Mojang founder Notch Persson recently left a succinct post on his blog, The World of Notch, in which he discusses the gender with regard to Minecraft.
Specifically, in the post aptly entitled Gender and Minecraft, Notch discusses some of his attitude toward how the game is meant to treat gender, after acknowledging the maleness attributed to Steve, the game's blocky protagonist. In essence, Notch maintains that the game is not meant to treat gender at all. Steve is in fact supposed to be a genderless human figure, blank enough to be filled in by anyone.
He writes,
"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. The blocky shape gives it a bit of a traditional masculine look, but adding a separate female mesh would just make it worse by having one specific model for female Human Beings and male ones. That would force players to make a decisions about gender in a game where gender doesn’t even exist."
While it is admittedly questionable that one figure could possibly be capable of representing players across the board without the player being capable of making that decision for themselves, Notch does admit that ultimately genderlessness is not necessarily an ideal design approach for developers who may in any way be attempting to treat this subject matter:
"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."
Read the rest here.
Image: Minecraft Blogger Template
