A TERRIFIC ONLINE ETHNOGRAPHY
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We're happy to share with our Patreon subscribers Your Place or Minecraft?, directed by Gina Hara in 2016. A precursor to Hara's more experimental work with Mojan Studios' world-building game (think Sidings of the Afternoon or Valley), Your Place or Minecraft? documents the activities of a handful of Canadian academics playing together. The full series, which debuted on YouTube six years ago to great critical acclaim, comprises eight episodes.
Both entertaining and revealing, Your Place or Minecraft?, takes place in the virtual land of the mLab server, one of the most modded Minecraft servers in the world. But what makes it really special is that it is owned by academic game research centres of Concordia University where the players - students and professors - all work together in real life. Their IRL friendships, objectives and conflicts result in fascinating, self-reflexive and sometimes explosive gameplay. Hara's modus operandi, connecting gaming, research, and film making, is a testament to the ethnographic potential of documentary-based machinima
Matteo Bittanti
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