Abstract
In 2011, Mojang released Minecraft Pocket Edition (PE), a mobile version of their popular Minecraft franchise for Android and iOS devices that allows the infinitely blocky sandbox worlds to be manipulated directly through touchscreen interfaces. While the virtual worlds created by Minecraft players have drawn attention of various researchers, the configurations of play made possible by different gaming devices—particularly touchscreen devices—have been largely under-examined. Using Barad’s notion of apparatuses to conceptualize gaming interfaces as sites of intra-activity, our study reports on a microethology of young Minecraft PE players engaged in collaborative play sessions. Over seven play sessions, which included two sessions observing Minecraft play on personal computer (PC)- and console-based versions, we examined how players’ bodies and gaming apparatuses collaboratively materialize gaming events that highlight the space-time biases of these different modes of Minecraft play that what we call momentary and monumentary.
Minecraft Pocket Edition (Mojang, 2011) is a mobile game wherein an “algorithmic ecology” (Phillips, 2014: 106) procedurally generates expansive gameworlds where players may continually build, shape, and modify the gameworld’s landscape. Unlike the heavily researched personal computer (PC)- and console-based versions of Minecraft (see Garrelts, 2014), the under-explored mobile version (henceforth Minecraft PE) offers pleasures of gameplay that are unique to the touchscreen interface since players gesticulate directly on a screen that simultaneously displays the environment they are modifying, affording a different bodily orientation to the familiar acts of hacking and stacking the recombinatory gameworld. The study we report on seeks to challenge the notion that our understandings of Minecraft can be exhausted through consideration of its desktop or console versions alone. To do so, we explore how the gaming system (i.e. the configuration of the interface and platform) is entangled with/in other human and nonhuman agencies, such that Minecraft gameplay is as much a performance of the platform as it is of the player.
We employed a microethological approach (Giddings, 2014) to observe the Minecraft play of participants of different ages playing on different platforms (with a predominant focus on Minecraft PE). This qualitative method uses granular analysis of audiovisual data taken from collaborative gameplay sessions with pairs of players, recording both on- and off-screen activity in order to attend to the “choreography” of embodied play through the touchscreen device as well as gestural and verbal performances (Giddings and Kennedy, 2008). Approaching Minecraft PE as a material-discursive “apparatus” that co-configures its interactants, this study offers an empirically based, theoretically driven exploration of the ways Minecraft PE “materializes” the bodies of male participants of varying ages playing under observation (Barad, 2003).
This article first discusses existing scholarly engagements with Minecraft that, while representing an array of disciplines and approaches, so far lack thorough consideration of the mobile version of the game, as well as the body in play. Following our review of the current literature, we expand on our theoretical undergirding through a discussion of apparatuses and cybernetic assemblages. Finally, we narrate thick descriptions of five microethological gameplay sessions involving pairs of Minecraft players of various ages and gaming experiences. In doing so, we are not overly concerned with schematically comparing Minecraft PE to other Minecraft modes; rather, our aim is to better understand how players perform expertise and operational fluency surrounding mobile Minecraft play. We conclude by proposing an understanding of these expertises in terms of momentary and monumentary performances of Minecraft.
Minecraft and the pleasures of assembling
This study is concerned with Minecraft specifically because of variations in play afforded in each procedurally generated gameworld (i.e., seeds), and the manner in which players are able to collaboratively or individually shape the gameworlds. Furthermore, Minecraft’s game modes allow players to strategically alternate between styles of play that give players either restricted resources (Survival mode) or unrestricted resources (Creative mode). Minecraft thus provides a game space that is a “playground” in Giddings’s (2014) terms, a space that affords “two-way flow between environment and children” in an “ecological feedback loop” (p. 124).
While still a relatively new game, Minecraft has, nevertheless, garnered significant attention. The contributions in Nate Garrelts’s (2014) edited, interdisciplinary collection Understanding Minecraft collectively argue that Minecraft affords various permutations of play that are ripe for scholarly and theoretical applications. Among these interdisciplinary research trends is an attempt to understand what Minecraft is and what it can do, as exemplified by Garrelts’s (2014) edited collection. For example, Bull (2014) and Phillips (2014) examine co-constructed gendered experiences between players and their Minecraft gameworlds. While Bull (2014) argues that Minecraft directs players toward masculinized play that compels colonization and transformation of nature as a necessary requirement, Phillips (2014) counters that a greater range of collaborative gameplay is possible in an “algorithmic ecology,” arguing that each seed in Minecraft “produces a very queer form of nature that proceeds according to its own nonreproductive rhythms” (p. 113). In discussing pedagogical applications, Brand et al. (2014) framed the co-construction of “Minecraft University” as constituting a form of play that was student centered and ultimately untethered from initial pedagogical designs. Bebbington and Vellino (2015) similarly affirmed the educational value of Minecraft due to the manner in which the game’s lack of scaffolding encourages self-regulated learning through information seeking from paratextual sources such as online discussion boards, YouTube videos, and wikis. These works emphasize the nondeterministic and open character of Minecraft gameplay, while, nonetheless, focusing on essential characterizations of the game or its potential application.
