Minecraft: moving the masses

For a simplistic game made of blocks, Minecraft links its self to the real world in more ways than we can imagine.  “It is almost impossible to summon and maintain good moral character in a thickly massed population” (Richard Prouty, 2009) the study that Prouty has put forward, stating that large Parisian mobs are likely to lead to a sense of menace is a theory that proves itself day upon day with news headlines and statistics showing that crime tends to arise in cities of large but dense population; so how does crime effect the innocent virtual world of Minecraft?

Crime in Minecraft is not something to be taken lightly in many servers, whether it be griefing another players structure, hacking or killing another play for no reason; admins do not tolerate this behaviour and often kick the player from the server. Although how can one man keep track of 200 – 1000 players at a time; this is where Walter Benjamin’s “Arcades Project” meets the virtual world.

By spreading out players and directing the so called ‘traffic’ into different directions or virtual arcades the number of user complaints tends to drop, this further renders the birth of the ‘spectator’; the Minecraft equivalent of Benjamin’s “flâneur”. Spectators can be described as “those who are indirectly and unintentionally affected by a particular design they experience only in passing.” (Walter Benjamin) “Spectator mode is a game mode which allows you to fly around and observe the world without interacting with it in any way” (www.minecraft.gamepedia.com/spectator, 14 June, 2016) the two very similar definitions reveal that flâneur’s are not only a figure to appear in our world, but the virtual; whether it be a computer game, social network or the internet itself, flâneur’s are everywhere and are a comforting yet mysterious sign of a well-constructed society.

Referencing 

Prouty, R. A turtle on a leash Retrieved from http://www.onewaystreet.typepad.com/one_way_street/2009/10/a-turtle-on-a-leash.html In-line Citation: (Prouty, n.d.)

Bibliography: Gamepedia. (2016, June 14). Spectator. Retrieved August 17, 2016, from http://minecraft.gamepedia.com/Spectator In-line Citation: (Gamepedia, 2016)