Minecraft, Sandboxes, and Colonialism | Folding Ideas

Hey everybody, let me tell you a story. So I recently got back into Minecraft after a couple of years away. I’ve got a little private friends and family server set up. I’ve built some nice things, done a lot of exploring, having a lot of fun. And then one evening a friend says:

“Hey. Let’s go tame some cats.” Now I’m of course completely on board with this plan. Pet cats? Sign me up. So in the current version of Minecraft, this entails finding a village, because the mechanical spawn trigger for feral cats is related to the number of villagers in an area.

So you find a village, and then hang out until you hear a feral cat. Then you give the cat some fish until it adopts you, and now you’ve got a pet cat. The problem is that just with how our world spawned

And the way we all chose to disperse around the area before this point, the closest villages are kind of far away, and aren’t connected to any of the rivers that we’re using as our main transport corridor. So we make this trip a few times and it’s always kind of a hassle.

But hanging out around the village exposes me to a bunch of the other things you can do with villagers that the game has added over the years. See, the last time I played, you could basically only use extremely rare emeralds

To trade for random stuff in a barter system with absolutely no concept of value. Like you’d have to dig up these emeralds that could only be found in one specific type of place in the world (the large hills biome) and then some villager would offer you, like

A pair of leather pants for three emeralds, and you’re just like… “Hey. Thanks.” “There’s three cows full of leather right over here, but…” “Wow. Great deal.” “Really.” These days it’s a little more coherent and engaging. Like you go to one villager and you can sell them a bunch of wheat for emeralds then you can take those emeralds to another villager, and buy a cursed book or something. Or just hoard emeralds.

Pack them into a block and build a solid emerald bathtub. I’m not your dad. Anyway, this seems like it could be a lot of fun. There’s still just that one problem: that the closest villages are kind of far away and in the wrong direction from everything else we’re building,

And wouldn’t it be so much easier for everyone to play with these mechanics if we had a village like… right here in this giant empty field, located conveniently between a farm, a dark forest, and a to-scale recreation of Notre Dame carved out of a mountain? Yes, it absolutely would be.

So you know what, set to work building a small village with nice little houses using the wood and materials that are nearby. Build a fountain, seed some farms, get it all decorated. Place a bunch of job sites so the villagers have something to do, and… Now what?

The game designers have their own vision of how this is supposed to work. They don’t really want you to just set up a village of your own convenience, so just building a village isn’t enough. What they want is for the player to find an existing village and adopt and expand it.

To build up something that’s already there. And they have constructed mechanics in a way to encourage this approach, and discourage anything else, by making it really inconvenient. You can’t just lure villagers with food, or set up a village and expect them to just pop into existence.

If you want to create a new village without using console commands to just create villagers, then you really only have two options: The first is to cut down trees until you have an apple. Mine eight blocks of gold. Smelt the gold into ingots. Combine the ingots and apple into a golden apple.

Build a portal to hell using obsidian. Explore hell until you find a nether fortress. Search the nether fortress until you encounter several flying enemies called “blaze”. Kill them until you have at least two blaze rods. Use one blaze rod to make a brewing stand, and the other to fuel the brewing stand.

Use a bottle of water plus a fermented spiders eye, which is made using a mushroom, sugar, and regular spiders eye, to create a potion of weakness. Then add gunpowder to make a splash potion of weakness. Hang around your new village waiting for a rare zombie villager to spawn. Entomb them in blocks.

Throw the splash potion of weakness on them. Feed them the golden apple. And then leave them entombed for another 5 minutes real time, so they don’t burn up in the sunlight at dawn. And then, finally, the villager will be cured of undeath.

And you’ll need to do this twice because one villager does not a village make. Alternately, you’re going to need to acquire villagers from existing villages. …and right here is probably where you pause for a second, squint your eyes, and go: “Hmm, not so sure about that phrasing there.”

“Not hype on where this is going.” So at this point I go through the time consuming process of expanding an existing river to make it ready for boat traffic. Because you see, villagers can’t just be lured away.

But if they get into a vehicle, like a boat or a minecart, they can’t get out on their own. It’s just a matter of getting a villager near enough to the water that you can push them into a boat.

Or maybe you first need to set up an elaborate trap with a minecart, that will first take them down to the river, so that you can then push them into a boat, Sail that boat halfway around the world, and then push them out into their new home.

And again, of course, you’re going to need to this a few times, because a lone villager can’t have kids. And it may take a village to raise a child, but it also takes a bunch of children to make a village. And so: yes.

The best, most straightforward way to create a new village in Minecraft is to kidnap villagers… from an existing village. Now this is a good point to say that I don’t believe this is intentional. That this is more of a weird, emergent outcome of systems interacting. I mean,

I really hope that the people working on Minecraft – both on the Mojang and Microsoft sides of things – didn’t look at the game and go: “Yeah. Human trafficking? Pushing people into a boat in and spiriting them away?” “I love it.” That would… that would definitely be a “yikes”.

But it’s a particularly interesting case study in the way that game systems create metaphor, and that even if you didn’t intend for your mechanics to incentivize kidnapping, you still sort of created a game where the player is kind of encouraged to do a kidnapping. Or two. Or three.

