The first link is Reporters Without Borders' own channel (it posts as Reporter ohne Grenzen, the German parent). The second is the project's live site, which is still up and still gives you the server address, because unlike almost every campaign we cover, this one never stopped running.
If you are a government that censors the press, you block the obvious things. News sites. Social platforms. VPN providers. Independent radio. You staff a department whose entire job is to find and close the doors people read through.
Nobody blocks Minecraft. It is a children's building game. It is also, and this is the part that matters, one of the most widely installed pieces of software on earth, sitting on the hard drives of teenagers in exactly the countries where the reporting is banned. It runs on its own servers, it carries its own text, and to a filtering system it looks like a game about digging.
So the loophole was never technical. The loophole was categorical. Censorship classifies the internet by what a thing is, and a game is not a newspaper.
Build a library inside Minecraft and put the banned journalism on its shelves.
Not a stunt inside the game. An actual reference library, in the architecture of a real one, holding real work by real journalists whose countries have made that work illegal to read.
RSF opened it on 12 March 2020, World Day Against Cyber Censorship. The build is a neoclassical complex modelled on the New York Public Library and the Library of Congress, roughly 12.5 million blocks, sitting on an island. BlockWorks did the construction, DDB Berlin the concept and design, MediaMonks (now Monks) the build and publishing, and RSF curated what went in it.
Each censoring country gets its own wing. The original launch covered Mexico, Russia, Vietnam, Saudi Arabia, Egypt and Eritrea, and it has grown since to include Brazil, Belarus, Iran and, notably, a United States room. Inside each wing are the articles, held as Minecraft books, in English and in the original language, written by reporters who were jailed, exiled or killed for them. The Mexican wing has memorials to murdered journalists standing in it. There were over 200 books at launch.
You reach it by pointing your game at visit.uncensoredlibrary.com in the server browser, or by downloading the map. That is the whole distribution model: a server address, passed the way kids pass server addresses.
The stupid: your client is a press freedom NGO with a serious, dangerous, adult mission, and the recommendation is to build them a fantasy palace out of digital Lego. You will spend months and a lot of money on a structure that cannot be seen by anyone who does not own a specific video game, cannot be indexed, cannot be shared as a link that renders, and reaches an audience of teenagers who came to the platform to build castles. You are also asking journalists whose colleagues have been imprisoned to hand their work over to a Mojang server.
The smart: the medium is not decoration, it is the entire mechanism. Every part of the choice does work. Minecraft is unblocked because it is trivial, so triviality is the security model. It is installed in the target countries already, so distribution is solved before you start. Its book-and-quill item is a native text container, so the articles do not need a website that can be taken down, they live in the game's own file format and travel with the map. And the audience choice is a strategic one rather than a convenient one: RSF aimed at 15 to 30 year olds, the group most likely to have the game and least likely to be reading press freedom reports. The neoclassical architecture is doing the last bit of work. A library that looks like the Library of Congress tells a fifteen year old, instantly and without a word of copy, that what is on these shelves is serious.
The steal: when the door you need is locked, stop attacking the lock and go find the category nobody thought to guard. The best media plans are not bought, they are noticed.
Most "purpose" work makes a film about a problem. This one is a functioning piece of infrastructure that solves a bit of the problem while you look at it. There is nothing to believe, because the thing either works or it does not, and it does.
The other thing worth stealing is the discipline of the build. It would have been easy, and much cheaper, to make a small gesture library and a two minute case film. Instead they made something at a scale where the scale itself is the argument: 12.5 million blocks says this is not a stunt, and a visitor can feel that in about four seconds of walking around in it.
Straight talk. The reach and donation figures come from the agency's own case study, so treat them as a claim rather than an audit, which is true of nearly every number in this business. The harder question is the one nobody can answer: how many people in a censoring country actually read an article they could not otherwise get? "Players reached" is a global number and most of those players are not in Riyadh or Hanoi. What can be verified is that it exists, it stayed up, it kept adding rooms (the one year anniversary added two more), and schools and universities started using it as a teaching tool, which is a second life nobody planned for.
Client: Reporters Without Borders (RSF), Germany
Agency: DDB Berlin, DDB Group Germany
Executive creative director: Patrik Lenhart
Build: BlockWorks, the Minecraft build studio
Production and publishing: MediaMonks, now Monks
Launched: 12 March 2020, World Day Against Cyber Censorship, and still live
Full individual credits run long and are listed on the D&AD entry. We have named the leads we could verify rather than reprinting a cast list we cannot check.
RSF's own launch announcement
Monks case study, the reach and awards figures
Wikipedia, the build, the country wings and the Peabody
D&AD 2021, the Pencils and the credits
TechCrunch, launch day coverage
Dezeen, on the architecture and the first year