Minecraft has become a campaign tool in the Australian state of Victoria. The Labor Party (Victorian Labor) has released a mod called "Paulinity & Jessity," in which One Nation leader Pauline Hanson and opposition leader Jess Wilson are turned into horror-style monsters. The mod has been promoted on TikTok since September 15, 2026, with its release serving as a reward for hitting 25,000 followers on the party's account. The Victorian state election will take place on November 28, 2026, so the campaign is running at its most intense pre-vote stage.

How "Paulinity & Jessity" works

The mod's mechanics are simple to describe but effective in practice: the player must collect votes held by villagers while avoiding two political opponents. Hanson appears as a seemingly friendly character who turns into a sinister creature after dark, while Wilson emerges from the darkness in a classic Minecraft horror jumpscare style. The party encourages players to record their gameplay and post it on TikTok, turning every participant into a distributor of the political message.

The mod's content isn't separated from the campaign's message. In the video descriptions on the @victorianlabor account, the party reminds voters that a Liberal and One Nation government in Victoria would mean 40 billion dollars in budget cuts and privatization of the healthcare system. So the game, despite being set in Minecraft's aesthetic, serves as a vehicle for concrete political arguments rather than just an election gimmick.

Inspired by the viral horror hit Verity

As Mumbrella points out, Labor didn't invent this format from scratch. The campaign team drew on the popularity of "Verity," a viral Minecraft horror creation made by YouTuber ThatMob. Richard Parker, Chief Strategy Officer at We Are Social Australia, described the decision directly: "Victorian Labor didn't just 'do a Minecraft.' It leveraged Verity, a viral Minecraft horror phenomenon, and created its own version starring Pauline Hanson and Jess Wilson." Parker added that "borrowing a phenomenon people already love means the hardest part, getting the audience's interest, is already done."

Horror maps and mods built in the Minecraft engine have for years been one of the most popular categories of community-made content, alongside survival maps and minigames published on servers. It's precisely this familiarity with the format that allowed the political message to reach younger audiences without having to build engagement from zero.

Reach: hundreds of downloads, tens of thousands of views

The campaign's results, while niche compared to classic TV advertising, are measurable. The "Paulinity & Jessity" mod has been downloaded more than 300 times, and the videos promoting it on TikTok have racked up tens of thousands of views, with the most popular one approaching 50,000. Meanwhile, the Victorian Labor TikTok account has crossed 36,000 followers, well above the 25,000 threshold the party had set as the condition for the game's release.

These numbers are modest in the context of a full election campaign, but significant for a format that by definition requires active effort from the audience, namely downloading the mod, installing it, and playing a session in Minecraft. Parker highlights this difference in engagement: "A TikTok video asks for 30 seconds of someone's attention, and it's hard even to get a fraction of that watched. Voluntarily playing a game is deep engagement." In his view, the player isn't handed the political message on a plate, but instead "experiences it through the language and humor of something they already like, which is more likely to stick in memory than a talking-head video."

Minecraft isn't just a kids' game anymore

Dr. Susan Grantham of Griffith University, quoted by Mumbrella, explains why Minecraft ended up in a campaign team's toolkit in the first place. "I think a lot of people, when they look at Minecraft, immediately think of kids, seven- and eight-year-olds playing it. But that's not true," the researcher notes. According to her, the game attracts a broad age range, from children to adults building entire cities in Minecraft Java Edition or recreating real-world locations, which makes it an attractive marketing tool. "It's definitely a concept, a game, and a brand that reaches a wide audience. It's a very clever approach," Grantham sums up.

It's worth noting that recreating real places and events in Minecraft is nothing new in Poland either: creators on the mods and maps section regularly publish projects inspired by real-world locations, from city maps to historical recreations. The difference here is that an Australian political party reached for the same mechanism for an election campaign rather than for educational or hobbyist purposes.

What's next before the November 28 election

Labor's Minecraft campaign is set to continue right up to election day. Mumbrella reports that the party also plans a live concert held in Minecraft on November 5, as well as a separate game on the Roblox platform, pointing to a broader strategy of reaching young voters through gaming environments rather than a one-off experiment with a single title. For industry observers, this is another example of how brands and institutions are treating worlds like Minecraft not as a curiosity, but as a legitimate communication channel for reaching audiences that classic advertising struggles to reach.

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