The removal of agency by server owners and reclaiming player power

Throughout the history of Minecraft servers, there is one system that has remained the same: leadership. At the top is the server’s owner, the person who has the final say in any decision made; next are the server’s admins, a group of people whom the owner trusts to act on their behalf; finally, there are the moderators, who enforce the server’s rules and maintain conduct in the day-to-day running of the server. I call this the Traditional structure. This paper argues that this structure is fundamentally flawed by exploring the core function and purpose of a Minecraft server, which is to create satisfaction for players on the server. Two key terms are outlined: agency and power, which are important for understanding why the Traditional structure has and continues to fail players by examining the issue from the perspective of the Player. This paper considers the individual player and the lone decision-maker – the owner – as classes in a hierarchy to better understand the inter-class interactions, removing individual anomalies in behaviour and allowing readers to understand the problem at a higher level. Finally, this paper proposes a structure where Players (as a class) have no “need” for the Owner, as decisions would only be made by Players.