Will Glover

Will Glover is a fourth-year PhD student in the English Department at Boston University. He specializes in early American nonfiction—travelogues, natural histories, sermons, legal documents, and Indigenous writing—with a particular focus on competing representations of landscape, land ownership, natural resources, and labor. He is especially interested in the tension between the truth-claims of ostensibly utilitarian texts, and the literary techniques inevitably employed to make them. He has also published on J. R. R. Tolkien and William Wordsworth.

Ethical dilemmas of the digital Robinsonade: What should we do with “colonialist” video games?

Colonialism is everywhere (beware)

Playing video games is a serious business. Once dismissed as a frivolous, childish pursuit, video games are now enjoyed by people of all ages and drive an industry that, in some countries, is larger than music and film combined.[1] The medium’s uptake was supercharged during the pandemic, with multiple studies subsequently showing that gaming, be it individually or as a family, provided some much-needed psychological relief during that difficult time.[2]

Amid this general rise in popularity, a certain kind of game has enjoyed special attention in the last dozen or so years. This type of game is largely open-ended, driven by a player’s choices and priorities rather than narrative. Play revolves primarily around the gathering and management of resources, and the construction of buildings and items. While combat may feature, it’s not the main focus. I am thinking here of three best-selling games in particular (though there are many others like them): Stardew Valley (2016), Animal Crossing: New Horizons (2020), and the highest-selling individual game title of all time, Minecraft (2011).[3] While each game occupies a different sub-genre—farming sim, life sim, and sandbox/survival game respectively—each could also be called a “Robinsonade.” This genre label, derived from the title of Daniel Defoe’s 1719 castaway adventure novel Robinson Crusoe, has a complex history, and can vary widely in meaning; while the term can be used specifically to refer to eighteenth-century literary imitations of Crusoe, critics acknowledge that texts “in such disparate fields as literature, theater, television, gaming, and the visual arts” can be considered Robinsonades, provided they demonstrate some kind of thematic or structural affinity with Defoe’s original.[4] I use the term here in the context of video games to highlight important structural similarities between Robinson Crusoe and the class of games outlined above—no matter the obvious surface-level differences. For example, while the cutesy aesthetics of Animal Crossing or the presence of numerous townsfolk in Stardew Valley might seem to separate these games from Defoe’s realist, isolationist desert-island fantasy, the essential mechanics of the novel and the games are much the same.

In Defoe’s novel and its video game imitators, we begin with a “virgin” landscape that the player/narrator explores and shapes. The protagonist follows a path of economic development in which a few basic tools and competencies allow for resource extraction and construction; success in these endeavors brings rewards that enable ever-more efficient techniques of extraction and construction. Material wealth is accumulated and grants power and influence over others—be they friendly villagers or foes. By the end of the novel/game (although properly speaking, the games never truly end), the protagonist is wealthy and powerful, and the landscape developed almost beyond recognition. As described here, this kind of story/gameplay may sound monotonous—yet it also holds great appeal. As one critic writes of Crusoe (in a statement that could just as easily apply to the class of video games described above), the “obsession with accountancy is simultaneously dull and oddly satisfying. As Crusoe’s stores expand and his assets become more secure, you feel heartened: all that effort paid off!”[5] This teleological progression from rags to riches, almost mythical in its simplicity, clearly chimes with readers and players alike. Crusoe has run through hundreds of editions in the 300-plus years since its first publication, while the three aforementioned Robinsonade games have together sold more than 300 million copies.[6]

Precisely because of these fundamentally consumptive and extractive mechanics, however, Robinsonade games have experienced something of a backlash. Some of this is tongue-in-cheek—there is clearly a knowing, clickbaity hysteria to popular pieces with titles like “Animal Crossing is a dystopian hellscape.”[7] But sober academic articles are making similar arguments. Alexis D. Smith, for example, argues that Animal Crossing expresses “colonialist values,” while Daniel Dooghan attributes to Minecraft a wide range of ideological sins ranging from “habituat[ing] players to myths of empire and capital that rationalize political and economic inequality,” to “delegitimiz[ing] racially constructed others,” to “train[ing] players to be docile, fungible workers.”[8] While one might be tempted to scoff at such doom-laden pronouncements, they are made in a spirit of seriousness, and so should be taken in one too. This article aims to assess and respond to these claims—but first we need to unpack them more fully.

