A few months ago, I rode to church with an older woman from my congregation. We hardly knew each other, so I told her about the college courses I was taking, and she took an interest in “Sociology of Mass Violence.” After I explained the course and my current project on video games, she sat in silence for a moment. “How do video games relate to genocide?” she asked, expressing her belief that the rising popularity of shooter games makes players more violent. I tell her that violence within video games is more a product of humanity’s cruelty, instead of the other way around. Even the games I play—classified as “cozy games” by the community—display forms of violence that mirror those seen in my Sociology of Mass Violence course. Minecraft specifically utilizes a game mechanic to acquire resources, which has been exploited by the player base. The lack of responsibility for one’s actions against and treatment of the mobs in the game, in tandem with justifications players make for their behaviors, echoes back to concepts James Waller discusses regarding perpetrators.
Minecraft is a sandbox game that lets players do nearly anything they can imagine. The open world facilitates adventuring and exploring. The massive catalog of blocks enables creative and artistic builds. The “redstone” mechanics function as a miniature version of electricity and technology with which players experiment. The multi-player compatibility is the icing on the cake: you can partake in all of the above with friends and family. Minecraft’s popularity is obvious, from the (once) small indie game being purchased by Microsoft, its explosion into media and culture, to the latest blockbuster film. Minecraft is a household name—and for good reason.
The game generates places called “villages.” These villages differ based on the environment you find them and the randomized code of the game itself. Villages have at least five structures. In these structures lie “workstations,” beds, and chests filled with loot. Workstations, structures, and beds all show players that villagers have a flourishing society. In these structures live the inhabitants, known as “villagers.” These villagers allow for trading with the player. Villagers hold different jobs: farmers, for example, trade potatoes for an emerald. The more you trade with these villagers, the more trades you unlock—until the villager hits the rank of “master.” Trading with villagers can be an arduous task, requiring patience, persistence, and access to resources.
Based on this description alone, one can think of a few ways that players can utilize the mechanics to their advantage. The game expects players to steal from the villages. The game encourages players to take the resources from them. Players feel no reservations about stealing since the game provides no consequences. The current world my friends and I play on is a prime example: most of our beds come from a village which we pillaged. We justify our thievery by saying that the villagers don’t need them. In the game, if a certain percentage of players sleep through the night, the night is skipped. The villagers, then, do not need a bed. The code of Minecraft ties villagers to a certain bed. In order for villagers to have children, extra beds must be available. The lack of beds means the villagers no longer have that tie to the village and cannot repopulate the village. The village right by my friend’s house now lies abandoned.
You may be asking: “What need have they for repopulating?” In Minecraft, hostile mobs will attack both players and villagers. Hostile mobs—such as zombies and skeletons—spawn in (if night is not skipped). My insistence on sleeping comes from a desire not to be harmed by these hostile mobs, since they can kill players. If one dies to a hostile mob, the player respawns, seeks out their items, and fends off the mobs. Villagers have only one life. When they die, they remain dead. Repopulation is necessary for the continued existence of the villagers. The empty village near my friend’s house serves as a reminder that people lived there before we arrived, before we colonized the surrounding areas. It haunts me.
As mentioned above, villagers trade loot to players based on their jobs and experience. When I play the game, I tend to lock villagers in their homes for two reasons: (a) They cannot be harmed by hostile mobs if my fellow players do not sleep through the night, and (b) I have constant access to the villagers. I trade with them every day until I get what I want. I tend to “make up” for my offenses by providing extra beds to the village as a sort of quid pro quo “treaty”: if you give me good trades, your population will expand. Here’s another mechanic: if a zombified villager is cured of their zombification, the player receives a discount for all trades with that villager.
The worst example of exploitation of these villagers I have seen requires its own section. Two years ago, one of my roommates made a world with our friends. We logged on a week later to find that one of our friends had built a villager farm. This farm holds two villagers captive in a small space. They stand atop beds and receive food from machines. The villagers, detecting an extra bed nearby, have a child. A minecart picks this child up and holds them until they grow up. The cart takes the villagers past a zombie, infecting and “zombifying” them. The cart shuttles the zombified villager to a curing chamber. Out of the chamber comes a cured villager. The cart escorts the villager to their final resting place: a cage with a workstation. My other roommate said, “I feel like you learn a lot about a person based on how they treat villagers.” After that experience, I wholeheartedly agreed.
My interest in the treatment of villagers grows each time I play the game. If people are inherently good, would every player want to treat these villagers with respect and compassion? Or, if people are inherently bad, would every player want to exploit these villagers to maximize efficiency and utility? Most people I know lie somewhere in the middle. The language surrounding villagers, however, largely remains derogatory. I hear a constant slew of insults thrown at the villagers for not “behaving”. Players assume themselves to be more developed, creative, and powerful than the simple villagers.
Perpetrators of extraordinary evil are themselves ordinary people. James Waller wrote, “While the evil of genocide is not ordinary, the perpetrators most certainly are”. What could be more ordinary than playing a video game? This game, meant for relaxation, for entertainment, for friendship-building, itself holds the potential for players to commit acts of violence. I do not believe the game developers intended this potential whilst coding the game and its various updates. The question “How can ordinary people commit acts of extraordinary evil?” seemed to me an odd one to ask. Everything I witnessed in this pixelated sandbox game illustrates exactly how ordinary people can commit evil acts. The general culture of cruelty explains the treatment of villagers by players. A culture of cruelty “helps [perpetrators] initiate, sustain, and cope with their extraordinary evil” by simultaneously rewarding and normalizing said evil. Rationalization, group beliefs, and moral disengagement allow players to commit the acts they do while reducing their level of responsibility. Even in my writing, I constantly referred to the villagers with the impersonal “it” pronoun instead of “they” as I tend to do with other video game characters. I understand that connecting people playing video games to perpetrators of mass violence seems odd, but I feel this connection bears significance. If people commit acts of violence in games with no prompt or order, is it so hard to believe that people could commit acts of violence in real life under group prompts and orders?
