What's at the Root of Racism and Sexism in Minecraft Communities?

Janine "Iris Ophelia" Hawkins' ongoing review of gaming and virtual world style

This week Christopher Long posted an interesting article over on Medium about the experience he went through with his daughter. She went from playing Minecraft Pocket Edition on her iPod to dipping her toes into PC multiplayer servers, and parental conversations about online safety and discretion turned to conversations about racism and misogyny as she engaged with other players who had less than appropriate things to say about the girly, dark-skinned avatar she'd chosen for herself.

These moments are now part of coming of age in a plugged-in world, but I doubt that their experiences will take many Minecraft fans in particular by surprise. Here's why:

For many gamer kids like Long's daughter, Minecraft multiplayer servers may be their most significant or even their first time engaging with an online community. They're going to be testing the boundaries of those worlds just as much as they're testing boundaries in real life, and that can lead to as many awful interactions as great ones. When you lack a mature understanding of the very real damage descrimination does in reality, it simply seems like an edgy joke easily within reach. This is pretty clear when you start looking at avatar skins, particular black male ones, where you'll find an endless parade of racially-charged stereotypes including prisoners, gang members, and others like the friendly chap pictured above. That's created a limiting situation for the friend I tend to play the most Minecraft with. While I hop from skin to skin pretty regularly, he sticks with a reasonably good-looking skin of Lee from Telltale Games' The Walking Dead. In his words, "I think it's pretty telling that I basically feel like I'm stuck with Lee for life -- that this is the best I'll get."

But no, I'm not putting this entirely on the shoulders of kids and teens trying to look funny and cool. Please. As anyone who's spent more than a few hours online will tell you, that kind of lazy "humor" is popular among far too many adults too, and that's where the issue gets a little more complicated.

It's a mistake to think of the Minecraft community (specifically those who play multiplayer games online) as a single, more-or-less unified collective. Okay, in a lot of respects it's a mistake to think about most extremely large communities, particularly when it comes to online games, as unified in any way -- there are always branches and splinters. This is even more the case with Minecraft because there is no one core gathering place for community members. For most of Minecraft's history, multiplayer servers have been hosted privately and unofficially. As such, server rules and community standards can vary wildly from server to server, as does the level of moderator involvement. In that way, comparing the Minecraft community even to the community of something like World of Warcraft isn't useful. It's more like the internet at large -- community after community with their own expectations, with a blanket of relative anonymity and few meaningful consequences. And some people... Well, some people are just jerks. A player who gets their account banned from World of Warcraft will have to drop a fair chunk of change to purchase the same level of access they lost for a new account, so they may not bother... Or may at least take the rules a little more seriously in the future. On the other hand, a player banned from a Minecraft server simply needs to go join another server. While some servers share ban lists, most don't, meaning that repercussions for bad behaviour are pretty insignificant.

Could the makers of Minecraft, Mojang, do more? They've recently been in the news for updating/clarifying their EULA with regards to what third-party servers can charge for, but that same EULA does include clauses against discrimination. However when most content is hosted on third-party forums and decentralized communities, it seems almost impossible to actually enforce it (especially given the scale of Minecraft's following.) It's up to players to police their own communities. Sometimes that works, and sometimes it doesn't.

That said, there are safe spaces out there. If you're looking for the perfect Minecraft community for yourself or for your Minecraft-loving kid, be sure to read Long's full piece, "Minecraft, Misogyny, Racism, and Community Design," here.

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Iris Ophelia (@bleatingheart, Janine Hawkins IRL) has been featured in the New York Times, and has spoken about SL-based design at the Fashion Institute of Technology in Manhattan and with pop culture/fashion maven Johanna Blakley.

Comments

[Adeon Writer]

Because the 1st standard deviation of people who play Minecraft range from 4 to 15.

Kids will do anything for attention, and that includes echoed racism and juvenile prepubescent sexism.

[Adeon Writer]

(Like most problems on the Internet, the cause of the problem is parents giving unrestricted, unmonitored Internet access. They don't watch their kids, so the rest of the world must deal with it. :P

[Jason]

The best way to give racism more fuel is to keep talking about it. Minecraft servers are private servers, as you pointed out, so their server their rules. If someone doesn't like the behavior on someone's server find another one. Racism it's self isn't a crime and shouldn't keep being treated like one. You cannot control what's in someone's mind or heart.

How I handle things like this is simple. No kids laptop screen in my house is where I cannot see it.

[zzpearlbottom]

Racism is in truth not a crime just a demonstration of stupidity.

[Arcadia Codesmith]

Racism, sexism and all the related forms of hate speech need to be confronted and countered wherever they rear their vicious heads. If we must allow the free expression of hatred, we must also allow the free expression of disapproval and disgust at such diplays of malicious ignorance.

In particular, the threats of violence that racists and sexists are often prone to ARE a crime, and should be vigorously prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

[Pussycat Catnap]

The situation is no better in the community of Second Life.

No one should be trying to pin this on kids and teens. Hate gets passed down from above.

Go into SL, and try searching out black male skins, and black female shapes...

The male skins are mostly 'thug', the female shapes are all giant rears and absurd lips...

They'll usually be found in 'ghetto' themed shops (that capture NOTHING of the real ghettos BTW...).

Search for places that "cater" the black avatars. Many are actually quite hostile to real blacks... Not in the community but in the venue decor and theme. So many places that are devoted to "interracial", "cuckold", and "black men assaulting white women" themes...

Plus a few "plantation" sims, and many places flying the flag of genocide: the Dixie flag.

(Being a real life multiracial person, seeking a good support community in SL, is how I first stumbled onto this. Because 'interracial' means something very different to me in my real life. It means what I am... Not some white Southerner's rape fantasy... but my existence.)

Its a little better for Asians - because many RL Asians from Asian countries are in SL. But there are also a fair share of 'kinky school girl' fetishes out there... and 'Asian Prostitute' angles...

Native Americans get an odd pass in SL. While there are western sims none of them are devoted to demeaning people.

And Latin America has a large presence of users here, so if 'anti-latin' people started doing their thing in SL, the Brazilians would roll right through them.

(Likewise the LGBT community is strong in SL, so anti-gay bias here gets smacked back hard.)

But racism against blacks is very rampant all over SL.

That said... a little tweaking in my search terms has helped a lot... There are some very positive 'African' centric communities in SL.
- Places where I can find not only those who have a fondness of Africa and African things, but also people and elements that remind me of the real Black America that is around the area I grew up in, and not the 'MTV / Hollywood / Racist fantasy' one so present in people's stereotypes.

Minecraft and SL both though... are a symptom of a larger problem in western culture - racism is not so much going away as shifting to platforms where it can be more blatant and face less repercussions.

[sameoldthing]

Blah blah racist, sexist. Blah blah.

ok.

[Adam]

It's interesting to note that alot of those 'interracial' sims are if not run by black folk, but certainly supported, I'm not sure if that makes it better, there is an element of choice there but now much.

That said I don't really see how the 'black man' avatar is particularly offensive, it's chicken on a Tshirt, unlike the stuff in SL, it could well have been a black person making a self-reflexive joke.