The essential argument of these attacks is that the games in question promote a “colonialist” mindset. This is a difficult word; as this issue of Ampersand shows, colonialism does not have a single definition or unified history and can be applied to vastly different time periods and locales. I think that these critics have in mind a particular kind of settler-colonialism practiced by (among other nations) Britain in (among other locations) North America, Australia and New Zealand. With this context in mind, “colonialist values” might include the rapacious seizing and transformation of land, the displacement and murder of native peoples, and the prioritizing of power and profit above all other concerns. Clearly, a game like Animal Crossing does not exemplify these values in the way that classic strategy games like Age of Empires (1997-present) do.[9] Rather, a critique like Smith’s sees significance precisely in the fact that Animal Crossing is not explicitly a game of dominance and conquest; but under its innocent, charming veneer (the argument goes) it implies these values. For example, colonialist-style resource extraction is practiced in the game’s side-missions, in which a player has a certain amount of time to loot a neighboring island of as many resources as possible. Racialization may be implicit in the setting up of hierarchies—some animals are anthropomorphized and given the power of speech (e.g. dogs, cats, and cows), while others (fish and insects) can be hunted and consumed or placed in a museum. The title of this issue is “Colonialism’s Long Shadow.” We might expect to see this shadow in things like the unequal distribution of geopolitical power, or the relative poverty of certain postcolonial countries, but can its outlines also be discerned in some of the most popular entertainments consumed today?

It is, admittedly, difficult to disagree with the first part of these arguments. Some of the fundamental drivers of historical colonialism also drive the Robinsonade. A premium is placed in both discourses on taking ownership of and “improving” land—an argument John Locke used to justify (among other things) the displacement of Native Americans: “[a]s much land as a man tills, plants, improves, cultivates, and can use the product of, so much is his property. He by his labour does as it were enclose it from the common.”[10] The shared emphasis on material accumulation and dominance is also impossible to avoid; countless lines from Crusoe encapsulate the appeal of the digital Robinsonade, such as “I was gotten home to my little tent, where I lay with all my wealth about me very secure” and “if I pleas’d, I might call my self king, or emperor over the whole country which I had possession of[.]”[11] Most critiques end here: games like Minecraft are structurally akin to colonialism and should therefore be condemned, or at least handled with care. Such a blunt approach, however, is unsatisfying, and rests on a number of flawed assumptions that I will address in the following pages. Firstly, critics like Smith and Dooghan have a monolithic view of video game players. They ignore player agency and responsibility, and even (to a certain extent) what makes a game a game in the first place. Secondly, they assume a straightforward crossover between the implied ethics of a virtual world and the practiced ethics of the real world. In so doing, they ignore the potential moral value of a game allowing players to approach issues of land use and resources as they wish, as the way a player plays a game may show them some potentially uncomfortable truths about their own values and desires. Thirdly and finally, they presume a particular relationship between virtual labor and real-world capitalism, in which the former must be an endorsement of the latter, rather than an escape from it.

Don’t hate the game, hate the player

At the heart of the arguments that critique video games for an implied endorsement of colonialism is Ian Bogost’s notion of “procedural rhetoric.” Bogost argues that video games are made up of structures and processes that, implicitly or explicitly, have a rhetorical effect. Put simply, they make claims about “how things work.”[12] In order to build, the player of Minecraft must extract resources from the natural world—the game’s procedural rhetoric thus makes a claim about the relationship between nature and culture. But just because the game allows a player to aggressively strip-mine a landscape to build a giant castle, it does not follow that it encourages them to do so. Permission should not be conflated with compulsion—something that is acknowledged but too quickly brushed over in the critiques outlined above. For example, Smith argues of Animal Crossing that, while the game “does not require over-exploitation [of the natural world], the reward system and the messaging encourage it.”[13] This is out of step with the game’s conception of itself—not gospel, of course, but worth referring to. Its website “invites you to create your personal island paradise on a deserted island brimming with possibility”.[14] Minecraft sums itself up as follows: “Explore your own unique world, survive the night, and create anything you can imagine!”[15]

