In the course of teaching, I have occasionally had parents voice the concern that their child has been “spending too much time on Minecraft” and ask me for some advice on how to change that. Now, those sort of parental decisions are above my paygrade at this point in my life, and how one ought to approach limitations on computer activity depends too much on parenting styles and a child’s personality for me to say anything useful in that regard. But the way they phrased the question points to a bit of a misunderstanding of what the game really is: kids are not on Minecraft, they are in Minecraft.

Like many contemporary games, Minecraft is as much of a space as it is a system of rules. Each time they make a new world, players are dropped into the middle of a sprawling landscape which is constantly generated based on a set of algorithms (an operation known as procedural generation, in game terms). Grasslands and deserts, mountains and jungles, cave systems and mushroom-filled islands, even villages and abandoned temples have a chance of appearing every time a player reaches the edge of the known map. And this process never ends: the world only gets bigger and bigger as the player explores. With no mini-map to aid them initially, players are forced to make meaning out of the environment – taking note of landmarks, following the curve of riverbeds, getting to higher ground – as they seek out shelter before nightfall.

Besides being infinitely vast, the worlds of Minecraft are also infinitely transformable. Players can harvest, collect, or mine just about every type of block in the game and use them for their own creations, whether that’s smelting iron to make a sword or placing wooden planks down for the walls of a house. In this way, players are constantly leaving their mark on the environment and making it their own. Every hastily-made shelter, every empty mine shaft, every scar in the mountain or crater in the earth becomes imbued with meaning as sites of the player’s failures and accomplishments. But these structures and stories do not remain confined to the game world: they are shared by players across every medium available to them, whether through screenshots, videos, or merely word of mouth. Every voxel has a ballad, and every player becomes a bard, expanding the space of the virtual world even further into the material one.

That may have gone a bit too far into the poetic, but there is a sort of magic to a game space that (for many people) doesn’t make the transition to the real world. This is especially true for kids in my hometown of Anchorage, a city which has long winters, not insignificant criminal and animal dangers, and long distances between destinations – not to mention the general lack of a safe “third place” for youth to gather and play of their own accord. Yet Minecraft is a place that is infinitely traversable, a place children can exercise their agency and reveal their intelligence, a place that they can make their own without the help of adults and where they can play with their friends on top of it all. Is it any wonder why this is the place kids decide to spend their days?

I understand the danger in gaming compulsion – it is very addicting to find such a place of empowerment. I also understand the necessity of getting outside – you can’t grow up in Alaska without getting at least some taste of that lesson! – but there is so much more to Minecraft and similar games than sitting in front of a TV or killing time with YouTube videos. The only way to truly understand that fact is to take the game for what it is: a place of empowerment as well as play.

My reaction to the parents who are skeptical about the value of games or who think their child is playing too much is to first ask them much they know about Minecraft. Some have watched their children play the game or even have an account themselves, but more often than not they have only heard their child speak about it ad nauseum while having very little familiarity beyond the confusing jumble of jargon and technical language that is frankly hard to keep straight unless you have seen it in action.

And that is exactly my piece of advice to these parents: let your child show you their space. Treat the experience as if you were a tourist trying to get an understanding of a different country. Ask questions, try out the language, pick up the controls and let your guide coach you if need be, but give them a chance to show you what this virtual space means to them. Only after understanding what it means to exist in this space can you truly understand what it would mean for them to lose it. Perhaps you can show them what they love about the space can be found elsewhere as well.

The same advice can really be said of almost any game and almost any social relationship: if you want to know someone’s feelings, let them show you the places they like to go. In the spirit of that mindset, I want to show you a place I like to go when things are not particularly bright. But that is a task for next week.

John Sanders is a second year PhD student in the Syracuse University English department where he studies games and new media. He considers himself an extroverted optimist, which can make mornings difficult for his roommates.

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By the time you read this it will have been September for at least a few days. This means, undoubtedly, an endless stream of friends asking what we did this summer. I, having been well trained in the art of back-to-school vacation reporting, dutifully explain that I spent the whole summer preparing for my qualifying exams. This entails reading through 20 books on queer theory, 20 more books in game studies, watching 40 or so films related to LGBT history and queer representation, and playing through 40 or so video games. And yet, at the end of the summer I still wonder if in all of this reading, watching, and playing I’ve learned anything at all. I should probably try to see if knowledge has happened and then share that knowledge with some other people to see if they think it’s knowledge, too. Maybe a four week series of blogposts right at the end of the summer – a kind of Summer In Review of games, gender, sex, and film. Give it a catchy title. Sure.

PLAYING, WATCHING, WANTING: A SUMMER IN REVIEW. PART 1 – ICKY WITCHER

Let’s start by thinking about a guy provocatively named the Bloody Baron. Philip Strenger, a.k.a., the Bloody Baron, is a key character in the opening third of The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (2015, Xbox One, PS4, PC), a sprawling role playing game by Polish game studio, CD Projket RED. This game is massive. Wild Hunt combines the expansive environment of Bethesda’s Skyrim with the deep characterization and romantic interludes of Bioware’s Mass Effect series, and throws in an entirely original trading card game, complete with factions and gold foil cards for good measure.

