Theories relevant to Minecraft

Regulation - Livingstone and Lunt


Livingstone and Lunt studied four case studies of the work of Ofcom.

Ofcom is serving an audience who may be seen as consumers and/or citizens, with consequences for regulation: consumers have wants, are individuals, seek private benefits from the media, use the language of choice, and require regulation to protect against detriment; citizens have needs, are social, seek public or social benefits from the media, use the language of rights, and require regulation to promote the public interest.

Traditional regulation is being put at risk by: increasingly globalised media industries, the rise of the digital media, and media convergence.*

*Media convergence is a term that can refer to either: 1) the merging of previously distinct media technologies and media forms due to digitisation and computer networking; or 2) an economic strategy in which the media properties owned by communications companies employ digitisation and computer networking to work together.

Cultural Industries - David Hesmondhalgh


Cultural industries follow the normal capitalist pattern of increasing concentration and integration – cultural production is owned and controlled by a few conglomerates who vertically integrate across a range of media to reduce risk.

Risk is particularly high in the cultural industries because of the difficulty in predicting success, high production costs, low reproduction costs and the fact that media products are ‘public goods’ – they are not destroyed on consumption but can be further reproduced. This means that the cultural industries rely on ‘big hits’ to cover the costs of failure. Hence industries rely on repetition through use of stars, genres, franchises, repeatable narratives and so on to sell formats to audiences, then industries and governments try to impose scarcity, especially through copyright laws.

The internet has created new powerful IT corporations, and has not transformed cultural production in a liberating and empowering way – digital technology has sped up work, commercialised leisure time and increased surveillance by government and companies.

Identity - David Gauntlett

The media have an important but complex relationship with identities. In the modern world, it is now an expectation that individuals make choices about their identity and lifestyle. Even in the traditional media, there are many diverse and contradictory media messages that individuals can use to think through their identities and ways of expressing themselves. For example, the success of ‘popular feminism’ and increasing representation of different sexualities created a world where the meaning of gender, sexuality and identity is increasingly open.

Regarding Minecraft, Gauntlett suggests that people build a stronger sense of self-identity through creative processes.

Minecraft allows people to express their identity and also socially create

Fandom - Henry Jenkins


Fans act as ‘textual poachers’ – taking elements from media texts to create their own culture.

The development of the ‘new’ media has accelerated ‘participatory culture’, in which audiences are active and creative participants rather than passive consumers. They create online communities, produce new creative forms, collaborate to solve problems, and shape the flow of media. This generates ‘collective intelligence’.

From this perspective, convergence is a cultural process rather than a technological one.

Jenkins prefers the term ‘spreadable media’ to terms such as ‘viral’, as the former emphasises the active, participatory element of the ‘new’ media