Notch: Minecraft Characters are Genderless
Masculine 'Steve' is really not a bloke at all.
Seems that Markus "Notch" Persson has been caught flat-footed on the subject of gender in Minecraft. The Mojang founder was hit with criticism that the mega-popular brick-building game has a lack of official female avatars. His reaction? The characters are actually genderless.
Uh huh.
"If it wasn’t for the fact that the default Minecraft character is referred to as “Minecraft Guy” and that I once jokingly answered “Steve?” when asked what his* name was, Minecraft would be a game where gender isn’t a gameplay element," Notch wrote on Tumblr.
"The human model is intended to represent a Human Being. Not a male Human Being or a female Human Being, but simply a Human Being." He added that the graphical style of the game is probably to blame for the 'masculine' look of 'Steve', but adding female features would have been "worse" as it would result in two separate player characters for males and females.
"That would force players to make a decisions about gender in a game where gender doesn’t even exist," he added.
"Obviously, I’m not saying this is a good way to deal with gender in all games, as the better your graphics are, and because of how quickly the human mind tries to identify the gender of other humans, you are going to have to make a decision as a developer about gender, but I felt we could get away with it in Minecraft."
Uh huh.
"If it wasn’t for the fact that the default Minecraft character is referred to as “Minecraft Guy” and that I once jokingly answered “Steve?” when asked what his* name was, Minecraft would be a game where gender isn’t a gameplay element," Notch wrote on Tumblr.
"The human model is intended to represent a Human Being. Not a male Human Being or a female Human Being, but simply a Human Being." He added that the graphical style of the game is probably to blame for the 'masculine' look of 'Steve', but adding female features would have been "worse" as it would result in two separate player characters for males and females.
"That would force players to make a decisions about gender in a game where gender doesn’t even exist," he added.
"Obviously, I’m not saying this is a good way to deal with gender in all games, as the better your graphics are, and because of how quickly the human mind tries to identify the gender of other humans, you are going to have to make a decision as a developer about gender, but I felt we could get away with it in Minecraft."
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