(Really, really sprawling)

However, it also introduces players to a terribly cruel world. Nobles squabble for control over their small corner of the world, always seeking to expand that corner by whatever means necessary, and Wild Hunt is unflinching in its depiction of how these squabbles disenfranchise the less well-off citizens of the Northern Kingdoms. The Bloody Baron, however, tells us the most about what we expect from our games, our games press, and the way sex and patriarchal oppression operate in video games.

Before we get to that, let’s backtrack.

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt launched just before this summer started. It was hotly anticipated by nearly every gaming media outlet and was immediately met upon release with virtually universal critical and popular acclaim. CD Projekt RED had an enormous success on their hands and the adoration of millions of fans due to fan-friendly business practices like weekly installments of free downloadable content (DLC) and frequent, personal communication with a demographic known for being extraordinary fickle. This rabid affection explains at least some of the intense anger that fans launched at Arthur Gies’ review of The Witcher 3 for Polygon.com.

In this largely positive review, Gies still expressed reservations about the constant and often gruesome violence to which women are subjected in The Witcher 3. Gies calls “the world CD Projekt has created […] oppressively misogynist,” and, though he acknowledges that the game deals with this misogyny directly, Gies also points out that the game seems to, at least a little, relish the many opportunities to depict women in peril. As Gies puts it, the world of The Witcher 3 has many women characters who struggle mightily – and not always in vain – against a viciously oppressive society, but then the game “kills them, over and over.

As you might expect in a post-but-not-at-all-post #GamerGate world, a review score of 8 out of 10 for a beloved game is an outrage, doubly so since the score seemed to rest on the objections of an SJW (Social Justice Warrior for those not in the know). Gies had previously been pilloried for his similarly positive yet hesitant review of Bayonetta 2 (2014, Wii U) and the gaming masses seemed ready to put him to the stocks again for this second, even more egregious sin. Fans of The Witcher 3 took to their blogs, message boards, and online communities to criticize Gies and Polygon for their review. One fan’s response characterizes the overall backlash quite well:

“Polygon is nothing but jaded old journalists with absolutely no love for gaming anymore. I lost respect for them years ago.”

Another fan in the same thread had this to say:

“The world in The Witcher is supposed to be portrayed as brutal and unfair. Racism, sexism, and the works are all prevalent. It just looks so silly to throw that stuff around in a review. It’s Polygon trying to sound cerebral, and coming off more as pompous.”

Even more damning, Adrian Chmielarz, co-owner and creative director of small indie studio The Astronauts and developer of such cult hit games as Painkiller (2004) and Bulletstorm (2011) wrote a long, scathing blog post calling Gies’ piece, among other things, “poisonous to the industry,” and an example of toxic journalistic incompetence endemic to the game review industry.

If you’ve been at all familiar with the #GamerGate saga over the past year (and if you’re not, I recommend this article from Ars Technica for a taste), then these objections might sound familiar to you. They have that je ne sais quoi of reactionary masculinist discourse that seems to characterize so much of online reddit/chan/gaming culture right now.

However there is something in the fan response to Gies’ review that, despite its histrionic tone and defensive articulation, warrants attention.

(In the same way that this glitched polygon warrants attention)

Let us grant Gies’ criticism that the world of The Witcher 3 is ruthlessly misogynist (it is) and that the game itself seems to at least, in some way, revel in women’s suffering, all the while dressing its many prominent women characters in laughably sexy costumes (it does). For sure, there is plenty to feel icky about in The Witcher 3. The question that Gies does not get to though, and the question that I think his critics in some way articulate, is this: does the game itself feel icky about its content? Or, put another way, does Wild Hunt encourage players to maintain or develop a critical perspective on a patriarchal society that often mirrors our own?

The answer, I think, is a resounding “yes.” Mostly anyways. As players assume the mantle of the Witcher himself, Geralt of Rivia, they also take on a social role that places them as both an outsider to and beneficiary of Wild Hunt’s “oppressively misogynist” world. Along with this unique point of player identification, The Witcher 3 offers (via its fantasy narrative and iconography) a range of viscerally-realized metaphors that, at times, make the player’s role of killing the monsters of the Northern Kingdom seem uncannily like a crusade against the patriarchy.

Whether The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt makes players complicit in a virtual Malleus Maleficarum or waltzes them around in the boots of a strangely familiar white knight, it is the episode with the Bloody Baron – drunkard, wife-beater, war hero, contrite father – that best exposes the complexities of gender and sexuality at work here. The reactionaries against Gies’ review may not have had what I argue in mind, but if gaming is ever going to move out of its current atmosphere of division, exclusion, and prejudice, then we need to work harder than Gies’ review does at understanding how games go about their representational business. Next week, I’ll try to do just that with the story of Geralt of Rivia and the Bloody Baron of Novigrad.

Jordan Wood is a Ph.D student in the Syracuse University English department where he studies games, sexuality, and queer theory. He lives with two cats and is terrible at side scrolling games. Go Bills.

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