The perception of journalism has taken a toxic turn after the U.S. 2016 election. Americans’ distrust of the media has skyrocketed in this era of “fake news.” This fake news transforms information into nothing more than buzzing, effectively censoring it. Other governments rely on different, more overt forms of censorship. On the 2020 “World Day Against Cyber Censorship,” Reporters Without Borders opened the doors to a new library: The Uncensored Library. This library, however, doesn’t exist in a physical space. Instead, the building exists on a dedicated Minecraft server. As the best selling videogame of all time, Minecraft exists beyond censorship and serves as a location for creatives to broadcast otherwise redacted journalism. The video above shows the doors to the library. As governments attempt to censor independent information for control, The Uncensored Library constitutes a loophole where one can download censored works to their home computer. In this paper, I plan to peruse The Uncensored Library and identify the affordances of videogames and how the interactive format of Minecraft affords this bypass of censorship laws. Additionally, as videogames act as their own localized space, then how does multimodal rhetoric translate within this space? By the very content that The Uncensored Library houses, how does the idea of “space” affect the world it interacts with, or does it bypass the world completely? I use critical video game theory as well as my own screen recordings of my walkthrough of The Uncensored Library to answer these questions.
This library does not have physical doors: it exists in Minecraft, the best-selling computer game of all time. The game typifies the “sandbox” genre of games, where there are minimal limits to what a player can do. The player can interact with the world freely. The video above depicts me entering my downloaded version of The Uncensored Library map for the first time, after following a README to move the map into the “saves” folder on my Macbook. Once I finished the drag and drop, the map is there for me to access at any time. Reporters Without Borders commissioned Blockworks, a community of Minecraft “builders,” to develop The Uncensored Library. Blockworks has been commissioned by a number of global companies like Microsoft, Warner Bros., Disney, and even Mojang (the creators of Minecraft). Walking up to The Uncensored Library and standing in front of its doors confirms the map as one of Blockworks “most ambitious projects to date” (Blockworks). The scale of the map impresses upon a visitor of the legitimacy of the place. The library looks regal, like the zenith of governmental architecture. Thus, as a digital beacon of the free press, it flips the architecture on its head.
Nevertheless, the building is massive to the point where an average computer could not render the entire building without overheating. In the video below, I show the render distance of the library using different video settings. Minecraft uses “chunks” for its render distance. The default number is 12. The lower the render distance is, the less “chunks” one can see, but the faster visible chunks load. The higher the visible “chunks” number, the slower everything renders. But, in order to view more chunks on one’s screen, a larger amount of processing power is required. I am fortunate enough to have a powerful (re: expensive) computer. But, at maximum resolution, my laptop’s fans go into high gear. Performance is reduced as frame rate lag and overheating is introduced. For that reason, the library does have a restriction: the ability to actually run Minecraft on a home computer. While it is not an intensive game, the grand scale of the library is reduced by its size and a computer’s casual processing power.
Despite being a digital space, this library remediates a physical space by acting as an accessible library for typically censored journalism, like that of Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi journalist who was assassinated at the Saudi consulate in Turkey in 2018. By my suggestion that space itself can be remediated, such as the concept of a “third space” or “affinity space,” The Uncensored Library doesn’t do enough. It is ambitious, but only houses a very minimal number of texts. Reporters Without Borders does intend to introduce more texts to the library. Indeed, it is at its beginning stages: it is more of a bookshelf than a library at the moment. And it does circumvent censorship laws in restrictive countries – but for how long? The Minecraft map, and therefore the game, treads the line between legal and illegal. As Reporters Without Borders is acutely aware, anti-free speech entities will attempt to bar the dissemination of independent information. Could an entity dismantle a downloadable, thus offline, map?