Since we are less concerned with understanding the affordances and limitations of Minecraft than we are with situating it within players’ lived experiences, we suggest an alternative to exploring the gendered and/or pedagogical applications of Minecraft is exploring performances of players. As exemplified by Dezuanni et al.’s (2015) rich ethnography of pre-adolescent female Minecraft players in and out of school, gaming expertise may be developed through a complex array of spaces, performances, materials, and relations between human and nonhuman bodies. By concentrating on various bodily configurations of play (i.e. where and how they played and with whom they played), Dezuanni et al. (2015) argue that the development of expertise was constantly “transient and contested” among various spaces and assemblages (p. 161). Trček (2014) similarly demonstrated that Minecraft players negotiate various nonhuman components and assemblages to build expertise. Trček’s case studies reveal how this involves a combination of play across gaming platforms and spaces, as well as material remediations and paratexts. Hollett and Ehret’s (2015) ethnographic observations of Parker, a 12-year-old oncology patient learning to play Minecraft during a hospital stay, similarly contextualizes gameplay amid various “intra-acting” components (Barad, 2003). Hollett and Ehret (2015) centered their analysis around various “interruptions” in gameplay “that positioned Parker […] as agentive and in control of his body and how others responded to it” (p. 1863). These ethnographic studies collectively paint Minecraft expertise as situationally and socially constructed by various assemblages of “intra-acting” bodies and components. These performances emphasize what Haraway (2007) calls a “becoming with” that happens in the intermingling of agencies—in our case, the materialization of Minecraft gameplay and the shifting boundaries between bodies as they performatively “intra-act.”
Similarly, our study aims to provide a detailed qualitative analysis of players’ in-the-moment performances with and configurations of the various intra-acting bodies at play in Minecraft. At the same time, since none of these studies directly focus on the machinic components that interface with human body parts during gameplay, our study centers around the dispositions developed via different apparatuses of Minecraft gameplay, particularly the distinctions between touchscreens, keyboards, and gamepad controllers. In this regard, our study is less aligned with the majority of pedagogical- and developmental-driven work on Minecraft (although our study certainly has implications for those fields); rather, like Hollett and Ehret (2015), our work is more aligned with posthumanist and materialist studies that regard videogame play as networked accomplishments, such as Behrenshausen (2007), De Castell et al. (2008), and Giddings and Kennedy (2008) among others. Each of these works leverage granular, qualitative observations of the intra-activity of human and machinic body parts via particular configurations of players, platforms, contexts, and conditions of observation. This means, according to Behrenshausen (2007), understanding videogame play as a “fleshy communion” between players, platforms, and screens through which players’ bodies are “literally given shape and configured. (p. 352)” The following section will theorize our notion of the “apparatus” in relation to cybernetic assemblages.
Theorizing the gameplay apparatus
From a posthuman perspective, apparatuses are “(re)configurings/discursive practices that produce material phenomena in their discursively differentiated becoming” (Barad, 2003: 820). Barad (2003) proposes that any apparatus—whether a scientific instrument or videogame controller—co-constructs phenomena along with human participants. In this way, the instruments of gameplay co-configure the experiences of players, “materializing” the players’ bodies in particular ways—eliciting and cultivating a shifting range of affects, bodily dispositions, and modes of perception and cognition.
According to Hayles (1999), such posthuman apparatuses additionally dissolve the boundaries between human and nonhuman agents. Hayles argued that cybernetics accounts for the posthuman body that is at once human and nonhuman—specifically in the theorized interface between human and machine bodies. Such posthuman perspectives, therefore, problematize a priori boundaries between on-screen and off-screen, blurring these elements together into a heterogeneous circuit. This is precisely why Hollett and Ehret (2015) were concerned with “interruptions,” since a sudden shift in attention to other vectors in the gameplay space, for example, a meowing cat, indicates that there was an intense feedback loop to begin with! As will be discussed below, the touchscreen interface of Minecraft PE makes this most apparent since the input and output components are conjoined at the screen, meaning that human and machine components interface at the point of contact—the screen (Romeo et al., 2003). At the same time, depending on how familiar the human and nonhuman bodies are with one another, attention to the apparatus may or may not “interrupt” gameplay. Our study thus posits that different permutations of the apparatuses for playing Minecraft configure different performances—not because the cybernetic interface demands it but because players and platforms intra-actively materialize it. To accomplish this, we offer a provisional account of the particular pleasures and dispositions that mobile and motive play with Minecraft PE make possible.
