What we can learn from the Slave Machines In Minecraft

I don’t play Minecraft. This is one of those things like “I don’t play mage in RPG games” and there’s nothing really to it. It’s probably problematic if I really dug into it, but this is all to say I do not play Minecraft and there’s no great reason.

I know many who do play Minecraft. It is the 2nd best selling game of all time, after all. That means I’ve been on a few server tours — this is just being shown around someone’s little Minecraft space. It’s cute. You get to see elaborate houses, self-sustaining farms, working computers, and some kind of vertical contraption that...babies keep falling out of every 10 minutes?

“Wait. What’s that?”

“Oh, that’s my Villager Breeder.”

“WHAT!?”

High level Minecraft runs on slave labour.

This is only a little hyperbolic. ‘Minecraft is colonial’ isn’t a particularly hot take. The core loop of Minecraft is objectively fucked:

1. Going to land that’s not yours.

2. Taking it because why not?

3. Stripping it of resources.

4. And rebuilding it better. (Better for whom? Everyone ™️. Obviously.)

Dan Olson has a very good (and short) video just saying it straight. Olson dives into the relationship between the players and the systems as implemented, further noting the behaviours these systems reward. For Olson, that was human trafficking.

Calling Minecraft colonial or imperial gets you laughed out of the room. This is one of the games. It’s foundational. There’s no plot. It’s like Pong or Tetris or Mario. It spawned a genre. I mean, if Minecraft is colonial, what does that say about the video games as a whole?

Could video games bad? No way, right?

Writer and narrative designer Meghna Jayanth in her talk at CGSA 2022, focused on the game design in the imperial mode and how to combat it. It’s a very good talk, the transcript of which is linked above, and it’s very cite-able, “As players and designers we all live, willingly or unwillingly, in the imperial mode of spectacle and alienation, geopolitical instability, global inequalities and accelerating ecological crisis. As Ulrich Brand and Markus Wissen argue, the imperial mode of living is one in which the imperialist world order is normalised, and inscribed into everyday practices and even unconsciously reproduced.”

In Minecraft, there is a modelling of systems that bends towards human rights violations or at least you quickly run into the limits of what you can do efficiently and ethically. It’s grim and a little funny, but mostly grim. The appeal of a village breeder is making more villagers. Think of each villager as a shop, so more villagers mean more chances one of them might have something you’re looking for. Each villager has a set amount of trades you can do with them and once you trade with them, you can no longer re-roll their offerings with a job brick. Elaborate villager breeding operations can render some of the most expensive and resource intensive materials to produce trivial to acquire.

There are hundreds of tutorials and videos of Minecraft creators showing off their Villager Breeder setup. I cannot stress enough that these are Geneva Convention breaking Rube-Goldberg machines. In a YouTube tutorial by Bigbooty17 (yes), a Spider-Man avatar walks us through an update to their villager breeder contraption for Minecraft version 1.21 and above. Their breeder relies on beds and boats. The beds are necessary for villager reproduction. Villagers need food and lodging to mate and have a child. The boats are for... I’m honestly not sure. A lot of this is really beyond me. I’m trying really hard to keep up.

Halfway through the video booty talks about “baby trajectories” and how a previous design had a flaw. They declare, “The new baby trajectory allows the parent to see the child and they’ll try to give them food, which lowers the amount of breeding that can happen between the parents.” booty calls this an oversight with a quick fix — a block in front of the parents’ eyes. Adult peekaboo, the child is out of sight, out of mind. It’s time to make a new one.

This is undoubtedly looney toons shit.

It also echoes real slave owner tactics where slaves of ‘good stock’ were made to breed. A good breeding slave was a “cash cow” as breeding new slaves was cheaper than going to the market. Stick a pin here. We’re going to get back to this.

Breeders are far from the only atrocity that Minecraft power gamers dabble in. Minecraft has a memory limit, which depends on your hardware limitations. So, what do you do if you’ve bred too many villagers? You get rid of some. Minecraft has a reputation system, where directly killing villagers lowers your rep [ and summons iron golems as divine retribution]. But if you developed a contraption that forced a bunch of villagers into a space one block high, and one block wide, squeezing them just tight enough that they despawn, effectively suffocating them out of existence — your reputation stays in-tact. Of course.

