Minecraft, Sandboxes, and Colonialism | Folding Ideas

Clickbait title: OOPS! Did I Do A Colonialism In Minecraft?!

This video has been "done" for a while now, but I had a lot of trouble finishing it owing to a lingering sickness in my lungs that has made it difficult to record vocals that don't sound froggy and gross. Aside from that bit of TMI I do want to stress that I really love Minecraft, I love creative games, I love construction games, I love logistics games. All of the game footage in this video is mine. I have it because I own all these games and have played them all for somewhere between dozens and hundreds of hours each.

Music used:
Minecraft OST
Visager - Windy Bluffs

Bibliography:
Prairie Fires: The American Dreams of Laura Ingalls Wilder, 2017, Caroline Frasier

Texture pack and shaders:
Bare Bones Texture Pack
BSL Shaders

Written and performed by Dan Olson

[cako]

Yeah you are not fooling anyone, mister. The only reason you made this video was to show people your notre dame replica.

[ExtraThiccc]

The leftism leaving my body the moment I boot up a building/terraforming game

[toreole]

Funny sidenote: in 1.13 there was a bug, where villagers would continuously drop their prices, while they are swimming in water. This obviously led to people essentially waterboarding villagers until the prices were at their cheapest.

[deawinter]

The game does incentivize the zombie curing method by the villager giving the player permanent trade discounts. Unfortunately, this now incentivizes technical players to repeatedly have zombies murder their villagers, so they can cure them and get further discounts.

[nicklaurindo]

I hate when I accidentally recreate the *Spanish Empire* in Minecraft.

[murdeoc]

Minecraft's the only game that made think: "damn, I just accidentally drowned the wrong child" and only THEN did I have a good long think about myself...

[lenjisaslamma]

There is this mechanic in the game that works around having illagers (mobs that are like supposed to be a raiding party) if you kill one of them thats holding a banner, you get a debuff that when you walk into a village will set off a raid that you have to fight off or the illagers will kill all the villagers, when you successfully defend the villagers. They will give you presents and emeralds. and you can do this about as many times as you want. You can get rid of the debuff you want by just drinking milk, or turn that village into a raid farm by constantly saving the village from attackers you purposefully set up so that when they are safe again they will shower you with money. they inadvertently added war profiteering.

[alexmcd]

Things get even weirder in modded minecraft. I've seen people set up villager breeding systems that pull villagers into an insisting station. If they have useful trade goods, a belt takes them to a holding pen. If they have no useful trades, they are dropped into a grinder that kills them to extract resources from their bodies.

[ghastlyghandi]

“Let’s tame some cats” these few words lead to the deposition and oppressing of many people.

[Epinardscaramel]

Well it's not colonialism, you're just helping them out by constructing infrastructure that they could not… oh god.

[Name-otxw]

I recall a server owner describing my villager dormitory as a concentration camp.

[zyaicob]

I come back to this video ever so often and every time I do I agree with it a little more and have more to actually contribute to the discussion so here goes my 2023 addition.

I am a black man living in a former British colony, so that informs my perspective on the whole colonialism and subjugation of a perceived subhuman population issue. The zombie doctor method has historically been the only way I ever tried to create a village from scratch. It never once occurred to me to take existing villagers from their village. If I had considered it I'm sure I would have immediately asked the question "Where would that leave the village?" I couldn't bring myself to disrupt their community- even if they're not really human, they're certainly human enough that I understood, even if just unconsciously, that taking villagers out of their society and bringing them to mine would do untold damage to the existing societies and be unsustainable if I ever wanted to make another village.

You described the zombie doctor process in a way meant to highlight its difficulty, tedium and inaccessibility. I was, of course, aware of this, but again, I just unconsciously assumed "Hey, they're villagers, they're pretty much people, of course it's a difficult and tedious process". So when my cousin and I wanted to build a village, we developed a whole system for trapping zombie villagers, shielding them from the sun and sorting them by occupation (or at least coat colour). At one point we had a massive 5 storey complex that was basically an hospital with a zombie villager in each cubicle. When we went to the nether our focus was on getting enough resources to make our potions. It was a very elaborate operation, but never once did it occur to us that it was too much work to get our own actual villagers, because again, they're pretty much people, of course it's hard.

Before when I watched this video I never really related to those people you described who, being from different cultural backgrounds, played video games in fundamentally different ways. But now that I remember all the things I used to do when I played Minecraft with my cousins and sister back in the day, it seems obvious that I am also part of that tradition. Once when we were in a village we had found, my aunt, (I assuming hearing our conversation and getting the jist of what was going on), said in her facetious way "I hope y'all ain' in Africa killing black people". We laughed at another example of adults just not getting our video games and explained to her what was going on, but I now think a part of her, even subconsciously, was weirded out by the notion of going into a village and disrupting the villagers' lives with our own selfish needs and superior technology, treating them like signficantly less advanced and capable than we (which, of course, they were) and generally recreating some of the kinds of things that both our African foreparents and the Indigenous peoples of the Americas definitely went through. R.I.P. Aunty Mar.

[kooeykooeykooey]

There's a minecraft modpack called regrowth, where you spawn into an endless wasteland with only burnt trees and dead grass, and you have to scavenge for a few seeds and use magic to bring trees, plants and animals back to the world. There are no ores in the ground, to get resources, you have to grow them with flowers.

One of the mods in the pack allowed you to "build" cities out of nothing, but you didn't do the actual building. You brought stone and wood to the villagers, and they would build it themselves. A lot of these towns were based off non-white cultures, and while you could go in and change things after they were built, they looked really nice just how the villagers built them, so there was really no need to.

I've played a lot of modded minecraft, but that one really stood out.

[HighGround_]

This man has clearly never seen villager trading halls and breeding machines

[Kiss_My_Aspergers]

"- until IT adopts YOU -"

This is how cats work in general.

[SL-wtfm]

I do love that gaslighting villagers for cheaper prices after zombifying them and curing them is a mechanic

[RetroAlchemy]

"This would be so much easier if I could put villagers on leashes..."
-"Hold up"

[cypherfunc]

I'll admit, there's a certain point in Minecraft where you get frustrated trying to build farms and think "dammit, why can't I just use a lead on villagers?" and then you look at yourself REAL hard.

[qwerasdliop]

This is the same as killing homeless people in genshin. Like my first thought as someone from an ex-british colony was- "Wait a second, I'm the outsider here. Why am I killing the homeless people for loot?"

[tevanchinsangaram]

I recently came across a game called "Eco" which does an interesting job of addressing the environmental side of the problem presented in the video. It's another sandbox survivalcraft style game, but it provides consequences for your actions. Killing too many local wildlife will cause a population decline, and processing mined ores into useful metals creates toxic tailings which, if not properly stored, will leech into the nearby environment making the earth toxic, and preventing plant or animal life from growing there. It still leads the player into exploiting their environment to some degree, but forces them to at least consider the consequences of their actions.