Another Minecraft post from Wren, fork found in kitchen, yeah yeah whatever. It is hardly a secret how I feel about this game, but it is also not a secret how an entire generation has been shaped by this game as well, even if the rest of them are… a lot more normal about it than I am, to say the least. Minecraft is the best-selling game of all time and has been that way since 2019, which has sparked a well-known meme surrounding child labor laws in mining facilities and kids just aching to get a pickaxe back in their hands. Due to this, Minecraft perfectly exemplifies just what it means to be a game of playbor, and how it has affected millions of people, not just children, and how they choose to experience fun in the gamespace.
Minecraft, as the name very clearly suggests, is a game that surrounds the mechanics of mining blocks and then crafting them into new blocks or items. Now, mining in Minecraft is not just the act of taking a pickaxe and whacking stone or coal until it breaks, but it is the entire action of swinging your blocky fist into anything that is not a mob or fellow player. Chopping down a tree is considered mining, punching grass is mining, fearfully breaking a block to see if the skeleton chasing you is still waiting is mining. Everything the player is capable of doing in Minecraft invokes purposeful action, and thus, labor. Even crafting is labor, because you have to gather the materials and then place them into a Crafting Table to acquire them. However, because this is what the game is primarily built on, this also means that it is the core play style of Minecraft, and thus, the enjoyment felt when playing Minecraft is one built (literally) on the player’s labor.
There are numerous ways to enjoy Minecraft without introducing mods, and the ways I interact with mainly surround building and redstone. I am personally terrible at redstone, so I stick to building and just watching others mess around with redstone, and due to how much Hermitcraft I engage with on a daily basis, I have become quite good at placing blocks and making them look pretty. This is also another example of playbor in the game, where even if I am not even playing the game, I am still taking in information that I can then put to use the next time I load my world, and therefore, the next time I engage in playbor in Minecraft. I also thoroughly enjoy mining for resources for said builds, and while I play mainly in single-player and do not need to share my resources, this is still an area of the game where I am doing laborious tasks in the name of playing the game.
Some players, namely those on Hermitcraft, take this idea of playbor a step further than others.
In the image above, Grian walks into ImpulseSV’s base on day three of the server (not Episode 3, DAY 3), where he encounters a full Villager Trading Hall (another incredibly obvious example of playbor in the Minecraft gamespace), not to mention the giant hole Impulse has dug outside. Reasonably, Grian exclaims “Oh, come ON! No way! This is not a normal amount of work to do in a couple of days!” and he is right, but this goes back to the notion of playbor from before. Impulse, for no reason other than his own enjoyment of the game, put in over two days of work in a three day timespan so he could progress further in whatever his plans are for the new season. The use of the word “work” by Grian raises another interesting point surrounding the division between labor and work in the gamespace. Most games have some aspect of player labor in their game mechanics, but every single Hermit plays Minecraft because it is their job. They have, in the most literal sense, gamified the idea of real life labor by playing a game all about labor as play.
While I have yet to turn my mining urges into a career, I have experienced playbor as procrastination of other playbor within my Minecraft world. Instead of completing my own set goal of killing the Ender Dragon, I decided to chop down a bunch of trees and build a dock instead. Then, after successfully killing the Ender Dragon because I wanted the advancement, I, instead of going to grab the elytra so I could have an easier time accomplishing the rest of my building plans, decided to spend 3 days building a lighthouse complete with a working redstone light inside of it. Arguably, the elytra was the easier option and would have made building that lighthouse so much quicker, but I chose to do more labor by mining stone and calcite because that was what I had deemed more fun.
Minecraft‘s game design is intent on giving the player a way to engage in labor without it feeling like a chore because every element of labor in it is gamified to be an area of play, not work. Even Hermits, whose actual job it is to play Minecraft, have found a successful way to gamify the labor of working in the real world by engaging with a game that essentially only includes playbor. It is no wonder the children, and me, and the Hermits, and millions of people across the globe, yearn for the mines when the mines allow them to craft and build whatever they want.
I find it interesting how you extend the concept of playbor to not only traditional mining in Minecraft but also nontraditional mining, crafting, and building. The unique way you choose to play Minecraft reminds me of the desire for safe productivity that we mentioned in class. The way you choose to engage with Minecraft, by avoiding defeating the Ender Dragon at first and focusing on the process of building structures instead, seems to showcase that desire of having a safe way to perform more traditional types of labor (mining, crafting, and constructing).
I feel like there’s another parallel you can make with playbor and certain types of Minecraft play, specifically the insanity that is the community surrounding redstoning. I don’t think its crazy for me to say that you could argue the redstone community and their act of redstoning is the most extreme form of labor as play you can find within Minecraft. Of course, I’m not talking about the type of redstone you would do spice up your doors in your base, I’m talking about the form of redstoning that blurs the line between actual real world engineering and playing a video game, ie, making a playable minecraft within minecraft or a compute that computes PI. These players aren’t doing all of this because the game requires it, they’re doing it because the challenge itself has become the fun for them. These builds demand hours of troubleshooting, optimization, calculation of tick timings (and having dabbled in redstoning, this is something I dread and couldn’t imagine doing for thousands of repeaters), and design iteration that resemble actual technical labo, Yet all of that effort is chosen with free will and even celebrated with many showing off their creations to the larger community. In that sense, it’s very parallel to large-scale builders who create immense structures (like the team making all of Westeros from A Song of Ice and Fire.) Both groups take on staggering amounts of labor not because the game demands it, but because the process of building, engineering, and perfecting has become the core of their enjoyment.
I feel that your argument about how Minecraft’s game design that turns labor into a fun activity and not a chore can apply to the entire cozy game genre. Similarly to Minecraft, other cozy games like Animal Crossing or Stardew Valley has the player doing literal labor like farming, fishing, or chopping trees, yet people put hundreds of hours into these games. People find these menial chores fun; people have even joked that if a game includes a fishing mechanic, it immediately elevates its quality as a game. I imagine the joy that people find from this gamified form of labor is the ability to see the product of your own work in a faster period of time and without feeling physically tired by the end of it (though playing a game for hours on end can also lead to a physical exhaustion). Though I can’t say I’ve cracked the code on why cozy games are so enjoyable, I do feel like you begun to scratch the surface of it with your analysis of Minecraft.
Your extrapolation of playbor to real life work was a compelling argument, and your discussion of how Minecraft is a game that only utilizes playbor was good as well.