Glitch Sorting: Minecraft, Curation and the Postdigital

Abstract

Minecraft (Mojang 2011) is a mysterious game; it seems odd; its pixelated aesthetic seems out of place in a world where digital games are often characterized and judged by incremental increases in verisimilitude. It is not just that it looks odd, weird and blocky; the question is how do you play it? It is not immediately clear. What is clear is that the game is a hit, a hit big enough to be the theme of the South Park episode ‘Informative Murder Porn’.¹ Naturally, the episode is about how unfamiliar Minecraft is for the adults of South Park. Corey Lanskin is hired to teach the adults how to play, he describes it as a game without an objective or goal, that is just about building. From the outside, his description is about right, although the experience of playing Minecraft is far from dull. It is a game that keeps on attracting players; by June 2014, nearly 54 million copies had been sold across all platforms. On the PC it has outstripped the sales of The Sims (EA Games 1999) franchise to become the biggest-selling PC game of all time (Campbell 2014). Its success brought it and the small Swedish independent company that made it — Stockholm-based Mojang — to the attention of Microsoft, which purchased Mojang and its intellectual property for $2.5 billion on 15 September 2014 (Peckham 2014). In the postdigital age, blocks and pixels are worth serious money.