Gamers against tyrants

“Reporters without borders” opened a library of prohibited texts in the Minecraft video game. There are texts in Russian too

The International Organization “Reporters Without Borders” announced the opening of The Uncensored Library library in the Minecraft video game. More than 200 books have been placed in a huge virtual building that contain articles of journalists who have come under censorship in different countries of the world. There is a section in the storage for Russia. On March 12, on the day of the fight against cyberscence, the organization opens access to the library to everyone.

In the virtual collection, you can find a collection of texts from five countries at the end of the Free Press Rating: Russia, Saudi Arabia, Mexico, Vietnam and Egypt. In the Russian hall, you can find, for example, publications of the Brani.ru portal, which has been trying to limit the access to Roskomnadzor since 2014. In the virtual hall of the library, you can see an octopus symbolizing a state that is trying to cover the entire Internet with its tentacles.

“Reporters without borders” had previously held similar promotions: for example, they laid out texts in the form of songs in the musical services of Spotify, Deezer and Apple Music. Services that are better suited for the new album Lil Uzi Verta turned out to be convenient for the publication of non -certificate information: the texts of the “forbidden” news were turned into songs and laid out under pseudonyms.

The Unkensored Library has a similar concept: the player can go to the virtual library and gain access to the texts prohibited by his government. Ultimately, any space or digital tool can be used to combat censorship. Minecraft, maybe known as the Lego Designer for Zumers, but it allows you to create monumental structures and complex mechanisms. Or write books and share them with other players. A little fantasy, and now the game is already a convincing and vivid argument in the discussion about freedom of information.

This argument is strong not even because states do not understand anything in video games. Games give a creative resource to do what is impossible in the real world.

And it is precisely this property that is so valuable for the “uncensored library”: as free space, of course, is possible only here.

In 2018, the Indie Studio Crows Crows Crows, known for her experiments with games, decided to arrange an adventure and invited the fans of her games to send works of virtual art: pictures, 3D models, sound sets, architectural structures, etc.

The concept consisted in the creation of the "Museum of the Community" with many expositions of the very different level of performance and idea. Someone painted a set of multi-colored penis in Paint, someone a complex psychedelic statue, and someone is a play about a sad robot from the future. So it turned out a museum inside the virtual architectural structure in the form of a white cube. And this is a good museum that is possible only in virtual space.

Minecraft has become a cult video game thanks to its simplicity. It is easy to do complex things here, so groups of players love large -scale tasks: for example, from scratch they create Middle -earth from Tolkien’s books in Minecraft. And Russian schoolchildren entertain themselves by making copies of native sleeping areas. Or make awkward figures from mud blocks and discuss how to make the house of their dreams out of them.

The monumental building of the library with prohibited texts of different countries is, of course, the same funny cube figure, only scaled on the problem of freedom of information. This, alas, is not a dream house. This is the house of needs. At the same time, the building itself, of course, was made by bores: to be honest, I do not know how boring it is to be to be gathering in Minecraft a building in the neoclassicism style.