ABSTRACT
Minecraft Pocket Edition is a mobile game in which players may continually modify a procedurally generated game world. Unlike the heavily researched PC and console-based versions of Minecraft, the under-explored mobile version offers gameplay that is unique to touchscreen interfaces since players gesticulate directly upon a screen that simultaneously displays the environment they are modifying, and play may occur across various spaces with various entangled bodies. Following Judith Butler, this chapter frames mobile Minecraft play as performative, and conceptualizes mobile gaming interfaces through Karen Barad’s notion of apparatuses. This positions the mobile touchscreen interfaces as a nonhuman body that comes together with human bodies through highly contingent, hybridized performances. In this chapter, I offer an examination of mobile Minecraft play with attention to the spaces played, mined, and crafted as part of the cybernetic performances of these entangled and frenetic bodies. I analyze three collaborative mobile Minecraft play sessions from a microethological study of young Minecraft players with particular attention to play that performs and reaffirms players’ co-present relationships through the digital and physical game spaces. In doing so, I argue that Minecraft play—in its mobile iteration—may be seen as a focal point through which to observe the hybridization of the co-present relationships, social and technological expertise, and bodies in play spaces. In other words, mobile Minecraft play materializes hybrid spaces.