Methodology
Following Giddings’ (2009, 2014) guidelines for microethology, our study undertook participatory observation in order to explore how individuals engage in gameplay through Minecraft PE version Alpha 0.13.0. 1 Barad (2003) argues that researchers concerned with observing phenomena need to be mindful of “the materialization of all bodies—‘human’ and ‘nonhuman’—and the material-discursive practices by which their differential constitutions are marked” (p. 810). Giddings (2009) presents microethology as such a methodology for observing the relations between human and machinic agents when we interface with digital media. Compared to microethnography, microethology attempts to focus on events in order to emphasize “the dynamic between the elements in play: entities coming together, material and aesthetic chains of cause and effect or feedback” (Giddings, 2009: 149). The cybernetic feedback loop enabled through a digital media apparatus thus becomes the site in microethology for observing the assembling of human and nonhuman agents.
According to Giddings (2014), all forms of play are “analogous to the complicated technologies of simulation and virtual worlds” as each involve feedback loops across virtual spaces (p. 155). Gameplay is thus a form of play in which the agency of the game, the interfaces, the gameworlds, and the apparatuses within the gameworlds are “part(icipant)s” in the assemblages of the play event (Giddings and Kennedy, 2008). Microethology of gameplay, therefore, requires multidirectional observation of the event (i.e. both on-screen and off-screen) to be recorded and synchronized. As such, like Hollett and Ehret (2015), this study employed a combination of audiovisual recordings that used the researchers’ game-screen as a bidirectional vantage point to observe the choreography between on-screen and off-screen virtual spaces. In relying directly on the researchers’ game-screen to record in-game, we further acknowledge our own roles as observers and players; in this sense, the mechanisms of our study colluded in materializing the very phenomena we sought to observe (Barad, 2007). Our presence, as adult, male, nonexpert Minecraft players, indeed co-configured our participants’ performances in each session. However, following traditions of (particularly feminist) science and technology studies, we are not concerned with observing so-called naturally occurring gameplay; at the same time, microethology encourages observation that allows for intra-activity to unfold as the latest iteration of familiar practices (Giddings, 2014). We are inclined not to think of our presence and agency in these sessions as a limitation, as per traditions of positivist and post-positivist research; rather, as a condition for transparent, reflexive, and ethical observation. As will be detailed, participants indeed exercised a wide range of agency in co-configuring gameplay alongside the researchers as well as contexts of gameplay.
Participants
Participants were recruited through a snowball sampling of the local community surrounding a North American university. Five participant groups in total were observed for sessions lasting 30–60 minutes each (see Table 1 for description of each group). Group A consisted of two young siblings playing PE over the course of two sessions, Group B consisted of a 27-year-old male playing Minecraft on Playstation 4 (PS4) for one session, followed by a session with PE, Group C consisted of two young male friends, Group D consisted of adolescent PC players, and Group E consisted of an 8-year-old playing PE on the same tablet as his father. We note that these groupings were not intended to serve as comparisons across age groups or gaming platforms and that we did not intend for any group to serve as a control, as might be expected in a study more concerned with linking Minecraft to theories of learning and/or of child development. In both our recruitment processes and in coordinating observation sessions, we deferred to what our participants insisted to be their preferred configurations for play.
Participant groups.
Instruments for observation
Observation sessions were recorded using a combination of audiovisual technologies to capture the on- and off-screen gameplay. On-screen data were recorded from the primary author’s mobile device (a Nexus 7 or Nexus 6 running Android 6.00) using the Android application Screen Recorder. A Canon EOS Rebel SLR camera with video-recording capabilities recorded off-screen visual and audio data. For each session, participants and the researcher engaged in 30–60 minutes of recorded gameplay in Minecraft PE in addition to other forms of Minecraft play as agreed on, with the participants deciding on which gameworld to play in, whether to use Survival or Creative mode, as well as the physical space to engage in play (i.e. an on-campus research laboratory or their home). A parent of participants for Groups A and C was present at all times during gameplay, and all participants and parents provided written and oral consent per institutional review board regulations. Throughout gameplay, the primary author regularly verbally prompted the participants to explain gameplay action, as well as ask about typical or past gameplay habits. Within the Minecraft seed, the primary author acted as an observer and interacted directly with participants’ avatars only when requested or directed to by the participants.
