Blocks, Each Exactly One Cubic Metre
Minecraft Earth superimposes its virtual gameplay on real-world scenarios.
For the last 10 years, children around the globe have been building and exploring Minecraft’s pixellated world, all while watching hours of YouTube videos dedicated to exploring it even further. Minecraft is ripe for exploration: a shared virtual space, procedurally generated when loaded and played mostly from a first-person perspective. Within the confines of its 3D grid, players can build with blocks representing various materials, and enter into and engage with worlds created by other players. The shorthand often used to describe the experience is “virtual Lego” with an unlimited set of bricks.
This physicalisation, however, does not do the game and its player base justice. Minecraft allows children and adults to form guilds whose membership stretches across continents, resulting in spectacular built environments beyond most people’s imaginations. Players have even built virtual computers using “redstone”, a digital material introduced to the game in 2013, which enables the production of electrical circuits. There has never been another platform like Minecraft, nor (judging by the YouTube videos) one that has given rise to such a committed group of explorers. Now, after 10 years, developer Mojang has added a new dimension. Using augmented reality (AR), smartphones and the broader principles of pervasive gaming, Minecraft Earth, which is currently available in a closed-group beta version, brings architectural spaces into the real world.
The scope and accessibility of Minecraft means that it is well-placed to help us navigate our relationships with cities. In May 2019, the game’s publisher Microsoft announced that Minecraft has sold more than 176m copies since its official release in November 2011 (having been in public beta testing since 2009), with a further 200 million users registered to the game’s free-to-play version in China. Unlike other videogame franchises, whose lasting successes are often built on myriad sequels and memorable characters, Minecraft’s popularity is based on small, incremental reiterations – such as the addition of materials like redstone – that nevertheless lead to huge new experiences. While there is technically a way of playing Minecraft that includes enemies and the more traditional goal of final boss battles, it offers countless forms of gameplay that move away from familiar videogame structures and towards the territory of the sandbox.
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Minecraft taps into our deep need for construction. From early in our lives, we are all fascinated by the possibilities opened up by building blocks. From the ground-breaking block-based educational system of Fröbel gifts, created by the 19th-century pedagogue Friedrich Fröbel as part of his development of the kindergarten concept, to the Lego bricks that have followed children through the 20th and 21st centuries, block construction has long been present in child development and play. Nevertheless, while some can directly trace their adult careers to these early engagements (think architects), most do not engage with building materials in this same way once they have left childhood behind. Minecraft presents an opportunity to redress this: it offers players a digital world constructed entirely from blocks, each measuring exactly 1 cubic metre whether they are made of grass, tree trunks and leaves, stone, lava, glass, wool, metal or explosives. The procedurally generated steppes, mountains, rivers and caves, as well as the pigs, cows, cats, sheep and squid that populate them, are also constructed the same way. This is childhood block play elevated to the status of world building, with all of Minecraft’s materials thrown open to the player to do with as they see fit.
Mainstream awareness of the possibilities afforded by Minecraft are centred on the game’s Creative mode, thanks in large part to a YouTube video posted by player Joshua “Halkun” Walker in September 2010. ‘Building Megaobjects in Minecraft’ saw Walker reveal a 1:1 virtual scale model of the USS Enterprise-D from Star Trek: The Next Generation, built using fan-created blueprints that had been authorised by IP owners Paramount. The construction is enormous, more than 1,000 blocks long (equivalent to 1km), and exhibited the scale of projects that could billions and billions of polygons, but how good you can make something look with the limited tools and resources at your disposal.” As writer Alex Wiltshire sets out in his essay for the V&A’s 2018 publication Videogames: Design/Play/Disrupt, “Minecraft’s low-resolution nature wasn’t a hindrance, it was an asset, making 3D design and space-making both accessible and desirable.” It is this realisation that has since inspired millions of creations shared over the internet, from the Danish government commissioning a 1:1 scale Denmark, to a guild of fans that have built the continent of Westeros from Game of Thrones; as well as projects that seek to use Minecraft as a tool for the real world.
UN-Habitat is a United Nations programme inaugurated in 1978, with a mandate to ensure adequate shelter and the development of sustainable human settlements in an urbanising world. In 2012, Pontus Westerberg, digital projects officer for UN-Habitat, approached Mojang about using its game in its work to engage young people in developing communities with real-world urban design. Thus, the Block by Block project was born, in which recreations of real-world spaces are set up on a Minecraft server so that community members can iterate on ideas they will use in real life. In Haiti, the programme has been used to redesign the central spaces of Bon Repos, a community that saw mass settlement of displaced people following the earthquake that hit Port-au-Prince in 2010. A series of workshops in 2016 saw the community use Minecraft to tackle traffic, sanitation and flooding problems, using the programme to help planning teams improve the public spaces and quality of life. Programmes have since taken place in such varied locations as Palestine, Vietnam and Kenya. “The magic of Minecraft in this case is how it changes some of the power relationships between experts and ordinary people,” Westerberg explained to Freedom magazine in 2019.
