Minecraft and the Self in Blocks

Communication Philosophy in a Post-Text World

Francisco Tupy

We live in an age where language fractures into commands, interfaces, and data streams. The written word—the foundation of modern rationality—no longer captures the depth of experience. It is in this vacuum of meaning, where discourse yields to construction, that Minecraft emerges as a philosophical field. It is not merely a game, but an ontological grammar made of voxels—cubic building blocks that don’t just shape worlds, but sculpt ways of being. To play Minecraft is to think with your hands, to inhabit a space where the self doesn’t write but carves its place into reality. In that act, a shift occurs: from representation to presence, from language to embodiment. It’s in this interplay—between player and world, between fingers and form—that communication reveals itself as transformation. This essay explores Minecraft not simply as a cultural artifact, but as a philosophical engine that asks how (or if) we still communicate in a post-text world.

Beyond Words: From Communication Theory to the Playful Encounter

Ciro Marcondes Filho’s New Theory of Communication pivots away from the idea of transmitting information and toward something more radical: transformation. To communicate, in this sense, is to be moved and to move others, to resonate in a shared space of becoming. When applied to games—and particularly to Minecraft—this theory exposes something deeper than interaction: it reveals co-emergence.

In Minecraft, you don’t receive a story. You inhabit a process. The player doesn’t decode symbols; they manipulate substance. And that movement—from the symbolic to the sensuous—is where communication, as a living force, finds its rhythm again.

The Block as First Philosophy

Voxels aren’t just graphical units; they’re miniature ontologies. In Minecraft, each block carries the weight of metaphor and memory. A stone wall is not just a structure—it’s a reflection of the builder’s mood, purpose, vision. To build in Minecraft is to externalize the self.

More sculpture than syntax, the game operates beyond the alphabet. It is post-Barthesian, post-linguistic. Writing no longer suffices; one must build. The block displaces the word, and with it, the self shifts too. “I think, therefore I am” gives way to “I build, therefore I transform.”

Merleau-Ponty in the Server: Flesh, Body, and Gameplay

Maurice Merleau-Ponty described the body not as object, but as sensate subject—a field where the world and self fold into one another. Playing Minecraft echoes this. The player feels the game not only through hands or eyes, but through an expanded body.

Here, the avatar is not a representation, but a lived extension. The game responds. You touch the world, and it touches back. This is Merleau-Ponty’s chiasm in practice—the reversible loop of sensation. And it’s here that communication ceases to be about signals and becomes event: encounter, transformation.

Homo Homini Codex: The Self as Another’s Block

The phrase “man is a wolf to man,” though widely attributed to Hobbes, actually originates from the Roman playwright Titus Maccius Plautus, in his third-century BCE comedy Asinaria. In Minecraft, perhaps a more fitting reinterpretation is homo homini codex—man is block to man. Each player’s constructions alter the shared world. One person’s architecture becomes another’s path or prison.

This is not communication as message, but as structure. The ethical question becomes architectural: What kind of world are we building? Whose ruins do we preserve? In a game where everything can change, every act of building is a moral decision. Minecraft, in this light, becomes a mirror of social existence.

Post-Text, Post-Human, Post-Self?

By replacing the word with the voxel, Minecraft signals a communicational shift. We are entering a time where meaning is not delivered, but inhabited. Where to communicate is no longer to speak, but to make space for others to build.

In this post-textual space, the subject is no longer central. The avatar is less identity than potential. Perhaps this is philosophy’s new role: to rethink the human in an era where code doesn’t need language to signify.

Final Reflections

Minecraft is not just a game. It is a philosophical sandbox, an ontological laboratory where the self is rebuilt in real time. When approached through the lens of the New Theory of Communication, it invites us to rethink what it means to speak, to build, to transform.

More than transmitting messages or interpreting symbols, this theory emphasizes the interplay between comprehension, fruition, and aesthesis—a dynamic space where experience is not received passively but lived, traversed, and shaped. It is about what passes through us and leaves a mark, not just what is decoded.

In that sense, this essay is also an homage. To the late Professor Ciro Marcondes Filho—visionary thinker of communication philosophy, creator of the New Theory of Communication, and my PhD advisor—who passed away in 2020. His thought continues to shape how we see not only language, but life itself: as a game in which we are not mere players, but ever-emerging beings in the process of building meaning, one block at a time.

Francisco Tupy is a Brazilian educator, game designer, and researcher with a Master’s and a PhD in Audiovisual Media and Processes from USP’s School of Communications and Arts (ECA-USP). His work investigates games such as Street Fighter and Minecraft. He has also published on Batman and Iron Man, exploring superhero narratives through ethical and aesthetic lenses. As a mentor of science-fair projects and a postdoctoral scholar, he advocates for media literacy through games, heroes, and anime, using playful worlds to cultivate critical, creative, and civic competencies in students and the broader public.