Here’s an idea for a research angle that struck me while reading through Ian Bogost’s Unit Operations: Approaching Video Game Criticism.
By its very nature, Minecraft’s world is defined by clearly identifiable units. Each block or item (unit) in the game (cobblestone, dirt, wool, and air for example) is a fully encapsulated representation of something that the player can manipulate in some way. Cobblestone is the result of mining naturally occurring or crafted stone, a byproduct of the violent process of mining that allows the player to break through the original stone block, but a byproduct that can be crafted into several different objects. Dirt can be dug up with a shovel and tilled to support farmland for wheat. Wool can be sheared from a sheep and combined with wooden planks to create a bed. There are hundreds of units (blocks) capable of innumerable operations within the game, so I believe that this could turn out to be a fruitful path for future research.
Unfortunately, at this point I’m only halfway through reading Bogost’s book, so the only this idea is basically in the prewriting phase of my writing process. I wouldn’t want to jump into any sort of analysis without fully understanding the approach completely. So instead what I’m basically working with now is a huge list of questions, some of that may resolve into facts and insights and some that won’t. It may be safe to assume at this point, however, that a block in Minecraft is essentially a unit in Bogost’s approach to video game criticism (as I understand it right now).
- What units are at play in Minecraft? What can I consider a unit in Bogost’s terms and what could I consider a unit based on how I understand the game?
- Since blocks are probably the primary units in Minecraft, how does each block encapsulate other aspects of a player’s lived reality?
- How does the encapsulation of lived experiences into blocks in Minecraft reflect human experiences of the world right now? Does the ability to manipulate the natural world through its identifiable unit operations counterbalance some fear about the state of the world embedded in the game users’ psyches?
- Who plays Minecraft anyway?
- Why out of all the games competing to generate cultural and economic capital though Internet-based commercial platform did Minecraft succeed? Could anything of substance be learned from trying to determine what makes Minecraft stand out?
- Though interesting, can studying Minecraft’s unit operations generate insights about how humans live, or should live?
- Is attempting to find meaning in this game a rather sophisticated attempt to justify the many hours I’ve spent playing the game?
- Though it may not be helpful to attempt to draw a line determining the totalizing system power by Minecraft, can looking at the various systems that support the game as unit operational (systems such as the user maintained Minecraftwiki.net)?
- How does Minecraft reflect how its users perceive the world and their place within it? What effects does modernity have on the kinds of unit operations that are emphasized as the game evolves over time?
- Does the history of Minecraft’s development as a cultural object offer any insights into changing patterns of developer-user interactions?
- Mojang is a startlingly tiny company—how does its size impact what unit operations receive emphasis over time?
- Minecraft borrows unit operations from several genres of existing video games, especially from basic groupings of games like first person shooters (FPSs) and role playing games (RPGs); what does this tendency say about the state of video games as a cultural media?
It’s important at this point, I think, before I ramble on and on about the hundreds of questions generated by Bogost’s book and my experiences with Minecraft, to point out that my thinking is heavily influenced by the strong example of the “chance encounter” as a unit operation as discussed in chapter 6. Before reading this particular chapter I hadn’t really grasped the nature of Bogost’s units until he introduced the chance encounter across Charles Baudelaire’s poem, “A une passante,” (quoted 75-76) which reveals the “figure that fascinates” (77) that “has become an effective unit operation, a tool for engaging modern life” (79). This idea develops through Charles Bukowski’s “A woman on the street” (quoted 78), a compact unit operational representative of modernity. Through Bogost’s discussion we then see that in Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s Amélie, the protagonist plays with the unit operation of the chance encounter and the figure that fascinates: “she has become the programmer of her own procedural urban counterparts” (81). Finally, The Sims: Hot Date brings the discussion back to video games, with Bogost explaining that, like Amélie, players of this particular game have significant agency to act to either fulfill or resist the unit operation of the chance encounter. In Bogost’s words, “The Sims: Hot Date finally takes the ultimate step in representing the chance encounter as a unit operation: it encapsulates it into the code of a simulation” (87).
From there it’s a pretty short step to the units and the unit operations that researchers (like me!) could use to analyze a game like Minecraft. Still, I’m left wondering the same old question that I’m always wondering: “why care?” However, I think the rest of Bogost’s book should continue to uncover Minecraft as a strong example of unit operations and how they might function within society.
jordan weagly 