On the 10-year anniversary of minecraft: two interventions in extractive colonialism

In light of the 10-year anniversary of the release of Minecraft, the wildly popular survival/building game, this retrospective considers the game as a vastly impactful digital text of settler colonialism. The ways in which the game’s ‘survival mode’ approaches the extraction of resources from land is fundamentally entangled in colonial fictions of indigeneity, gendered systems of property, and a Euro-humanist sense of entitlement and ownership. Considering Minecraft as a colonial text allows for two theoretical and aesthetic interventions: first, the visual art of Peruvian-American Eamon Ore-Giron, who challenges colonial extractivism in the two-channel piece, Morococha, and second, the 2006 flash game released by XGen Studies, Motherload, which approaches mining-based gameplay with key differences. These two interventions highlight the importance of digital realms as a terrain of colonial space-making and thus a site of analysis for cultural geographers. Moreover, they may help to chart useful paths to the production and realization of anti-colonial digital textuality.