Minecraft's territory: Alberta's oil sands, settler knowledge infrastructure and digital geographies

Abstract In 2017, the Alberta Geological Survey published an extension to the game Minecraft that allows players to virtually mine bitumen in Peace River, one of the three bitumen deposits in Alberta that together form the fourth largest oil reserve on Earth. This article uses the Minecraft extension to advance a novel synthesis of environmental and digital geographies, and to understand how they combine in settler knowledge infrastructures—the networks, institutions and practices through which geoscientific knowledge is constitutive for claims to territory by settler states. To advance these ideas, I show how the data used to create the virtual world within Minecraft are connected to real‐world extraction, especially environmental harms that Alberta's provincial regulator sought to address in Peace River. That data, however, does not stand alone. It was interpreted through, and itself extended, knowledge practices that stretch back to early‐twentieth century mapping and the on‐going collection of extractive data by the state. The Minecraft model also extends Alberta's settler knowledge infrastructure as part of international collaborations with other geological agencies. Set in this broader context, the article pushes digital geographies to attend to how environments—geologic pasts, extractive presents, virtually played—prove constitutive for state claims to territory.