Observations of play sessions
The five participant groups detailed in Table 1 yielded seven total play sessions, five of participants playing Minecraft PE and two of play on PC- or console-based versions of Minecraft. Audiovisual data from screen-capture and video-recording sources were synchronized using ELAN 4.9.1 (Lausberg and Sloetjes, 2009) in order to view both synchronized video sources and annotate the video sources to compare to field notes made following play sessions. As with studies analyzing audiovisual recordings of ludic interactions both in and around the screen (Taylor, 2006; Taylor et al., 2009), we find these data are well suited for what St. Pierre and Jackson (2014) call “post-coding analysis.” This approach, which is informed by grounded theory (Charmaz and Mitchell, 2001), allowed us to view events as they occurred on- and off-screen simultaneously rather than enforcing, via instrumentation, a priori distinctions between events happening in the gameworld versus those happening in “meatspace.” In doing so, we attended to “emerging themes” and categories (Charmaz and Mitchell, 2001: 160), which allowed us to make careful observations, annotations, and, in some cases, codes (e.g. hand switches on a tablet screen) based on the simultaneous video sources.
In viewing and re-viewing the play sessions, we observed contrastive choreographies of playing on mobile or stationary apparatuses, and we attempt to present our analysis in the form of a diffractive reading (Barad, 2007). Barad (2007) argues that this strategy attends to how boundaries emerge through intra-activity and “how different differences get made, what gets excluded, and how those exclusions matter” (p. 30). In our case, a diffractive reading of Minecraft play attends to the subtle distinctions in how participants play the same game in performatively distinct ways that are shaped by platform, context, and participants’ relationships, ages, and gaming histories.
In what follows, we base our observations on a separation of stationary play experiences and mobile ones. This is by no means intended as the basis for rigid comparison. Rather, we see this separation as an “agential cut”: Barad’s term, operating within her method of “diffractive reading,” for enacting temporary boundaries between phenomena that are otherwise entangled. This agential cut by platform type is not the only one we could have made—we could have grouped our observations by player age, for instance, or by context (campus vs domestic)—but nonetheless, it is a particularly salient emic distinction within Minecraft communities. While we certainly see platform type as key in shaping how participants play, we do not see it as over-determining play experiences. In what follows, we see the contrasts between stationary and mobile play as generative in terms of how we might theorize Minecraft play experiences within and across platform types, though certainly not generalizable due to the specificity of our observations. Throughout these narratives, we pay particular attention to the choreography of the bodies of the players, avatars, and devices as entangled components that highlight space-time biases (Innis, 1986; Tobin, 2012) in the different assemblages of play.
Stationary apparatuses
The two stationary play sessions involved participants from Groups B and D (see Table 1). Group B consisted of participant JJ and his two longtime friends, M and N, playing through the PS4 online network where they have, along with several others, frequently played console-based games online together. Our observation of JJ playing Minecraft occurred in his gaming room in his home, while M and N played in their respective homes. For this session, JJ broadcast his play to his Twitch.tv account, which the researcher then recorded through screen-capture as well as a video camera setup to observe JJ. The scene was as such: JJ perched on a chair approximately 3 ft away from a desk mounted with a TV and his PS4; wireless headphones on his head; PS4 controller wrapped around his hand; iPhone lying on the desk in front of the PS4; and, most importantly, JJ’s cat, Martiná, lying on the chair between his perched feet.
Group D consisted of participants B and H playing on separate PC devices (B on a dual-monitor desktop computer; H on a borrowed laptop) at B’s family home with the two of them playing in the same room with the primary author. Computers were stationed on desks on opposite sides of the room so that B and H had their backs to one another. The scene was as follows: B stationed at his dual-monitor computer on the left, equipped with mouse, keyboard, and seated in an office computer chair; H stationed at a desk with a borrowed laptop on the right, without a separate mouse and seated in a foldout chair; the researcher stationed adjacent to the camera; and B’s and H’s parents and siblings socializing downstairs.
Stable bodies
What is perhaps most striking about the stationary play sessions is how relatively stable JJ, B, and H were. While all players remained audibly vocal and active in-game, the general positioning of their bodies was largely consistent throughout play. As mentioned, JJ sat in a manner so that his feet were on the chair while knees were bent in a form of perched position in order to accommodate his cat, who JJ claimed liked to sit on the same chair as him while he played. JJ remained positioned like this for approximately 29 minutes until his legs “fell asleep,” after which he placed his cat on the floor and sat in a more typical position for another half an hour.
B and H similarly tended to remain in the same seated positions facing their own screens; however, there were two circumstances in which B and H un-dock from their stations. First, early in the play session, H complained that his folding chair was too low from the desk, so B found a pillow for H to sit at a more appropriate height relative to the desk. Second, throughout the first 20 minutes of the play session, H twice complained that the sensitivity settings of his laptop were “killing me!” At approximately 24 minutes into play, after H complained a third time, B asked H, “Do you want me to fix it?” B then stood up from his station and approached H’s station. After a moment, H leaned back from his laptop and B bent down to alter the sensitivity settings on the laptop.
