For JSTOR Daily, Matthew Wills explored an interesting concept through the work of educator Bennett Brazelton: Minecraft as a platform that displays problematic assumptions about coloniality and power
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Introduced in 2011, Minecraft has also been widely embraced outside the gaming community, especially, notes scholar Bennett Brazelton, for educational purposes.
“Though Minecraft certainly encourages combat,” Brazelton writes, “it has been largely taken up in media and scholarly culture as a purely creative outlet; many scholars, for example, have suggested that Minecraft can and should be incorporated into school curriculum to teach mathematics, geology, architecture, and digital literacy.”
Before all these things, however, Minecraft should be taken as a lesson in ideology. The game, after all, “perpetuates the fictions of settler colonialism,” and celebrates “the planetary violence of [resource] extraction.” The game turns “‘mining’ and ‘mines,’ concepts with deeply colonial roots,” into “objects of an in-game economy-of-pleasure.”
This might sound like a hot take or being provocative to get the people going but I can see where Brazelton is coming from. You start in a randomised world (or you can choose what your world looks like with a certain “seed”), and you start stripping that world of its resources to make tools and shelter. If you decide to beat the game, you have to eventually find a dragon and slay it. But the dragon doesn’t cause any problems unless you find it so you could just leave it be.
Of course this could all be rendered moot if you play in creative mode and have unlimited everything and never have to fight any zombies or skeletons. But utopia is no fun!
