At the time, the game did not include feminized or feminine models for either playable or non-playable characters. Minecraft was initially developed by a Swedish man, Markus “Notch” Persson, and released in 2011 by his production company, Mojang. It is often the case that the design of a videogame privileges ideas of “active/acting,” “masculine/men” over any preference for being “passive/acted upon,” and “feminine/woman.” Without an alternative framework, game designers risk reproducing systems in which gender and labor-or “doing,” more simply-privileges a colonial, masculinist fantasy. In constructing gender and sexuality, designers often rely on the way humans look and act, but this really contrasts with the lived experiences of gender and sexuality that demand a framing of these terms outside of an object-oriented, categorical model. It’s about almost every game I have ever played in which I was forced to adopt a digital representation of myself. In many ways this conference presentation is about Minecraft, and in others it’s not. To make sense of this epistemological framework I’m then going to explore the limitations of ontological possibility in the game. I’ll then walk through the ways in which labor facilitates the gendering of players and vice versa. I will then talk about how this this framework differs from sociological understandings of gender and the lived experiences of people who play the game. This is also work that I am more comprehensively developing for my master’s thesis, provided the process of writing it doesn’t kill me over the next few weeks.īy way of some introduction to this paper, I’ll first describe how Minecraft presents itself and rhetorically defines gender and sexuality. Full disclosure, this presentation is an abbreviated analysis of a forthcoming book chapter on conventions of gender in Minecraft.
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