Produsage, platform rhetoric, and Minecraft exceptionalism

A significant body of scholarship is concerned with trying to pinpoint what exactly makes Minecraft special: what accounts for its resounding success, or how it may be a “game-changer” in media production. This Minecraft exceptionalism comes in many forms, identifying different aspects of the game as definitive—although most highlight open-ended play, co-creative development, and extensibility (modability) as decisive. Scholars should treat claims about the uniqueness or

exceptional nature of any media artifact with a healthy skepticism, but not necessarily outright dismissal. Indeed, my own rationale for this research rests on some qualified claims of Minecraft exceptionalism.

Gerrelts (2014) introduces the anthology Understanding Minecraft: Essays on play, communities,

and possibilities by claiming that “Minecraft has engaged the popular imagination so profoundly that

it has transformed videogame culture,” likening its proliferation and enthusiastic adoption to the “Pac-Man Fever” of the 1980s (p. 1). He further links its success to the fact that “Mojang generously allows users to modify the game and share derivative works” and to the disruption of

producer/consumer distinction that is characteristic of participatory culture as discussed in Section 2.3:

Unlike other videogames that are produced by teams of programmers working largely in isolation from their audience, Minecraft has been shaped collaboratively with the help of the global gaming community. (2014, p. 1)

This sort of participatory development is commonly cited as the thing that makes Minecraft tick. Christiansen (2014) argues that the “mechanics of the game shape the behavior of the player, configuring her not only as survivalist or an adventurer, but as a builder, a programmer, and a hacker,” resulting in an “almost seamless continuum between player, modder, and developer” (2014, p. 34). Redmond (2014), who was introduced in Section 2.3, sees Minecraft as the inflection point in a transition towards a new “videogame commons” production model. For Lastowka (2013), it is no accident that Minecraft showed up in the era of YouTube, social media, metadata

crowdsourcing, and the other forms of user-generated content that are the hallmark of Web 2.0, of which, he argues, Minecraft has been both a benefactor and a beneficiary. Re-iterating that “amateur creativity” has been key to Minecraft’s success, Lastowka notes that the current intellectual property regime discourages and disincentivizes this sort of participatory production model. Schlinsog (2013) expresses a similar concern, arguing that merely granting contractual permission for users to make mods (as Mojang does) is not sufficient to protect participatory creativity,16 _{and copyright law must}

expand to recognize user-generated content as a new form of authorship if the Minecraft-like production model is to endure: this is not only a legal issue, but a cultural one as well, because copyright law can shape how we perceive authorship (Schlinsog, 2013, p. 206).

Leavitt (2013) describes “a verifiable ecosystem of player-creators” that “creates alongside the official production process, making Minecraft possibly one of the largest and broadest participatory cultural productions ever” (p. 2; emphasis original). Importantly, Leavitt argues that the vision of the “alpha artist” (i.e. Notch/Mojang) continues to matter to participatory contributors: rather than redirecting the game entirely according to their own whims, they recognize “experiential and creative boundaries based on the core game produced by Mojang’s developers” (p. 26). Murphy (2015) asserts that fans’ freedom to participate in creating Minecraft is fraught with tension.

Boundaries pertaining to the alpha artist’s priorities are not merely recognized and respected by fans, but are actively re-imposed by a company periodically trying to claw back some creative control over its product. Criticizing the “popular narrative framings” that “emphasize harmonious audience- developer relations,” Murphy claims that:

[Minecraft’s] production oscillated between the promotion of audience participation and the subsequent reassertion of developer control. Far from being a simple tale of web 2.0 entrepreneurialism, Minecraft’s unique rise in popularity is inherently linked to

paradoxical notions of freedom and openness. (2015)

16 _{For one thing, Schlinsog argues, US federal copyright law can pre-empt the enforcement of contracts under}

Another thread of Minecraft exceptionalism considers how the game can act as a techno- cultural substrate for further computation and culture-work. Duncan (2011) writes that Minecraft serves as an “experiential platform” that “works to provide players with experiences that are

somehow ‘about’ something other than the game’s presumed original intent” (p. 17-18). Leavitt, and the players he interviews, also speak of Minecraft as a platform, “not only literally as software but also metaphorically as a foundation on which participants build ancillary media” (2013, p. 26). Tremblay, Colangelo, and Brown (2014) do not mention “platforms,” but appear to be addressing the same phenomenon:

Notch is not the creator of an art object which can be analyzed like a work of literature, but is instead the creator of the vocabulary and grammar through which a player may articulate the game of Minecraft itself.... What separates Minecraft from games like Mass

Effect or World of Warcraft is that the language created in Minecraft’s development is open

and unrestricted enough to allow for the kind of “decentralized creativity” which has made it notable. (2014, p. 77; emphasis original)

For Simon and Wershler (2018), the fruits of Minecraft are not only computational and experiential, but allegorical and evocative too. The fundamental operational mechanism of Minecraft, they argue, is not the block but rather the grid, a cultural technique that serves as “the condition of possibility for the integration of aesthetics, governmentality and computational logic” (2018, p. 290). For its part, “Minecraft embodies that integration, and presents us with a powerful allegory for how it functions in 21st _{century culture” (p. 290).}