In both of these examples, it should be noted that JJ and H both experienced some form of bodily discomfort with how they were positioned in play with the game; yet, both prolonged the discomfort but at the same time they remained active within the gameworld. It bears asking then: why did JJ and H prolong their discomfort? While it is certainly easy to point to JJ’s cat or H’s unfamiliarity with the laptop, the presence of these components in their respective play assemblages does not account for each participant prolonging discomfort while continuing to play. In the process of remaining continually engaged in a feedback loop that privileges input/output components so that eyes attend to the monitors and hands attend to the controller/keyboard cursor for long periods of time, JJ and H’s bodies had been conditioned to maintain that feedback loop. Their bodies needed to be attuned to the gaming apparatus, and therefore, discomfort with the apparatus was accommodated and prolonged.
Temporal biases
In addition to the stable positioning of their bodies as they played, JJ, B, and H played in familiar, previously developed seeds. JJ played in a seed in Survival mode originally created by his friend N, a vast and sophisticated world constructed by their entire group of friends. B and H, similarly, brought the researcher into a seed that B had originally created with his sibling that H would switch between Creative and Survival modes. While these were not the only seeds that the researcher was privy to during the play sessions with each group, these worlds are of particular interest because of their existence prior to this study.
The seed that JJ predominantly played in during his session was hosted by his friend, N. This seed had been intensively shaped and modified by JJ and his friends over several months of gameplay and, while hosted by N, was frequently left accessible to JJ and others even while N was not playing. JJ claims that he perhaps spent the most time alone in this world, and this was surely reflected in a sophisticated multilevel house that he had constructed far from the structures built by his friends. JJ’s house contained, among other things, a colorful glass waterfall, a simulacrum of his cat Martiná, many chests of mineral resources, and a passage to a complex underground mine-rail system. Indeed, the entire seed evidenced hours upon hours of deliberate planning and gameplay, as well as a bias toward ocularcentric spectacle. For example, at approximately 23 minutes into play, at a designated quarry where JJ and his friends mine for sandstone, N and M insisted that JJ capture in the recording a large sign in the distance that spelled out the name of a male anatomical body part. Their world was one intended for permanence and monument more than spontaneous play, and this was further evidenced by the fact that besides roaming around the landscape, JJ, N, and M continued tasks in the world they had left off months beforehand.
Similarly, the seed that B and H played in, one originally built with B’s sister, was a flat world covered with large-scale replicas of B and his sister’s earlier avatars, Minecraft icons such as Steve and an Enderman. While B noted that he occasionally changes the game mode, this seed appeared intended to build structures in order to mark specific achievements. For example, among the monuments were several buildings, many of which contained elaborate mechanisms, one of which was what B called a “suicide booth” that kills the player that activates a particular switch. H and B then decided to add to the world by constructing a mansion, and while the structure was not completed by the conclusion of the play session B stated that he and H could finish at a later time.
As mentioned, while these seeds were not the only worlds that the participants played in during the observation sessions, JJ, B, and H’s gameplay within these worlds results largely in monuments to gamic mastery, all of which reflect sustained dedication to what JJ called the essential purpose of the game as observed by Bull (2014): first you mine, then you craft. In the following section, we discuss how mobile play involved divergent forms from these.
Mobile apparatuses
Participants from Groups A, B, C, and E all engaged play sessions with Minecraft PE. Groups A and C involved two youth pairs, while Group B involved JJ playing PE for the first time with the primary author, and Group E involved a father and son playing on the same device. With the exception of Group E, participants in all of the mobile play sessions (including the researchers) played on a separate mobile device. As with the previous section, we will provide a brief scene-setting for each play sessions.
Group A consisted of two brothers, S (9 years old) and O (5 years old), who had engaged in a pilot play session with the researcher 3 months prior to the recorded play session. The brothers played in the lounge space of the authors’ campus-based research laboratory, consisting of two couches facing one another as well as several small stools on wheels. S and O sat on the couches or stools and often used the table to hold their tablets. The brothers were well accustomed to playing Minecraft together (although rarely in the same seed) and had been playing the game on their Android devices for well over a year.
Group B consisted of JJ playing at home with the primary author, while seated on a couch next to one another. JJ had never played PE, and when asked to do so exclaimed, “What am I—a child?!” JJ played on an Android tablet device provided by the researcher and sat perched on his living room couch in a similar manner as when he played on his PS4. It should be noted that JJ had not played PE before but was, nonetheless, well accustomed to playing mobile games on his iPhone.
Group C consisted of participants C and J (both 9 years old and friends since infancy) playing in the lounge space of the same research laboratory as Groups A and E. They played PE regularly with one another as well as with other friends and sat adjacent to one another on a couch.
