Trigger Warning: this post contains discussions of rape and slavery in Minecraft
Ok, as a member of a number of various historically oppressed groups I just don’t get slavery play in video games. That shit ain’t fun and it ain’t playful. That’s why I get plan old enraged when I see it done willy nilly in games. Don’t get me wrong (I need to be more specific) games that help us interrogate and analyze slavery as a system can be a very good thing. Assassin’s Creed Liberation was one of the better representations that I have seen in a game. But why, in the name of all that is holy, are people playing at enslaving one another in online games? In recent months we’ve seen it happen numerous times in games like DayZ where bands of merry idiots for people into slavery at gunpoint or make them prisoners by trapping them in pits ala Silence of the Lambs. And now another reason for me to hate Minecraft….
Let me start by saying that the following took place on a private server where players are playing a modded version on Minecraft called CivCraft that is similar to Sid Meier’s Civilization (which has had it’s own issues with representation of slavery as a system). So apparently on this server (and on others) there is an in-game item called a Prison Pearl that allows you you to “pearl” (or enslave) a character that you have killed. Pearled players are then transported to a section called “the end” from which there is no escape and they can only be released if their capturer allows it. The language used to describe the mechanics of it is as follows:
Use the ppsummon command with a PrisonPearl in your inventory to summon that player back to the real world. This player can do anything as he pleases, but if he travels a configurable distance from the pearl he will begin to take damage. You can place the pearl in the chest if you think it is secure enough to prevent the prisoner from freeing himself. If he dies for any reason, he will be respawned in the end. You can reward your slave by using the ppreturn command, which sends him back to the end where he was with his inventory intact. A bad slave can instead be punished by using the ppkill command, which will put him back at the end spawn with no inventory.
Now, don’t get me wrong. I understand that there are people who willingly volunteer for slavery in games for the purpose of S/M play and if that’s your thing I’m fine with it, but when people are involuntarily enslaved this gets to be a very real issue and that is what they have been dealing with in the CivCraft community. It seems that one player in particular has been boasting about his exploits of enslaving and raping female characters (along with explicit screen caps, well as explicit as Minecraft allows) and the mods and others in the community are not pleased with his actions or the attention that they have been getting. Apparently the Prison Pearl mod was originally added for some other kind of slave play and there are a number of different thread (~70) in their subreddit where they discuss use and sale of slaves as well as the history to slavery in CivCraft. There are even threads where people volunteer to be slaves. And that makes the involuntary enslavement even more disturbing. These folks are not looking for willing participants they are purposefully going after unwilling victims. Being as this is a Canadian server the moderators are especially concerned about real world repercussions as the Canadian Criminal Code can actually ban their server.
So aside from the obvious there are several things that are really bugging me about this case…
1) What the hell did the mods think was going to happen when they created a build of Minecraft that allowed for such actions in the first place;
2) They state that these actions “do not contribute to the experiment”. What the hell is this experiment?; and
3) What are the implications of this for children playing Minecraft? If Prison Pearl (and numerous others) are mods that can be added to any server, how can you best be sure of what content behaviors children are being exposed to?
Makes you want to take a very close look at what servers your children are playing on…as well you should be anyway.
One thought on “The Day the Bricks Fell: Rape and Violence in Minecraft?”
Hi,
I’m one of the administrators over at Civcraft. From what I can see, you’ve read the appallingly-researched piece over at the Daily Dot, which seems to have been cobbled together from a post on SubRedditDrama. Most specifically, the author confuses several projects which are called “Civcraft”.
Our Civcraft is not based on the Civilization game. Rather, it is an attempt to create an experiment in community-building and politics.
Vital to this experiment is PrisonPearl. Essentially, it allows for actions to have consequences. Without the possibility of coercive force, it’s meaningless to try and simulate politics of any kind. Criminals can’t be imprisoned, Governments can’t impose taxes, and invasions are impossible.
Prisonpearl is a tool that allows one player to capture another. In practice it is primarily thieves, vandals and killers that are caught, and are either kept imprisoned or made to pay reparations to their victims. This can be done by working off the damage – indentured servitude rather than true slavery.
But it’s not accurate to say that only the jailer can free a prisoner. To keep someone imprisoned, you need to keep their ‘pearl’ (an item) safe. The pearl broadcasts its location to the prisoner, who can ask other people to free him. If an imprisonment is manifestly unjust, there are often players willing to fight and mine to free the prisoner and, often, punish the jailer.
In this case, a group of outside players from another combat-oriented server began to play and capture a large number of players and defend them militarily. This happens from time to time, and the rest of the playerbase usually comes up with various solutions to the issue – going into hiding, making alliances, forming an underground resistance, etc.
There is really no history of true ‘slavery’ on Civcraft. It’s impossible because people just wouldn’t work.