Building a Minecraft Utopia

This game ethnographic research project explores Minecraft and its players through the conceptualization of realism and Foucault’s notion of heterotopias. Players were interviewed and invited to build limitlessly in a Minecraft creative server to construct a communal utopia.

CONTEXT

Minecraft is a critically acclaimed open-sandbox gaming platform with over 55 million monthly players and 122 million sales. As the classic indie-game success story, Minecraft has cemented its role in the cultural play of an entire generation—despite having no structured plot whatsoever.

Minecraft consists of five game modes: Survival, Creative, Adventure, Hardcore, and Spectator. The most popular two modes—Survival and Creative—differ greatly in gameplay. In Survival, players are mortal and must gather materials to craft food and shelter, while in Creative, players have access to infinite resources, are immortal, and can fly. In particular, the resource abundance of Creative mode has fostered a plethora of mind-blowingly intricate creations built by avid Minecraft players. These creations range from facsimiles of gameworlds from other cultural supersystems (i.e. Game of Thrones, Lord of the Rings, Battlestar Galatica) to functional scale models of the players’ real world environments (bedroom, kitchen, cruise ship). Transforming into amateur content creators, these Minecraft players juxtapose real-world references with their construction of virtual worlds. Many players have even joined forces to create game design companies that generate commissioned work for Minecraft, Microsoft, and international art museums.

THE PROJECT

In the upcoming weeks, I will be running a communal Minecraft building project and observing the players’ gaming behaviors. I decided to interview both amateur players and experienced builders on their experiences with gameplay and social interactions on Minecraft. The amateur players were sourced from the Claremont Consortium student community, while I reached out to expert Minecraft builders via their personal websites, Minecraft forums, and Reddit. In total, I conducted interviews with 7 players (4 amateur players, 3 expert builders) from the United States, France, and Belgium.

After the interview, I asked the players to join my private creative server and build freely in the virtual world for 30 minutes. Building on top of each other’s creations, the interviewers constructed a communal utopia of their choice. I screen-recorded the cumulative building process, and with the footage, I presented my observations in the form of a world tour video.

THEORY

In “Minecraft: Transitional Objects and Transformational Experiences in an Imaginary World,” Landay highlights the five key traits of Minecraft as: interactivity, audiovisual and kinetic aesthetics, user agency, social community, and experiential learning. These five areas served as the theoretical foundation for my interview questions. I was particularly interested in exploring the players’ conceptualization of realism, their involvement in physical or virtual communities related to Minecraft, and Minecraft’s capability as a medium for psychotherapy and creative learning.

WATCH THE WORLD TOUR VIDEO

Video Documentation

FINAL THOUGHTS

My journey into the world of Minecraft has been far more immersive and comprehensive than I had initially fathomed. I've come out with a strong appreciation for Minecraft's unique gameplay and open sandbox model, which navigate a fine line between freedom and constraint.

All of the players that I interviewed started playing in the 2010-2012 time range, during Minecraft's alpha and beta releases. They all began playing due to encouragement from real-life friends, but the amateur players tended to play Minecraft intermittently—fluctuating between playing the game over 20 hours a week to not playing for several months.

The players' building behaviors were revealing of the reasons why they found the game to be appealing; individuals who like to build alone tended to rely on the game as a channel of escapism, while players who built in group servers used the game to find or reinforce friendships with other gamers. Similarly, the players' choice to build real-world replicas, fantastical structures, or scaled structures generally aligned with their interpretation of Minecraft's ability to mirror or differ from real life. I think that the form, strategy, and approach by which the players interact with the game determine whether Minecraft can be considered a utopia, a heterotopia, or something else. That being said, perhaps Minecraft's ability to sustain and facilitate so many different players' visions speaks to its capacity as a heterotopic platform.

I was very surprised at how quickly the expert builders responded to my messages, even though I was clearly not a Minecraft player. They were all very open to chat and readily provided me with their Skype handles. One of the building teams even added me to their Discord channel (basically Slack for gamers), so I was able to observe the global players' communication with each other across multiple languages. However, their rapid response makes a lot of sense; most of them—if not all—are digital natives, who are very comfortable with virtual communication and actively participate in virtual Minecraft communities. In addition, a lot of them were very amused and curious about my motivations for conducting this project. In terms of my observations, I found it interesting that the majority of them have not played Minecraft leisurely in a few years. Moreover, they tended to build their elaborate architectural structures in third-party CAD software, rather than in Minecraft servers.

If I have the opportunity to continue this project in the future, I would want to conduct a more long-term experiment and/or with more specific communities. While my chosen approach of giving players 30 minutes to build ensured an equalizing and fair process, many of them viewed the time period as a constraint, rather than a cutoff. I think that their perception of this "30-minute building challenge" made them feel pressured to come out with a defined end-product by the end of their time. Thus, although I emphasized that they had the option to build on top of other players' creations, they all decided to build their own structures. Only one player decided to build fences to connect his house with another players', but that was as communal and collaborative as the process went. In a more long-term project, I'd hope to gather a group of strangers who have never played Minecraft and ask them to build together. I would then observe their building behaviors, problem-solving skills, and communication with other players across multiple sessions. One of the interviewees, Bram, also touched upon the potential of Minecraft for facilitating learning experiences for children with autism. I think that it'd be very interesting to observe communal building for the purposes of early childhood education or identity exploration within marginalized communities.

WORKS CITED

Bennett, Luke. “Code, Place, Law...and Minecraft.” lukebennett13, 9 Mar. 2014, lukebennett13.wordpress.com/2012/02/18/code-place-law-and-minecraft/.

Duncan, Sean C. “Minecraft, Beyond Construction and Survival.” Well Played, vol. 1, no. 1, 29 Oct. 2011, pp. 1–23., pdfs.semanticscholar.org/c1f7/db3b2492402eb5073ecb8bbad2d9cc20ddd3.pdf#page=10.

Foucault, Michel. “Of Other Spaces.” Diacritics, Translated by Jay Miskowiec, vol. 16, no. 1, 1986, p. 22., doi:10.2307/464648.

Landay, Lori. “Minecraft: Transitional Objects and Transformational Experiences in an Imaginary World.” Revisiting Imaginary Worlds: a Subcreation Studies Anthology, edited by Mark J. P. Wolf, 1st ed., Routledge, 2017, pp. 127–147. Taylor & Francis Group, www-taylorfrancis-com.ccl.idm.oclc.org/books/e/9781317375944.

Lastowka, Greg. “Minecraft as Web 2.0: Amateur Creativity and Digital Games.” Amateur Media: Social, Cultural and Legal Perspectives, edited by Dan Hunter et al., 1st ed., Routledge, 2012, pp. 153–169. Taylor & Francis Group, www-taylorfrancis-com.ccl.idm.oclc.org/books/e/9781136280801.