, a “British Colonisation” lesson to teach about “what the settlers went through” in Australia on the Minecraft Education Edition site).
• In addition to obscuring and distorting colonialist histories, these myths cause direct psychological harm.⁴
• Similar mechanics exist in many game genres, because mechanics are often uncritically copied between games.