Both games, then, seek to impart a sense of open-ended possibility—an attitude at odds with the players described by Smith and Dooghan, who allegedly pursue resource extraction and material reward at all costs. Dooghan acknowledges that “[t]he promised freedom of creative possibility may suggest a wide range of outcomes,” but in the end sees homogeneity: “in the gameplay that has emerged, based on thousands of YouTube videos, forum posts, and player modifications, players do similar things.”[16] This seems doubtful. Surely part of the drive to make and upload YouTube videos describing one’s gameplay is to showcase one’s individuality, rather than the opposite. The argument also ignores some interesting high-profile cases of alternative play in Minecraft. I have limited space to go into these in detail, but they include an environmental awareness campaign mounted by Greenpeace Poland and a digital travel writing project based on playing the game in an unconventional (but perfectly legitimate) way.[17] Rather than settling and building, Brendan Keogh set out eastwards throughout Minecraft’s vast procedurally-generated world, sheltering in caves and hastily built shelters before moving on, documenting his physical and emotional journey in a blog—all over the course of 18 months.[18]

But even if we ignore these creative, thought-provoking ways of approaching a game like Minecraft and assume that most gamers do play in the most single-minded, exploitative way possible, shouldn’t we be interrogating them rather than the game? To illustrate this, I’d like to examine a case study: one of the countless YouTube videos about Minecraft, albeit more academic in tone than the average. Entitled “Minecraft, Sandboxes, and Colonialism,” it is produced by “Folding Ideas”—aka Dan Olson—a “documentarian making videos on a broad range of subjects rooted in stories and how they reflect and shape the world around us.”[19] The video begins with an innocuous-sounding voice-over—“Hey everybody, let me tell you a story”—followed by on-screen text: “THAT TIME I ACCIDENTALLY DID A COLONIALISM IN MINECRAFT.” In brief: Olson wants to trade with some non-player-character (NPC) villagers. However, the closest villages are “kind of far away,” so making the journey is “kind of a hassle” and “in the wrong direction from everything else … [he is] building.” Olson decides it would be far more convenient if his trading partners were located closer to him, so he builds some houses for them to live in. The game’s mechanics, however, make it very difficult to create bustling villages out of nothing—while building structures is easy enough, populating them is much harder. After detailing one extremely time-consuming method, Olson decides it would be much easier to simply “acquire villagers from existing villages.” At this point he preempts the viewer’s probable reaction: “Not sure about that phrasing. Not hype on where this is going.” He goes on to explain this process of “acquisition”: NPC villagers can be pushed into boats that they are incapable of getting out of themselves. Thus, they can easily be transported to a new location and released into their new player-built home, conveniently located for easy trade. Olson sums up:

And so, yes, the best most straightforward way to create a new village in Minecraft is to kidnap villagers from an existing village. Now this is a good point to say that I don’t believe this is intentional, that this is more of a weird emergent outcome of systems interacting. I mean I really hope that the people working on Minecraft … didn’t look at the game and go ‘Yeah. Human trafficking? Pushing people into a boat and spiriting them away? I love it!’ That would…that would definitely be a yikes. But it’s a particularly interesting case study in the way that game systems create metaphor, and that even if you didn’t intend for your mechanics to incentivize kidnapping, you still sorta created a game where the player is kiiinda encouraged to do a kidnapping. Or two or three.