Finally, Group E consisted of the father-and-son participants BB (8 years old) and P (late 30s) playing in the research laboratory the same as Groups A and C. BB and P played on a single Kindle device, as they were accustomed to playing (indeed, they declined to use an extra device provided by the researchers). In this fashion, they sat on a couch so that BB was seated near the edge of the seat, with P seated behind him and with his arms wrapped around BB so that they could both access the device.
Frenetic bodies
As previously discussed, an important distinction in the touchscreen interfaces is that input and output components are conjoined on the surface of the touchscreen. This gaming apparatus obscures certain exchanges of input and output (i.e. fingers on the screen not only input gamic action but also block visual output) as well as cuts the feedback loop short by reducing distance between fingered input and visual output. This means the entangled bodily components are not necessarily “locked” into an input/output feedback loop as they are in a stationary apparatus. As was observed by participants from Groups A and C, hands, limbs, and bodies are much less stable and much busier. This may be attributed to the lightweight nature of the gaming devices, as well as because PE does not require discrete up/down buttons for input; rather, the input components on the touchscreen for Minecraft PE involve a partially opaque directional pad that sits in the bottom left corner of the screen for players to control directional movement, while point of view is controlled by swiping up or down, and attack/seize functions are controlled by short or long taps. The result is that input/output is multifaceted and primarily haptic.
This haptically driven feedback loop was notable during moments of conflict between players. For example, S and O, who were particularly averse to playing in the same seed or game mode, would often jump back and forth into the other’s world to antagonize one another. At approximately an hour into the session in a Creative seed created by S, O began spawning multiple ghasts (large gray flying creatures that shoot fire). S exclaimed, “Whoa! Too many! Shoot the ghasts!” and began tapping on his screen as he smiled and sat reclined on the couch. At the same time, O sat on a stool, quickly tapping his screen to spawn even more ghasts. Within a short time, the entire vicinity was filled ghasts—the sight of which caused O to squeal with delight—so that S was shooting without aiming, all while laughing on the couch. Very quickly gameplay lagged significantly from the overabundance of actions, and all three players exited and deleted the seed. One of the researchers then exclaimed, “Nice work guys, you broke Minecraft,” which elicited even more laughter.
C and J similarly engaged multiple times in frenetic and chaotic “slap fights” throughout their gameplay. Within minutes of the start of the play session, the two attacked one another, while leaving the researcher’s avatar unharmed. At 40 minutes into gameplay, C and J were exploring and “pillaging” a village generated in a Survival seed created by the researcher. Much of C and J’s actions within this world were to find and “claim” specific areas. Since C had claimed a particular village, which J wandered into, the two began “slap fighting” that devolved into repetitive tapping on their respective screens in order to do the most damage. When one would die and respawn in the same spot, the “slap fight” would continue on as if there had never been any interruption.
While this manner of repetitive actions for attacking or even mining are possible in the PC- or console-based forms of Minecraft, as observed by Groups B and D, these actions do not appear nearly as gestural or frenetic. Since stationary apparatuses involve discrete inputs for control, simply holding a button down for a sustained action involves much less movement. Indeed, during JJ’s mobile play session, he noted that such a sustained action in PE required long presses on the flat touchscreen for so long that his index finger felt sore.
The most striking finger actions were observed from BB and P’s play session, wherein father and son were literally entangled in the same feedback loop. P’s seated position behind BB allowed them the ability to switch hands effortlessly. While BB was clearly the chief architect of their endeavors, P commonly played the role of laborer so that during any sustained mining or building BB could pull his hands back and let P continue his work. This certainly invokes images similar to B altering the settings on H’s laptop wherein one body disengages from the controls as another engages; however, arguably BB and P remained simultaneously engaged with the controls. Over the course of their 15 hand switches, much of their switches were for mere seconds and often to complete the same ongoing task. This was similar to observations from Romeo et al. (2003), wherein the touchscreen interface affords a feedback loop that blurs the boundaries between input/output components since multiple bodies may be interfaced simultaneously on the same screen. This much more entangled apparatus is further evidenced by the kinetic bodies and repetitive finger actions on the touchscreen’s surface, which strikingly contrasts to the stable and disciplined bodies in the stationary play sessions.
Spatial biases
Compared to the stationary play sessions, participants in the mobile play sessions were generally less concerned with creating and crafting seeds containing monuments to their gamic achievements. As we argued that the tendency for the stationary players demonstrated a bias toward time and permanence, we argue that mobile players demonstrated a spatial bias.