Likely not. The library has an FAQ (frequently asked questions) book. In the book, one question is “can this library be censored?” (Reporters Without Borders). The image below shows the answer: an entity would need to raid personal computers in order to wipe the data downloaded offline. The reproducibility and availability of the map, housing criticisms of censorship, stands in as a metaphor for the resilience of independent information. The viral component of the library allows it to be downloaded and reuploaded or modified and augmented in any which way by different users. Because the information is already uploaded through conversion into a Minecraft book, it can be inseminated into any server. To clarify, a Minecraft book is, literally, a book in Minecraft. It is an item that occupies inventory space. One can flip the pages, pick it up, or put it down, much like a “real” book. Similarly, Minecraft is home to a number of prosumers, individuals who both create and consume their own cultural artifacts. By joining independent information with an existing suite of prosumers, a new boon to information dissemination arises as a new affinity space.
The Uncensored Library carefully curated each room to depict the various ways journalism and free speech is oppressed. Each room in The Uncensored Library is thematic, representing a different obstacle for journalism to overcome. Vietnam’s Labyrinth of Truth demonstrates the difficulty of access, requiring truth-seekers to meander through sources to discover the press. Reporters Without Borders writes, “the labyrinth of truth highlights Vietnam’s growing efforts to make it as hard as possible for its citizens to reach independent information” (theuncensoredlibrary.com). Representing one type of restrictive access towards independent information, Vietnam’s restrictions are a direct contrast to a country like Mexico, where journalists are killed for their exposés. While free speech may be written into law for some of these countries, the blockades put in front of the press render free speech moot.
Minecraft both exists as, and demands participation in, an affinity space. Minecraft lacks a tutorial, thus demanding participation in an affinity space to learn how to play. Online affinity spaces afford an environment for like-minded players and fans to “share their appreciation of particular games, insider knowledge regarding specific gameplay, and fan productions of drawings or game modifications based on existing video games” (Wu 23). When I logged in, I immediately destroyed some of the texts through misclicking. In my recordings, my audience can see how I accidentally destroyed a block in the Saudi Arabia room. The video blow demonstrates some intentional destruction, too. I can pick up a book; I can throw it; I can remove it permanently from my inventory. I can destroy the tile floors with the book, too. All of these attributes lend themselves to the tangibility of Minecraft. Indeed, I have ultimate control in Minecraft, but did not know how to use my powers. I had to join an affinity space, in this case Reddit, to learn how to play the game and make basic interactions with the environment. Wu notes that these spaces are an “integral component of video game culture, and provide newcomers to these games with an archive of knowledge” while simultaneously “hosting the productions of these prosumers” (23). Wu continues, “self-initiated engagement…may provide insights for art educators to consider regarding art making and art appreciation,” thus suggesting Minecraft as a space where the creation and appreciation of art is shared happily. Minecraft allows these prosumers to create and consume artifacts within the game itself, but also share their fruits through other forums and spaces.
In acting as an affinity space, Minecraft relies on a level of immersion in interacting with one’s own creations. It is this immersion that constitutes Minecraft as a space. Frances Dyson, writing on the immersion of Osmose, notes, “the metaphysical and the perceptual (sight and touch) thus blend in a culturally proscribed, virtually ‘embodied’ experience that…reinforces visualism while adding the powerful element of interactivity” (Dyson 112). The Uncensored Library is a distinct remediation of a real-life library. It has shelves and stairs, hallways and doors. You press “w” to walk forward, you right click to pick up a book. It looks like a library. On the contrary, Dyson cites Mark Hansen in regard to the movement of the virtual body “as integral to the immersive, interactive experience” (124). Utilizing an apparatus (the keyboard) to control movement substitutes the fine motor control required to walk for the press of a button. For that reason, other elements become key to experiencing the library as an immersant. The ambient music, the visual scale, and the subject matter all blend to immerse a participator in the library. The marriage of the journalism – and the history of censorship behind it –with the somber music and dark earth tones produces a lasting affect, particularly as one “holds” the article of an assassinated journalist in one’s hand. The immersion imparts a sense of tangibility, confirming that what an immersant holds is a true artifact.