“At its zenith in the summer of 2016, Pokémon Go was a surveillance capitalist’s dream come true, fusing scale, scope and actuation.”
These experiments in real-world building have paved the way to Minecraft Earth. At 2015’s E3 technology show, Microsoft demonstrated its new HoloLens augmented-reality visor, which it put to use on Minecraft, having acquired both the game and Mojang for $2.5bn in 2014. The demonstration showed how the HoloLens visor could project 3D virtual imagery into the real world, creating digital Minecraft constructions in front of a user’s face. This caused considerable excitement (“Amazing,” reported Polygon; “Stunning,” said Kotaku), but with no commercially available iterations of HoloLens on the horizon, it seemed as if it would remain a pipe dream. Microsoft developers understood, however, that while they could not achieve the same fully encompassing holographic effect as the HoloLens, smartphones could offer something akin to the experience of transporting Minecraft architecture into the real world. Only a few years later, developments in technology have given us unparalleled mapping, cloud computing and lightning-fast 5G internet on smartphones. All of these opportunities for data gathering have been combined with the development of Microsoft’s Azure Spatial Anchors, a technology that pinpoints a user’s location to a digital twin of our own world with a precision of as little as 3cm. Thus, Minecraft Earth began to take form.
Attempts to utilise AR in games have so far been limited, with most attention falling on the success stories of phone games Pokémon Go and Harry Potter: Wizards Unite. Both of these games were developed by Niantic, a company that started within Google but which split from its parent in 2015. Pokémon Go was released in July 2016 and has already been downloaded 1bn times, with 147 million active users counted in May 2018. The game sends people out into the world to catch and battle Pokémon using Google Maps technology. This may be charming, but as the social psychologist Shosanna Zuboff notes in her book The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, the game actually allows Google to control the movements of people through cities, rather than developing creative opportunities. “At its zenith in the summer of 2016, Pokémon Go was a surveillance capitalist’s dream come true, fusing scale, scope and actuation,” writes Zuboff. “It provided a living laboratory for telestimulation at scale as the game’s owners learned how to automatically condition and herd collective behavior, directing it toward real-time constellations of behavioral futures markets, with all this accomplished just beyond the rim of individual awareness.” Alongside these socio-political concerns about the use of AR, it is also worth noting how stunted the functionality offered by both Pokémon Go and Wizards Unite is. Niantic’s games are premised on the location-based collecting of franchise characters, rather than any deeper investigation of what actually happens when these characters are viewed through a mixed-reality filter.
Minecraft Earth seeks to address this disconnect, allowing exploration of player-built architectural spaces in the real world, thereby raising the bar. Like Niantic and Google, the team behind Minecraft Earth will provide Microsoft with vast amounts of data about its players’ movements. “As [players move around cities] we’re uploading the shape of the world around us so that we create an anchor,” says Jesse Merriam, the game’s executive producer. “When multiple people come in, everyone’s in the same spot [in] the park and everybody sees the exact same place.” Nevertheless, this is at least being used to offer connected environments for players to experience together globally. Once a building has been placed in the world, it can be shared by the builder with their contacts or the public, who can visit – and even enter – through their phone in the real world.
There are clearly real-world applications for bringing architectural models and urban planning out of the studio here. As seen through the success of the work of UN-Habitat, this tool could offer individuals the opportunity to encounter virtual proposals in public spaces. It provides the ability for users to apply their own adjustments to virtual environments and to see how these might play out in real time. The AR element of Minecraft Earth has the potential to create a new level of deeper engagement with public space. Yet as Zuboff articulates, the collation of data by the corporations that produce these apps potentially enables them to manipulate our movements. Players could be drawn to businesses that pay developers to entice them there, while data about the socio-economic backgrounds of players could also be exploited by commercial forces. Even when you play an innocent game, information is leaking out.
My own experience with Minecraft Earth has so far been confined to the drizzly October streets of Bethnal Green and Hackney. I’ve collected virtual pigs and ducks, as well as treasure chests filled with all sorts of minerals. I’ve anchored a virtual treehouse to Homerton station. But I’ve yet to experience how others engage with my buildings due to the game’s initial, closed-group release. It is this social aspect that has driven the phenomenal engagement of games such as Pokémon Go and when Minecraft Earth launches to the public, I expect there to be similar scenes of massed players waving their phones around our cities. But I also can’t wait (read: I am fascinated and terrified) to see how architects and urban planners, artists and governments, advertisers and corporations will embrace this new layer of virtuality in a world that is already reeling from the effects of digital technology.
Words Kristian Volsing
Minecraft Earth was shelved in June 2021. “Minecraft Earth was designed around free movement and collaborative play – two things that have become near impossible in the current global situation,” the developers said in a statement. The launch had been plagued by technical issues and was criticised for its aggressive monetisation system.
This article was originally published in Disegno #25. To buy the issue, or subscribe to the journal, please visit the online shop.