In a nondescript American city, an all-white police force in riot gear faces a multiracial crowd of protesters in front of city hall shouting, “No more injustice! No more discrimination!” I try to make my way through the crowd, but a cop stops me in my tracks, warning me of my imminent arrest. By the time I turn to run, gray clouds of tear gas have already descended.

This scene opens “Lessons in Good Trouble,” a Common Core–compatible educational Minecraft experience advertised to grade school social-studies teachers. To escape the tear gas, I duck into a library, and a helpful librarian leads me through an abbreviated history of civil disobedience, introducing me to John Lewis, Malala Yousafzai, Mohandas Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, and Emmeline Pankhurst along the way. With its anodyne celebration of nonviolence, why did this downloadable content (DLC) play like a message in a bottle from a bygone era, when corporations flooded Instagram with black squares in the name of solidarity?

“Lessons in Good Trouble” was released on November 6, 2020. Microsoft, the owner of Minecraft since 2014, had been promoting it through its education division every Black History Month since then to little fanfare. Minecraft was just one of many mainstream games adopting “woke” half measures. Even Call of Duty: Black Ops Cold War introduced a nonbinary player option, allowing Ronald Reagan to send you to Cuba for covert neocolonial violence while using they/them pronouns to refer to you gunning down communists.