On the voyage from West Africa to the Caribbean, human beings were packed so tight into such unsanitary conditions, and with little food and care, that almost 2 million slaves died in transit alone.

There are games that are explicitly designed to have the player role-play a colonist. It’s time to talk about 4X games. The ‘4X’ stands for Explore, Expand, Exploit, and Exterminate. It knows what it is. These are conquest games where, more often than not, you are racing other colonial powers to world domination in some form. This could be militaristic or a very loosely defined “cultural victory.”

For my purposes, I’m just going to talk about slavery again and why the systems that simulate and abstract it 4X are all lacking to the point of being detrimental to the depiction.

First, and perhaps most importantly, why does this matter? Most living people think, understand, or at the very least pay lip service to, the notion that slavery is among the worst things a human can do to another human. We are very good at acknowledging that chattel slavery was bad. There is a collective idea of slavery informed by popular culture — TV, film, and video games — that dilutes the notion of “a person as property.” But also most of us just lack the imagination to fully suspend ethics and see another human being as something less than a farm animal.

We’ve already mentioned slave breeding. ‘People as property,’ extended beyond treating them as farm animals. You know how in movies or maybe you have a friend from a well off family, or you are the friend from a well off family, you’ll see a parent gift a child a car for their 21st birthday? They used to gift them people. A father might gift his daughter 5 slaves when she married.

Slaves were assets. They were protections against poor investments. They were dowries. Poorer white men would fake large estates to woo women from well-off families with an abundance of slaves. They were protections for white women against the tyranny of white patriarchy. American historian Stephanie Jones-Rogers writes in her excellent historical account on how African-American chattel slavery in the States intersected with white femininity and feminism in ‘They Were Her Property,’ "No group spoke about these women’s investments in slavery more often, or more powerfully, than the enslaved people subjected to their ownership and control. They were the people whose lives were forever changed when a mistress sold someone just so she could buy a new dress. They were best equipped to describe the agony that shook their bodies and souls when they returned from their errands to discover that their children were gone and their mistresses were counting piles of money they had received from the slave traders who bought them."

A person as property was a tool, an animal, and, at times, lesser than both. No 4X game attempts a depiction of slavery outside of a lever to pull where your community’s morale falls and your production skyrockets. For these games, slavery is a onetime decision and not an industry to maintain. In reality, owners were shackling a standing army that, if rallied and co-ordinated, would easily overthrow them.

To destabilise movements, many owners forbade literacy, separated families, and dispersed slaves who were from the same communities on arrival in the ‘New World.’ But the path of all enslaved and oppressed peoples is towards freedom. Resistance and rebellion are inevitabilities. News of success would spread, emboldening other slaves and inflicting paranoia on their owners.

This was one cost of slavery. Created solely from the efforts of the brave and desperate people chained to plantations. Other costs were even less tangible. For the ‘owner’ class, slaves were a part of everyday life. The dehumanisation of Black people was so total and indoctrinaton of young white children was so complete, that it would occur to only a few of them that slavery was a cruelty.

Slavery was big business. Some form of is the backbone of nearly all ‘developed’ countries. The other cost to the slaver was their humanity. To maintain slavery was to become more and more depraved and to be less human.

So the TL;DR is that I feel better about the fucked up slave machines in Minecraft and how they depict the visceral horror of a human trafficking and slavery than the purposeful depiction of similar atrocities in Civilisation or Frostpunk or whatever. There’s something viscerally repulsive about the former, while the latter is too distanced and sterile.

Notes:

1. This was supposed to be a short thing to plug two pieces. It ended up much longer and using research left on the cutting room floor of my most recent piece for No Escape. I’m glad to open and close the year writing with Kaile who is a fantastic editor that looks out for their writers while making sure their voice stays intact. My other piece for No Escape.

2. I really need to write something gentler to research, so I wanted to get a bunch of loose thoughts out there instead of trying to stitch together a fully researched piece. Hoping to not give this topic headroom for the rest of the year.

3. Still unemployed, still looking! If you’re an employer hi, we should talk because I’d probably love to write for you so I can pay rent and maybe treat my ADHD.

4. If you’d otherwise like to help me tide over another month of not having a job, so I can pay rent and maybe treat my ADHD. Here’s a link.