A Grand Library Of Banned Journalism Has Been Built Inside 'Minecraft'

We can all agree that the very best feature of any video game is the in-game books. Forget slaying dragons or scoring epic loot, nothing quite beats curling up near the hearth of a house you broke into and reading eighteen pages of lore on the grandad of some NPC you've already forgotten. But what if you could use your Twitch reading skills to thwart not just fictional villains, but real-life ones as well? For that, you need to check out some very controversial books in Minecraft.

Put away your suspicious stew and disable All Caps in chat as you enter Minecraft's Uncensored Library. The library was commissioned by Reporters Without Borders to give the game's young player base access to real-life censored journalism without tipping off the technological troglodytes of their totalitarian governments. Inside the virtual building, the works of dozens of journalists from countries at the bottom of the Press Freedom Index have been carefully transcribed into hundreds of in-game books, available to peruse by any truthseekers who download v1.14.4 of Minecraft and hop their blocky bods into the library's server.

And since this is Minecraft, home to millions of elaborate monuments to player perseverance, time investment and doing your homework on the bus, the library itself is an architectural wonder of the digital world. Made by design studio BlockWorks, an international team of 24 Minecraft architects (yes, that's a job now) spent 250 hours and 12.5 million blocks crafting the grand athenaeum inspired by an unused design of the French National Library. Even the reading halls themselves showcase artistic commentary on the horrific realities of journalistic oppression, with wings displaying massive blocky cages, blocky tombstones or blocky labyrinths, all symbolizing the extent governments will go to block the truth.

For more weird tangents and an invite to his in-game reading of The Satanic Verses, do follow Cedric on Twitter.