colonialism

More than 300 million copies of Minecraft have been sold, making it one of the world’s best-selling video games. Launched in 2011, it has found a significant place in educational settings, with suggestions for its integration into curricula for subjects like mathematics, geology, architecture, and digital literacy. The game is critiqued for perpetuating narratives of settler colonialism and celebrating violence associated with resource extraction. Players enter an unfamiliar land as a default character model, reflecting Western norms, and engage in defeating hostile creatures, which are argued to echo harmful stereotypes of Indigenous peoples. The game rewards players for mining resources and constructing empires, overlooking real-world implications of colonial extraction, labor exploitation, environmental degradation, and cultural erasure. In contrast, the game Motherload presents a critical view of colonial exploitation, depicting mining as perilous rather than enjoyable. The problematic assumptions about coloniality and power in Minecraft are noted to be deeply rooted in the history of computer and video gaming, with earlier games like The Oregon Trail facing criticism for similar portrayals.