Search

My research was inspired by a bold move from Reporters Without Borders. RSF made a Minecraft map, called the uncensored library about how governments supress the freedom of the press. The Uncensored Library contains information about the Freedom Index, explaining situations around the world, but mainly it is about the articles that are inaccessible in such countries. The library recently introduced a COVID-19 room, featuring separate edits about how authoritarian governments made use of the covid situation to control the media (and Hungary got featured, yay!).

Since Minecraft is basically a huge sandbox world, you can do basically anything as long the game engine can comply with it. Moreover, Minecraft includes editable books! And well, that’s the culprit of the library. Reporters can copy articles into the book, thus having a workaround with censorship. You only need an internet access to their server, or a copy of the game map and Minecraft running on your device.

The Uncensored Library features halls about countries that heavily censor the press. In the video above, you see the hall of the Reporters Without Borders' hall, the organisation that made The Uncensored Library.

Sidenote: in China, Minecraft doesn’t include editable books, or really anything that can transfer messages. You cannot rename items or give names to pets.

Search is just a lot more about typing into Google. Search is about discovery! Minecraft has a special education edition. This special version can be used for teaching natural sciences such has physic or chemistry.

This type of discovery is also present in other games. Really, any game with a sandbox mode, or within the sandbox genre can be used as a search tool for discovery. Fortnite’s creative mode enables teachers to give student a sort of digital canvas to experiment with. This can be leveraged for teaching art & design, science, engineering, and even coding!

A surprising game to bring up is Overwatch. You might ask, Overwatch is a multiplayer PvP game, how come I would feature it for a search related topic? Well, Overwatch has something called the Workshop. And OW’s Workshop feature is quite different from a simple sandbox mode. The Workshop lets you modify game rules from heroes’ abilities down to the game’s win conditions. This enables you to create your own gamemodes. Overwatch has millions of players, imagine if those players create gamemodes! What makes the Workshop really great is that you can copy any kind of modifiers from other players. This means if you like a Workshop game, you can just copy it and take a look at how it works. It is a very different search experience, since it is very hard to find a an exciting gamemode just from looking at a list of lobbies. No matter if you are looking for fun or want to hack the game, you have to try these Workshop modes to understand them first. And Overwatch makes it incredibly easy to discover modes.

These gamemodes are not just different means to play Overwatch. For instance, Tinderwatch, created via Overwatch's Workshop is a dating.. platform? simulator? Tinderwatch let's you create a profile and set expectations, and then matches you with someone that might met those expectations - a truly unique way of search.

So far, I really only talked about how games enable us to search and discover knowledge. But, what if we do it vice versa? What if we look at something that is built for organizing information, and make a game out of it? The Wikipedia Game takes an interesting twist in search architecture. The concept builds upon Wikipedia’s hyperlinking function. In this game, you are given two random Wikipedia articles, one for your starting point, and one that you must reach from the other one through clicking on article links. It is quite an unconventional way of sharing information, built upon a very conventional system, Wikipedia. The idea to take something that can be edited by anyone, the database that probably contains the vast amount of human knowledge and make it into a game is a truly fascinating way of searching. On the other hand, it is very hard to use it, to find what we want, and get information transparently.

Speaking of transparency, the trilemma of searching is quite the puzzle. In my examples, search takes many different kinds of approaches. This is understandable since these examples have different goals. The uncensored library is about to raise awareness of press censorship, while also giving a way to avoid censorship. Therefore, it is very easy to distribute, it is transparent and easy to use, but it is incredibly hard to maintain it to be up to date. Overwatch’s Workshop is very easy to maintain for freshness, it has a robust distribution system, since it handles everything for the player, but all that tackles down on transparency. You have to have experience, a sort of craft to Overwatch to understand what makes it tick – this generally applies to all sandbox non- or full code sandbox platforms. In this trilemma, usability and transparency has a sort of double meaning. Not all searches made equal – take Google, a very usual way of search for examples. Google is incredibly easy to be distributed, it is very up to date, but we are not quite sure of how we get the list of results. Why is the no 1 result the no 1? That comes down to transparency.