Digital Conquerors: Minecraft and the Apologetics of Neoliberalism

Abstract

The widespread popularity of sandbox games, and Minecraft in particular, may be a recent phenomenon, but their appeal may be much older. Rather than representing a wholly new development in gaming, these games may participate in a larger media ecology that flatters a neoliberal worldview. This research calls for greater attention to the coercive economic assumptions encoded in game mechanics. Drawing on scholarship in ludology, postcolonial studies, and phenomenology, it suggests that sandbox games like Minecraft habituate players to myths of empire and capital that rationalize political and economic inequality. More than simply offering a blank slate for player creation, Minecraft rewards players for assuming their entitlement to the world's resources and thus their superiority over other inhabitants of the game world.

Children and Minecraft: A survey of children’s digital play

“…This enormous popularity has coincided with drastic changes in younger children’s access to digital game play due to the ubiquity of tablet computing, the rise in popularity of digital game–related content on YouTube (MacCallum-Stewart, 2013), and the ‘mainstreaming’ of gamer culture more generally (Golding and Van Deventer, 2016). As a result, research ranging across education (Nebel et al, 2016), culture studies (Apperley, 2014; Potts, 2015; Willett, 2015), game studies (Dooghan, 2016) and psychology (Baek and Touati, 2017) has begun examining the Minecraft phenomenon, its impact and ways to leverage its potential benefits.…”

Self-enterprising eSports: Meritocracy, precarity, and disposability of eSports players in China

“…In other words, gaming, especially eSports, may complement the neoliberal worldview and create a neoliberal utopia to encourage players to be neoliberal heroes in the game world and a neoliberal subject in the real world. For example, Daniel Dooghan (2019: 71) argues that video gaming, Minecraft in his example, is ‘a utopian space for aspirational neoliberal subjects’ to ‘vicariously experience the pleasures of neoliberalism’. By rehearing and assuring the viable, necessary, and personally rewarding neoliberal policies in the game world, it is mirroring, resonating, and justifying existing neoliberalism.…”

Tarot as a Technology

“…Various scholars have thoroughly articulated the ways in which patriarchy, heteronormativity, capitalism, sexism, racism, militarism, colonialism, ableism, and classism as forms of knowledge are integral to the development, dissemination, and deployment of emerging digital technologies (Wacjman, 1991;Balsamo, 1996;Nakamura, 2008;Dyer-Witheford & de Peuter, 2009;Crogan, 2011;Byrd, 2016;Noble, 2018;Dooghan, 2019). For example, in contextualizing the emergence of computer games as the "defining technology of the contemporary digital information age" (Crogan, 2011, p. xiii), Patrick Crogan traced the trajectories of scientific research, including cybernetics and virtualization, funded by the United States military for the goal of war-making during the 20th Century; the "computerbased simulational technics" that undergird modern computer games emerged from these trajectories (p. xx).…”