Despite its frustrating pairing of grave subject matter with trivial language—“DID A COLONIALISM,” “do a kidnapping,” “that would definitely be a yikes”—Olson’s argument is clear, and chimes with Smith and Dooghan in blaming colonialist-style play on the video game in question. It also (unintentionally) makes abundantly clear how misplaced this blame is. I find it simply astounding that, after detailing how difficult the game makes it to move villagers, and explaining how his own reasons for doing so were rooted in a desire to play the game more conveniently, Olson somehow blames Minecraft’s developers for “incentivizing” this kind of play. This is a striking negation of player responsibility and places the moral onus in the wrong place. Rather than critiquing a game whose mechanics distantly allow for pseudo-colonial behavior, shouldn’t we interrogate why a player might actively choose to play in this way?

To explore this question about player agency and responsibility further, I’d like to offer up my own playing for critique, albeit in the context of a different game: Stardew Valley. I downloaded the farming/life sim last semester, when I was feeling particularly burnt out at work and looking for some fun respite. The game invites you to escape from corporate drudgery and rebuild a farm left to you in your grandfather’s will. The narrative premise and visual style are pastoral and cute and, as a whole, the game promotes small-scale community-oriented ways of farming and living. At the outset, after designing an in-game avatar, the player decides on what kind of land they’d like to build their farm: a standard grassy plain, a hilltop, a beach, etc. Imagining myself a digital Henry David Thoreau, I chose a woodland lot, looking forward to tilling a few modest rows of beans sheltered beneath the pines. As I quickly found out, however, trees are a real pain when it comes to growing things, especially if you want those things to be in neat rows (which I certainly did). I cut down a small area of trees and planted my first crops. I sold them. I earned money to buy more seeds. I soon grew bored of only growing one or two kinds of crops and wanted to plant more varieties (without compromising on quantity, of course). The only thing to do was to chop down more trees. I did so with satisfaction, anticipating my future wealth—but also with a twinge of guilt as each trunk came creaking down (though this was partly remedied by the lumber I harvested). For me, playing the game involved a continuous battle between my better angels and my desire for profit. The angels beat a steady retreat throughout—and all this even though I went into the game with the clear intention of doing the opposite of what I largely ended up doing. Not only this, but the game allows—even encourages—other ways of playing.[20]

Despite the open-endedness of our respective games and our freedom as players, both Dan Olson and I played in exploitative ways that sacrificed the freedom of NPCs and the integrity of the environment for our own convenience and wealth. This tallies with the wider history of colonialism in the real world, about which I will risk a generalization: while racism may have justified it, economic concerns were its fundamental drivers. It is important to stress here that I am by no means seeking to absolve the colonialists of the past. Rather, I aim to show that the motives that drove past actions that we now abhor continue to drive us today. Personal wealth and convenience justify innumerable sins—how many of us buy clothes and phones in full knowledge of the exploitative labor practices that go into making them?[21] This is an uncomfortable but valuable lesson to learn. Admittedly, it may be something that we are already aware of in a distant, intellectual way, but it can be taught vividly through the role-play of games, in which the combination of freedom and agency has the potential to show us something about ourselves and our values.[22] Unlike the reader of Defoe, the player of a Robinsonade does not have to follow a narrow path of domination and accumulation, but can employ the game’s mechanics to more interesting ends. We don’t have to act like Crusoe; but what if we choose to?

Ethics by numbers

One might respond to the above point, of course, by claiming that one should never even attempt to “understand” the motives of colonialism; and that to re-enact colonialist practices even in a virtual environment has harmful real-world consequences. This is a tricky area. Some posit a direct connection between behavior in virtual and real worlds to varying degrees of sophistication. Smith fears that the attitudes espoused by Animal Crossing “are ultimately an obstacle to conservation in the real world” because of their allegedly nefarious influence on players.[23] A student post on the website of Ian Bryce Jones, a professor at the University of Chicago, argues that, because Minecraft “allows the player to become ‘God’ and help themselves with resources … playing [the game] allows people to role-play as the oppressor, which rationalizes racist behavior outside a digital format.”[24] These are especially crude connections—but are not that different from the notion that playing violent video games leads to violent behavior in real life, a commonplace assertion that a great number of studies have struggled to prove.[25]