In all these groups, seeds were created and discarded on the fly; they started not so much as landscapes on which to enact massive, complex structures, but as ephemeral stages for a dynamic and frequently combative series of exchanges. For example, during the pilot play session with Group A, S showed the researcher a sophisticated bridge between two ridges, one of which led to a small hut containing a portal to the Nether. At the time, S was insistent that the researcher witness his efforts to augment the bridge; however, by the time of their full play session, 3 months later, this seed had been deleted. In fact, creating and deleting seeds seemed to be a regular practice of S and O’s gameplay. On two occasions, S created a new seed with the intent to invite both O and the researcher. At the same time, O’s seeds were similarly disposable worlds in which he regularly told the researcher, “Do anything you want to in my world.” For example, S and the researcher joined a preexisting seed of O’s that contained a small glass house with numerous farm animals inside; however, at approximately 27 minutes into play, this structure had been destroyed by a fire set by both S and O. Thus, while S and O demonstrated different forms of achievement and construction in their worlds, both were impermanent and easily disposable.
C and J similarly competed for spatial control of gameplay. At the start of the play session, C and J insisted on playing in each other’s seed, primarily so that the seed’s owner could control the mode of play as well as who stays in the world. Like S and O, both had several preexisting seeds that they each insisted on playing in wherein they could each impose their own order. For example, at approximately 6 minutes into the play session, the researcher and J joined one of C’s worlds; however, at the site of J laying down TNT explosives, C quickly disconnected J and the researcher. A minute later in J’s seed, in which all players spawned near several ghasts throwing fireballs, C insisted on slowly killing his avatar through drowning and suffocated until J changed the difficulty settings to “easy.” At approximately 15 minutes into play, J and C requested that the researcher create a new world for them to join in Survival mode. Within this new world, the two initially began by attacking one another until C noticed a village and exclaimed, “I call blacksmith!” while J wandered toward a temple. Both C and J were thus primarily interested in exploring, pillaging, and claiming territory, even though this seed would not be accessible to them in the future.
The back and forth changes between worlds and game modes, as well as constant shifts in attention to different aspects or activities of the worlds, were thus characteristic of both Groups A and C’s gameplay sessions. Seeds, settings, and game modes were all highly contingent and subject to change. Furthermore, even when some form of mining or crafting occurred in these worlds, they were just as easily subject to destruction from TNT or—more dramatically—deletion of the entire world itself.
Groups B and E further demonstrated that even when play centers around more sedentary Minecraft play that mobile play is still quite frenetic. For example, BB and P only had a single preexisting seed in which they had already constructed a two-story castle. At the start of gameplay, BB insisted on building a hut that would be a recreation of “Hagrid’s hut” from the Harry Potter movies (even including a villager that BB named “Hagrid”). Nevertheless, throughout the course of their play session, BB would redirect or re-brand his architectural plans depending on the construction process itself. For example, once “Hagrid’s hut” was enclosed, BB spawned a villager to be “Hagrid” (albeit, a beardless Hagrid):
Now I can spawn Hagrid.
Oh, he left.
(Laughing) He walked out the door.
What!? Oh I forgot villagers can open doors.
So are you going to block him in?
I want to keep a Hagrid!
So this is a cage or a house?
Since BB’s attempt to map the role of “Hagrid” onto the villager failed, BB spontaneously changed his architectural designs for the hut in order to adapt to the villager’s gamic agency. As a result, as P noted, the hut now occupied an ambiguous state as cage and house.
Compared to JJ, who was unaccustomed to playing PE, Groups A, C, and E were thus engaged in more spontaneous and unpredictable play. Despite being unfamiliar with playing Minecraft on a mobile device, JJ attempted to play in the same manner as if he were on his PS4: first mine, then craft. Forty-five minutes of play in this fashion rendered a deeply structured mineshaft lit with torches and working furnaces. Nevertheless, at the end of the play session, JJ bluntly stated, “That was the worst experience of my life,” and asked the researcher to never play PE again! Thus, even though JJ attempted a form of Minecraft play typical of his regularized play on PS4, the seed he and the researcher made on PE was, nonetheless, a disposable iteration of play, much like forms of play from Groups A and C. In the following section, we explore the competing and complementary epistemologies and bodily configurations in play in these different modes of Minecraft.
Monumentary versus momentary: the biases of Minecraft
As alluded to above, we believe Harold Innis’ work on the biases of media may prove useful in understanding the sorts of Minecraft play that we saw materialized on stationary versus mobile platforms. In Innis’ (1986) foundational work on the role of communication technologies in the growth and maintenance of ancient empires, media exhibit either a time or space bias; that is, they are either oriented toward the preservation of meaning and information in durable form (e.g. stone tablets) or toward their diffusion over distance (e.g. papyrus). This basic distinction has been applied to studies of handheld play by Samuel Tobin (2012), who states that Innis’ attention to “fundamental modes of transmission and storage, of stability and fragility” offers scholars opportunities to document mobile and stationary gaming “in new and important ways” (p. 128). Following Tobin, we are less concerned with empire-building than we are with the more prosaic forms of construction afforded by different Minecraft apparatuses and the temporal and spatial dimensions with which they are associated.