This remediation of a library attempts to circumvent journalist censorship, but it also criticizes censorship in its governmental representations. Ian Bogost argues that “unlike verbal discourse…videogames deploy more abstract representations about the way the world does or should function” (Bogost x). This argument validates the stance that The Uncensored Library takes; likewise, as Minecraft is a customizable game, the inherent critique is restricted to the map, and is thus imbued with meaning not by Mojang, but by the builders. Bogost continues, “videogames’ usefulness comes not from a capacity to transfer social or workplace skills, but rather from their capacity to give consumers and workers a means to critique business, social, and moral principles” (x). In this way, the library clearly is a critique of censorship laws. Through Minecraft, Mojang exhibits the work builders create without censoring the product. Unlike a museum, Mojang does not curate the work of the prosumers, allowing the builders to abstract their sense of reality within Minecraft. Reporters Without Borders leverages this attribute of Minecraft, thus creating an artifact which critiques an aspect of the world.
Walking in on pictures of assassinated journalists, having to look up at their black-and-white faces, affected me as much as seeing the memorial in real-life would have. It feels like a real space. If The Uncensored Library was not a skeuomorphism of a library–that is to say, a place I did not have to enter of my own volition—and was instead a dedicated blog with Javier Valdez’s face and perhaps a link to an article or two of his, I would not have been as moved as I was when walking through the Library’s physical doors. I offer videos of the memorial below. Each of these photographs in the videos below were people who gave their lives in pursuit of independent information. The greyscale photos provide a stark contrast between the dark, mahogany palette of the library’s interiors. The monuments are larger than life, standing several blocks higher than my avatar. In Dyson’s chapter on immersion, Hansen says of this affecting new media that “by placing the body into interactive coupling with technically expanded virtual domains, such works not only extend perception…they catalyze the production of new affects” (Dyson 131). It is this production of affect that allows The Uncensored Library to remediate space through its recreation of a similar affect that a memorial projects onto a visitor. The monuments loom over me, and looking at each photograph, reading the journalist’s bio, shows a specter haunting censorship. In interacting with these monuments, like one might interact with a physical memorial, perception is extended as one interacts with the ghosts of journalists and then suddenly brought into the fight against censorship.
The Uncensored Library remediates space by providing similar functions and boons that a physical space would have. The sense of scale, the depth, the colors, the music all mingle to create the ambience of a physical space, guiding a visitor’s emotional response. Yet, as a videogame, The Uncensored Library still serves a political function. It critiques censorship laws and offers a route to circumvent censorship and restore independent information in countries that need it the most. As the library might go under “renovation” to include more texts and wings, it is an adaptable location, capable of being added to and retracted as censorship changes and more journalists are represented. The Uncensored Library affords someone who is seeking independent information with a space to do so. As the backdoor to journalism, this library and Minecraft constitute an ideal, shareable venue which can be circulated widely and surreptitiously. By being downloaded onto personal computers and shared offline, The Uncensored Library circumvents censorship and quietly honors the journalists who died in the pursuit of independent information.
Works Cited
Bogost, Ian. Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames. 1. MIT Press paperback ed., [Nachdr.], MIT Press, 2010.
Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. 6. Nachdr, MIT Press, 2003.
Dyson, Frances. “Immersion.” Sounding New Media, 1st ed., University of California Press, 2009, pp. 107–35. JSTOR, JSTOR.
Latour, Bruno. Reassembling The Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network-Theory. Oxford Univ. Press, 2007.
The Uncensored Library – Reporters without Borders. https://www.uncensoredlibrary.com/. Accessed 30 Mar. 2020.
Wu, Hong-An. “Video Game Prosumers:Case Study of a Minecraft Affinity Space.” Visual Arts Research, vol. 42, no. 1, 2016, p. 22. DOI.org (Crossref)