Other approaches are more careful. Stephanie Partridge, for example, argues thoughtfully against the “amoralist” position she characterizes with the phrase “‘Come on, it’s only a game!’”[26] She does so by positing that certain games have an “incorrigible social meaning”—i.e. that, depending on the context, the content of a game may take on a meaning with ramifications outside the space of play, which may be harmful. I do not here endorse the “come on, it’s only a game” point of view. I do, however, think that because a game is a game—something with a very particular relationship with reality—we cannot assume direct crossover between real and virtual worlds in terms of value systems. It would be absurd, for example, to claim that football teaches or encourages its audience to surmount life obstacles by charging headlong into them. Spaces of play are separated from the “real world” by their boundedness (they take place on a specific court, field, board, or screen) and by their rules.[27] It’s also important to remember one of the first things we teach in literature classes: representation does not equal endorsement. In sum, there is no reason that a player who primarily mines fossil fuels in Minecraft should be a fan of Big Oil, or that a player of Animal Crossing who fishes and catches bugs can’t also be a level-5 vegan.[28]

So far I’ve modulated the view espoused by Smith and Dooghan on three counts. Even if certain video games permit the single-minded exploitation of people and nature for the pursuit of profit, players may well not play the game that way. Even if they do, there may be a potential moral benefit to role-playing as a colonizer and understanding the decisions and rationalizations that lead to such abhorrent actions. Finally, the space of play is firmly separated from the real world—there is little evidence of moral contagion between the two spaces. To end, I’d like to flip on its head a claim frequently made about these games in relation to labor and work.

A love of labor

While writing this particular article, I conducted a (very much un-scientific) survey with some people at a barbecue. Video games—specifically Stardew Valley—had come up, and I asked the two gamers in the group why they enjoyed playing it so much. One of the players held forth for a while—she detailed the various things one could do, grow, and find; the routine of the simulated day; and the rewards one could obtain for playing a certain way. I soon realized that she was not explaining why she liked it, but was simply laying out what playing the game entailed, as if the tasks of a farming simulator and deep enjoyment were innately linked—and perhaps they are, in literature as in gaming. I have already cited a critic who finds the depiction of Robinson Crusoe’s successful efforts to be “heartening.”[29] The narrator comes to see his “infinite labour” (a phrase that crops up no fewer than seven times) in a redemptive light: “with patience and labour I went thro’ many things; and indeed every thing that my circumstances made necessary to me to do.”[30] No doubt it is partly this kind of sentiment that led Rousseau, among many others, to think the book a perfect moral text for children, especially boys.[31] But video game Robinsonades are, above all, meant to be entertaining—how do they make work as fun as my barbecue interlocutor clearly finds it? A few patterns are discernible. Save for the occasional opportunity for automation, tasks must generally be performed by the player and by hand: each swing of a pick-axe or hoe is performed individually (often resulting in a satisfying judder of the gamepad). At the same time, it is obviously not back-breaking work, requiring only the coordinated movement of fingers and thumbs. Most importantly, video game Robinsonade labor is precisely and proportionally linked with reward. Mine a seam of coal in Minecraft and you get one piece of coal. Sell a bushel of wheat in Stardew Valley and you get a fair price: no market fluctuations, no droughts, no wars to destroy your crop. In short, these are worlds where you really can pull yourself up by your bootstraps, where hard work mathematically guarantees a substantial reward.

