More than 300 million copies of Minecraft’s fantasy of settler colonialism have been sold, making it one of the world’s best-selling video games. Several sources cite it as the best-selling, although Tetris wins in this listing. 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.”Consider, continues Brazelton, how the game begins.“The player ‘appears’ in a new and unknown land. While the appearance is changeable,” Brazelton writes,the player’s default skin is white, appearing as either the “Steve” or “Alex” model, based on the chosen gender. […] [T]he appearance of a fully grown, white, human on completely unknown and “untamed” land suggests a colonial fantasy akin to Robinson Crusoe. Accordingly, the player always brings with him or her a (default) white skin, a gender defined in western terms, and an antagonistic relationship with the newly generated landscape’s indigenous human(oids).Players must “kill endless amounts” of inexplicably hostile creatures, who come in the form of zombies and skeletons who “engage the cannibalistic and phantom-like characterizations of Indigenous people,” and creepers, who “function essentially as suicide bombers.” The native inhabitants, in short, are the “monsters,” deadly obstacles to the pursuit of resources with which players aggrandize themselves. The player is rewarded for killing the locals while mining diamonds and other resources to build—typically in the shape of castles—a personal empire.Minecraft’s “deeply problematic assumptions and ideas about coloniality and power” have a history in computer/video gaming.“The eradication and construction inherent to the game do not entail the creation of a new and abstract culture, so much as the transplantation of European neo-colonies which resemble and seek to recreate feudal/industrializing European life,” Brazelton writes.The game is innocent of the history of genocidal brutality of colonial extraction in the Americas, Africa, and Asia. There’s also no sign of the contemporary reality of labor exploitation, environmental destruction (slag heaps, polluted water, mountain top removal, etc.), and cultural erasure perpetuated by today’s mining enterprises in search of rare and strategic materials.Weekly Newsletter[contact-form-7]Brazelton contrasts Minecraft with the game Motherload, which is all about the “danger of colonial exploitation”—in this case extrapolated to Mars. In Motherload, “mining and extractivism are not things to be enjoyed so much as feared and endured.” Players are corporate workers in what is basically hell. (Spoiler alert: read the name Natas, the tech billionaire in charge of Mars, backwards.) Motherload, initially released in 2004, has never approached Minecraft’s success, including with investors.Brazelton notes that Minecraft’s “deeply problematic assumptions and ideas about coloniality and power” have a history in computer/video gaming. One of the very first computer games, written by teachers in 1971, was The Oregon Trail. The game positions the player as the leader of a wagon train west across a fantasy of virgin land. It has been criticized by Native Americans for its portrayals and assumptions. Twenty-first-century versions of The Oregon Trail have attempted to respond to the embedded racism—but ideology is hard to mine out.Support JSTOR Daily! Join our membership program on Patreon today.The post Neocolonial Minecraft appeared first on JSTOR Daily.