And it should be noted that this interaction doesn’t just mimic kidnapping, but more specifically the brutal relocation policies of colonialism. Shove some people in a boat. Translocate them off somewhere else. Push them out and say: “Okay. This is your home now.”

And the whole uncomfortable metaphor is exacerbated by some of the smaller details. Villagers all have a regional look, so even though they are mechanically identical, there’s definitely a sense of villagers… taken elsewhere… being out of place. Villagers and the player-character are both humanoid, but distinct from one another. They are different groups.

The villagers have large noses, and talk in a nonsense Simlish. Across multiple vectors, the group with agency – players – are delineated from the group without. None of these individual details are per se bad, but they do collectively build a scenario where the player can easily otherize human NPCs.

This gets pretty dark when players are indirectly incentivized to abduct them, or even industrialize them like chattel. Such as this contraption, that exploits villagers summoning guardian iron golems as an infinite, automated source of iron for making tools. As much as I love building and constructing games,

These kind of issuses, these metaphors, hang over the head of the genre, whether they’re created from mechanics or from the intrinsic framing of the games’ scenario. In the 2019 essay collection “Video Games and the Global South”, Jules Skotnes-Brown observes: In an era when physical space has been thoroughly explored,

Virtual spaces harken back to the romance of the colonial frontier – as new regions to discover and conquer. Such conquest is not just psycho-symbolic, but also sensitive to the legacies of colonialism and underdevelopment. Since most mainstream video games are produced and disseminated in the “developed” world,

They are spaces in which primarily ex-colonial nations can continue to “conquer” the “other”, even in post-colonial periods. 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.” And he’s not wrong. I mean, yeah, a lot of those underlying reasons are why I enjoy construction games, particularly Minecraft. I like exploring. I like building things. I like terraforming.

I enjoy bridges and towers and villages and boats and trains. And that’s not to say that those interests are illegitimate, but it does speak to deeper cultural values that I have inherited.

I like terraforming and building big things, in part because I was raised in a culture that values terraforming and building big things. A culture that looks at the New York skyline, the Hoover Dam, and the trans-Canada highway, and sees first and foremost… “progress”. A culture that sees these things as “good”.

My interests and values are authentic, but they didn’t form in a vacuum. And this is a value set that informs the entire genre. Minecraft, Factorio, Satisfactory, Stonehearth, Dwarf Fortress, Towns, Timber and Stone, No Man’s Sky, Gnomoria. Even the relatively constrained Stardew Valley is enamored with the romance of taming the wilderness.

It is certainly interesting that in a genre crowded with options, there are multiple games where the player builds vast labyrinthian factories to extract resources on an alien planet, and not one where the player reclaims a planet from the extractors, carefully balancing wetlands and ecosystems.

I mean: is the food chain of a marsh any less complex than assembling red chips in Factorio? Now, this is not me saying that all these games form a deliberate block of pro-colonial propaganda. In fact, all of them to some degree or another are aware of that legacy,

And try to steer gently away from the issue by fabricating scenarios where the behavior is in some way or another justified or permissable. All of them have a reason for doing what you’re doing. The protagonist in Factorio, for example, isn’t a colonist,

But is stranded on an alien planet by accident, and given the implicit goal of leaving. In No Man’s Sky, the protagonist is adrift in a universe where no one belongs. A space too vast for any one person to make a meaningful impact. A place devoid of villagers to displace.

Again, they all have reasons for doing what you’re doing. But these are just explanations, not excuses. In many ways, these works of fiction are indulging in a “clean” version of history. What if America, but no Native Americans? This sense of insignificance is a through-line we can see in a lot of these, even, to a degree, Minecraft. The relative powerlessness of the individual in the scope of the systems they are interacting with. As with No Man’s Sky, Minecraft’s world is unfathomably vast – about 900 million square kilometres.

It is impossible for an individual to truly alter the nature of the world. But even that narrative isn’t new. “Prairie Fires” by Caroline Fraser outlines how tales of rugged individualism were used to downplay, excuse and dismiss the institutionalized displacement and massacre of indigenous Americans.

How, in books like “Little House on the Prairie”, authors like Laura Ingalls Wilder took colonization and turned it into a thousand tiny, quaint stories. Not the product of policy, culture, and values, but the lamentable byproduct of a thousand individuals, each too small to truly alter the nature of the world.

So, the question then, is how do we navigate this? It is, perhaps, tempting to fall into an all-or-nothing proposition and just throw the whole lot out. But that is, in my estimation at least, immature. It is possible to interrogate our collective past, the world that we have inherited,

And determine that bridges and boats and trains are okay and good. That building things and even altering the environment are things that are, or can be, good. That it is possible to explore in a way that is better than our own history.

That all these things are themselves value-neutral, and it is up to us to engage them morally. This is also where there is a great value in ensuring that voices from different backgrounds, different cultures, are given space to create. To maybe argue against permanence, to argue the viewpoints of the colonized.

Is it possible to tell these kinds of stories? Stories of exploring the unknown, without creating a fantasized, idealized version of our own colonialist past? I… I don’t know. I don’t have an answer for that. Maybe? And at the very least, maybe we won’t end up with games

Where you push villagers into boats to haul them away.