Minecraft 'loophole' library of banned journalism By Tom Gerken BBC News, Washington DC

13 March 2020

It started out as a project in an online forum and turned into the best-selling video game of all time, but now Minecraft is being used for something even its creator would not have dreamt of.

The iconic game based around placing Lego-like blocks with more than 145 million players each month has been turned into a hub of free speech.

A virtual library was carefully created to house articles written online by journalists.

You can read the entire work of Jamal Khashoggi. He was a journalist who was attacked by Saudi agents in 2018.

Minecraft has declined to comment.

Reporters Without Borders, a non profit organization, created the project. Blockworks designed the Minecraft library.

Christian Mihr (executive director of Reporters Without Borders Germany) stated to the BBC that Minecraft was good because he believes it isn't seen as a threat from governments that censor media.

He stated that Minecraft was the best because of its versatility. It is available in every country. The game is not censored, as some other games are.

"There are big communities in each featured country, that's why the idea came up - it is a loophole for censorship."

He explained that the authors were chosen to represent countries where media freedom was restricted so that people from these communities could access their work.

He clarified, however, that permissions had to be sought before republishing in a library.

"We didn’t put any content in our library without the approval from respective authors - If they are still alive.

"In the Jamal Khashoggi case, we spoke to family members - in regard of people who have died, and the safety their families."

Nick Feamster from the University of Chicago Neubauer Professor of Computer Science said that the library could be effective in beating the censors. However, he was concerned about what governments might do.

He said, "It's a fascinating idea, but I think there are still some problems." Governments will be able to see the articles as they are posted on the internet. It won't be foolproof against an aggressive adversary.

He said that the strength in the library's use of entanglement was what gave it its strength - mixing up the censored content with the videogame for the eyes and ears of the censors.

He stated, "By entangling them both you force the content to share." "You can't censor one without the other."

Helmi Noman (a Research Affiliate of Berkman Klein Centre for Internet & Society) said that he believed the library would only have a small audience.

"The censored content is dynamic, diverse and distributed," he said, adding that in his research "the users prefer approaches that don't pre-select and compartmentalise content in certain spaces online.

"Any approach that fails to create a seamless browsing experience for the entire web, social networks, and direct messaging apps is likely to fail."

Due to the sheer number of simultaneous users, the server was often inaccessible. Despite the limit on simultaneous users, it was visited by 3,889 players representing 75 different countries. It has been downloaded over 77,000 times.

After two hours of trying, BBC finally visited the virtual library and asked its users what they thought.

SoulfulGenie stated they thought it needed more books and more information on North Korea. Another user called the idea "ingenious in many different ways". He added that because the library can be downloaded and reuploaded by others, it is easy to duplicate and therefore hard to kill.

Meanwhile, other players focused on the appearance of the library, with ReduxPL saying it "looks incredible indeed".

The design of the library by Blockworks was no small feat, taking a team of 24 people from 16 different countries around 250 hours to construct.

James Delaney (Managing Director) of the design company stated to BBC that the goal was to create classical designs that were "on the border between fantasy and reality".

"It is kind of plausible as a real building," he said, "but is pushing the limits of what is possible.

"We chose a design that was in the neoclassical aesthetic." It's similar in style to the British Museum and New York public libraries.

Outside of these influences, he said Minecraft was improvisational at its core, so the builders were not restricted to set designs.

"With many people working on the same project," he said, "people see each others' work and have to respond in real time. This is a very reactive method of working and it changes the look.

"The style is meant to symbolize power and authority. We wanted to flip that around.

"It's not representing the power of either the government or the regime. It's representing freedom of expression."
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