Bot Players and Sociotechnical Imaginaries of AI in Minecraft: Worker Bees, War Machines, and Virtual Girlfriends

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AGSA is pleased to invite you to our Brown Bag Talk, titled "Bot Players and Sociotechnical Imaginaries of AI in Minecraft: Worker Bees, War Machines, and Virtual Girlfriends," by our fellow graduate student Lina Cahill. The talk will be held on Thursday, November 5th, from 3:15 to 4:45 PMin Hale 455. Food will be served on a first come, first served basis. The presentation is open to all faculty, staff, and undergraduate and graduate students.

As a sandbox video game, Minecraft allows human players to step into virtual avatars and interact with a near-infinite 3-D landscape of LEGO-like blocks—but recently, AI-driven virtual robots, referred to as “bot players” or “bots,” have taken the Minecraft multiverse by storm. On certain Minecraft servers, human players have coordinated bots en masse to serve as worker bees and delivery drones that can automatically collect in-game resources, carry parcels of precious items across vast distances, and construct monuments at record scale and speed. Recent experiments have even demonstrated the potential of virtual bots as war machines, highlighting their hand-to-hand combat prowess and alarming capacity for mass destruction of the gameworld.

Beyond servitude and weaponization, human Minecraft players have also turned to bots for online companionship, as evidenced by the current trend of inserting one’s “waifu” (dream girlfriend) into the game as a co-player capable of voice chatting. On the one hand, such cyborgian co-play would seem to proffer feminist and posthuman potential; however, in practice, these interactions are characterized by misogynistic mistreatment. This presentation draws on social media data gathered as part of an ongoing research project examining the Minecraft community and its variably utopian and dystopian visions of AI-driven entities, highlighting the gendered embodiment of bots.