This representation of work in video games has attracted much critical attention. Many earnest articles appeared critiquing Animal Crossing during its pandemic boom, such as “Animal Crossing’s Embrace of Cute, Capitalist Perfection Is Not What We Need.”[32] As the title of Dooghan’s article claims, Minecraft is an apology for neoliberalism and a rehearsal for a rapacious free-market future. But I think it is the opposite. What animates these games is the desire for a smaller world, in which every worker is in charge of their destiny, and in which the proceeds from the sweat of their brow are enjoyed by them directly, without capitalist overlords to skim off the cream. It’s no coincidence that Animal Crossing was such a hit when real work and meaningful reward disappeared. Even now, as the pandemic is slowly fading from memory, I wonder: if work and reward really were directly linked, do we think that people (especially working adults) would still play these games in such large numbers? Lewis Gordon writes of Animal Crossing that “[i]ts stultifying islands are not the inspiration we need”—but regardless, they seem to be what we want.[33]

[1] “Gaming Worth More than Video and Music Combined,” BBC News, January 3, 2019, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-46746593.

[2] See, for example, Matthew Barr and Alicia Copeland-Stewart, “Playing Video Games During the COVID-19 Pandemic and Effects on Players’ Well-Being,” Games and Culture 17, no. 1 (2022): 122–39; Katy E. Pearce et al., “Families Playing Animal Crossing Together: Coping With Video Games During the COVID-19 Pandemic,” Games and Culture 17, no. 5 (2022): 773–94.

[3] “Best-Selling Videogame,” Guinness World Records, April 2021, https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/best-selling-video-game. Concerned Ape. Stardew Valley. Multiple platforms (2016); Nintendo. Animal Crossing: New Horizons. Switch (2020). https://www.animal-crossing.com/new-horizons/. https://www.stardewvalley.net/ ; Mojang Studios. Minecraft. Multiple platforms (2011). https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/.

[4] Jakub Lipski, “Introduction,” in The Robinsonade across Languages, Cultures, and Media (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2020), 1. Lipski’s edited volume provides a recent, wide-ranging account of the genre. For a more historically focused treatment, see Carl Fisher, “Innovation and Imitation in the Eighteenth-Century Robinsonade,” in The Cambridge Companion to “Robinson Crusoe,” ed. John Richetti (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 99–111.

[5] Philip Ball, “The Many Afterlives of Robinson Crusoe,” The New Statesman, May 1, 2019, sec. Culture, https://www.newstatesman.com/culture/2019/05/the-many-afterlives-of-robinson-crusoe.

[6] J. Clement, “Unit Sales of Animal Crossing: New Horizons Worldwide as of March 2023,” May 11, 2023, https://www.statista.com/statistics/1112631/animal-crossing-new-horizons-sales/#:~:text=Currently%2C%20lifetime%20sales%20of%20Animal,sit%20at%2042.2%20million%20units.; J. Clement, “Lifetime Unit Sales Generated by Stardew Valley Worldwide as of March 2022,” August 16, 2022, https://www.statista.com/statistics/1326529/stardew-valley-lifetime-unit-sales/#:~:text=Stardew%20Valley%20lifetime%20unit%20sales%202016%2D2022&text=As%20of%20March%202022%2C%20indie,of%20sales%20(13%20million).; “Best-Selling Videogame.”

[7] Laura Hudson, “Animal Crossing Is a Dystopian Hellscape,” The Verge, February 7, 2018, https://www.theverge.com/2018/2/7/16971976/animal-crossing-pocket-camp-dystopian-hellscape.

[8] Alexis D. Smith, “Colonialist Values in Animal Crossing and Their Implications for Conservation,” Highlights of Sustainability 1 (2022): 129–33; Daniel Dooghan, “Digital Conquerors: Minecraft and the Apologetics of Neoliberalism,” Games and Culture 14, no. 1 (2019): 67, 83.

[9] Although even here it is worth noting that overtly historical games often emphasize the contingencies of history, allowing the player craft counter-factual narratives in which, say, the Aztecs successfully defend against Spanish invasion.

[10] John Locke, The Second Treatise of Government & A Letter Concerning Toleration, ed. Tom Crawford (New York: Dover, 2002), 14.

[11] Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe, ed. John Richetti (London: Penguin, 2001), 47, 103.

[12] Ian Bogost, Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2007), 29.

[13] Smith, “Colonialist Values in Animal Crossing and Their Implications for Conservation,” 131.

[14] https://www.animal-crossing.com/new-horizons/. Accessed August 21, 2023.