In our observations of console- or PC-based play, players appeared to be temporally biased, with JJ’s session in particular exemplifying this orientation. The salient features of his apparatus, from his sitting position meant to accommodate his cat, to his optimally arranged screen, chair, and desk, speak not only of an arrangement suited to long sessions of relatively uninterrupted play, but to significant time and care to configuring this arrangement. This mode of play can be described as at once sedentary and sedimentary. The structures JJ and his friends shape in the game accrue form, meaning and technical (if not always intellectual) sophistication quite literally layer by layer as the player gradually accrues competencies with the recombinatory logics of the gameworld, achieved through long periods of immobility operating across player and platform.
If JJ’s play embodies a kind of sedimentary play that we see associated with the time-biased apparatus of desktop and console Minecraft, we might describe S and O’s play with the more spatially biased Minecraft PE as vibratory. This is characterized by a “kinaesthesis” (Behrenshausen, 2007) of effervescent associations, as the boys’ bodies, devices, and gazes are almost constantly in motion, generating new, temporary relations rather than deepening existing ones. The tablet helps craft this orientation through its portability, the immediacy and imprecision of its inputs, and the small size of its screen, all of which allow for dynamic, recombinatory associations of attention and agency. It may be no coincidence that our youngest participants (those under the age of 10) tended toward spatially biased play. As similarly observed by Trček (2014), our participants’ preferences and play styles may intersect with ongoing developmental processes and digital literacies—which our study was not designed to observe. Nevertheless, we suspect that these distinctions in play styles may not be dependent on age and computer skills, but rather co-configured by these variables.
Following recent work in studies of gaming and affect (see, for instance, Anable, 2013; Moore, 2012), we might see these as different configurations that materialize our bodies in certain ways, compelling and cultivating certain forms of perception, communication, action, and pleasure in accordance with both the algorithmic ecology of the software and the differing physical affordances of the platform. These differences, quite literally, matter—not only to our ongoing understandings of emergent forms of digital play but also to participants’ own bodies and subjectivities. Accompanying this realization, for us, is an acknowledgement of the very different sorts of competencies that might be associated with Minecraft play on different devices. We think that current research on Minecraft, not to mention countless videos and social media posts, privileges the “monumentary” forms of engagement associated with stationary play: the creation of large, complex structures. It is clear from our analysis, however, that although some of our younger participants used to playing on mobile devices have little concern with “mining and crafting,” they are certainly not novices, particularly given the frequency with which they navigate between multiple game seeds and modes. Therefore, while our study design was certainly not intended to address the complexities and cultural politics around what constitutes expertise and how it is developed (see, for instance, Jenson and De Castell, 2008), we think we can acknowledge that there are multiple, different competencies in play across different Minecraft platforms—that being good at the game can mean something else besides the kind of sedimentary “mining and crafting” we associate with the game.
Future qualitative research would be well prepared to further investigate how gender, development, and computer skills co-configure spatial or temporal biases in Minecraft PE. In particular, longitudinal case studies of a small group of participants of varying genders between the ages of 8 and 12 may yield further understandings. Such studies could involve more detailed assessments of developmental processes, include periodic microethological observations such as our own, examine the role of the observer, and include various paratextual sources that Minecraft players frequently access (i.e. message boards, YouTube channels, etc.).
Conclusion
While previous studies of Minecraft, which have primarily focused on console- and PC-based iterations, have observed that Minecraft play may be instantiated in a multitude of ways, we observed particular entanglement of young players, Minecraft PE, and touchscreen interfaces that were characterized by much more haptic and spontaneous gamic performances. By participating in these microethological observation sessions, we documented the frenetic scramble of fingers across touchscreens as our young participants laughed, wrestled with their devices, assembled structures, and created new seeds—often only to destroy the structures and seeds without hesitation. These observations explore forms of expertise of Minecraft that are less about “mining and crafting,” and more about assembling, disassembling, and re-assembling arrangements of bodies, devices, seeds, and affects. Our observations suggest that playing Minecraft on a mobile device may involve distinctive configurations and performances of Minecraft itself.
While these configurations may be intertwined with how our younger participants are developing gaming expertises, digital literacies, and social practices, our study was not positioned to observe these developmental processes. Future research from multidisciplinary perspectives is, therefore, well suited to investigate such entanglements in Minecraft play, particularly through means that combines methods of Trček (2014), Dezuanni et al. (2015), Hollett and Ehret (2015), and our own. Our observations emphasize that researchers with various concerns related to developmental, discursive, and human-computer interaction questions would do well to attend to not only the point(s) of interface between bodies in play but also the broader embodied modes and contexts in which players and games play.
Footnotes
Funding
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.