[15] https://www.minecraft.net/en-us/. Accessed August 21, 2023.

[16] Dooghan, “Digital Conquerors: Minecraft and the Apologetics of Neoliberalism,” 70.

[17] Gaia Amadori, “Gaming for Ecological Activism: A Multidimensional Model for Networks Articulated Through Video Games,” Games and Culture 0, no. 0 (2023): 1–20.

[18] Alenda Y. Chang, Playing Nature: Ecology in Video Games (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019), 216–32; Brendan Keogh, Towards Dawn: Leaving the Miner’s Life Behind (blog), accessed July 10, 2023, http://towardsdawns.blogspot.com/.

[19] Dan Olson. “Minecraft, Sandboxes, and Colonialism | Folding Ideas,” YouTube Video, 15:02,

August 23, 2019, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d6i5Ylu0mgM&ab_channel=FoldingIdeas.

[20] Jason Sheehan, “Reading The Game: Stardew Valley,” NPR, April 29, 2017, https://www.npr.org/sections/alltechconsidered/2017/04/29/523940086/reading-the-game-stardew-valley.

[21] Michael Martina, “U.S. Senator Slams Apple, Amazon, Nike, for Enabling Forced Labor in China,” Reuters, June 10, 2021, https://www.reuters.com/business/retail-consumer/us-senator-slams-apple-amazon-nike-enabling-forced-labor-china-2021-06-10/.

[22] See C. Thi Nguyen in https://aestheticsforbirds.com/2019/08/21/playing-games-with-history-philosophers-on-the-ethics-of-historical-board-games/, who in his analysis of the board game Root (2018) argues that a game that permits the player to “to step into, and then step back from, the role of the colonizer” can be a valuable teaching tool.

[23] Smith, “Colonialist Values in Animal Crossing and Their Implications for Conservation,” 129.

[24] Adayan Munsuarrieta, “Minecraft: The Robinsonade of Creativity or Colonialism?,” Intermittent Mechanism (blog), May 10, 2020, https://intermittentmechanism.blog/2020/05/10/minecraft-the-robinsonade-of-creativity-or-colonialism/.

[25] Alex Hern, “Playing Video Games Doesn’t Lead to Violent Behaviour, Study Shows,” The Guardian, July 22, 2020, https://www.theguardian.com/games/2020/jul/22/playing-video-games-doesnt-lead-to-violent-behaviour-study-shows.

[26] Stephanie Partridge, “The Incorrigible Social Meaning of Video Game Imagery,” Ethics and Information Technology 13 (2011): 303.

[27] For an account of the importance of “boundedness” in telling apart fiction from reality, see Anna Abraham, “How We Tell Apart Fiction from Reality,” The American Journal of Psychology 135, no. 1 (2022): 1–18.

[28] This last point is ignored by PETA, who lay out the dos and don’ts of playing Animal Crossing in a vegan way in “PETA’s Vegan Guide to ‘Animal Crossing: New Horizons,’” March 23, 2020, https://www.peta.org/features/animal-crossing-new-horizons-vegan/.

[29] Ball.

[30] Defoe, 92. For the phrase “infinite labour,” see 46, 49, 55, 97, 101, 102, 121.

[31] Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in his educational treatise Émile (1762), describes Crusoe in the following terms: “[it is] the most felicitous treatise on natural education. This book will be the first that my Emile will read. For a long time it will alone compose his whole library, and it will always hold a distinguished place there” (184). This passage comes shortly before Rousseau extolls the value of hard work: “turn all [your pupil’s] attention at first toward industry and mechanical arts which make men useful to one another” (185-6). Edition used: Emile or On Education, ed. and trans. Allan Bloom (New York: Basic Books, 1979).

[32] Lewis Gordon, “Animal Crossing’s Embrace of Cute, Capitalist Perfection Is Not What We Need,” The Nation, May 11, 2020, https://www.thenation.com/article/culture/animal-crossing-video-game-essay/.

[33] Gordon.