ibxtoycat – A Deeper Look At Gender in Minecraft

Hello i’m yeah extracad and according to notch in a now deleted blog post every single character and animal in minecraft is homosexual have you ever wondered why cows have both horns and others or why any two chickens can breed even when the two babies come from the same parent

Chickens today i wanted to dive into the weird world of how minecraft a game of course founded by notch who is best known for his uh controversial opinions these days uh was actually a game which was at the very forefront of a giant debate about how gender should work in

Games and then later even the world of progressive politics when it comes to businesses and video game development companies however today i wanted to start with just the fact that steve was never meant to be the name of the minecraft character he was never meant

To be a guy and there’s a whole ton of details to do with that but first let me know if you like this video and indeed if you want to see more of these please do subscribe with notifications turned on so you can see more of these videos

Dealing your homepage with that said we’re going to go back to the very earliest messages we have regarding gender in minecraft because it was always meant to be super ambiguous but eventually notch decided he had to address something which was true which was that increasingly steve was becoming

The name of the minecraft character even though it was as he confirms right here just a joking answer he gave to the answer to what is the minecraft guy actually called it was never what his name was meant to be but he just accepted that the community latched onto

It and if enough people call something a name then that name eventually sticks that is the very nature of names in the world that we live in and so he said that 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 one for male ones that would force players to make decisions about gender

In a game where gender doesn’t even exist confirming that in minecraft there is no gender even doubling down on that starts by saying all of the other mobs in the game are genderless and usually exhibit the most prominent traits of both genders cows have horns and others

Even if i’ve later learned there are some cows where females do in fact have horns and the chickens slash ducks whatevers have heads that look like roosters but still lay eggs for breeding any animal can breed of any other animal of the same species effectively making

All of the animals agenda or in other words genderless perhaps you could say 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 there is no point in this post i just want to clarify it so there’s an official word on it also as a fun side

Fact it means every character and animal in minecraft is homosexual because there’s only one gender to choose from take that homophobes and this to me is one of the most interesting lines to come out someone who supposedly if you are to believe just the headlines of all

These various sites um is one of the most transphobic and right-wing bigoted people uh why is he super pro everyone being gay inside the game that he’s made why is it not a traditional christian game where to breed any of the animals you don’t just need to have a bed and

Some food you should be out you know there should be like a wedding ceremony going you know like obviously i think that’s an important thing to come back to later but it’s also important to confirm that in this very blog post he did in fact say very clearly uh that

Adding a female mesh to minecraft would make it significantly worse and his opinion actually makes some sense right by having a separate female character you are forcing people to choose a gender whereas you can much better just get away by saying there is no gender in this game the whole goal of minecraft

Was that this real world concept of gender didn’t need to exist i mean look at this cow do you really need to care if he’s a male or a female cow or maybe if it’s a genderless cow you probably shouldn’t so why do you need to care

About the player it was an interesting view at least at the time and it’s funny because his view was very strongly we should not have a female character in minecraft which is why it’s so interesting that when you look at the time that alex was added to minecraft it

Was the exact same month that microsoft bought the minecraft maker mojang for 2.5 billion dollars and i’m just saying it seems as though notch was very strongly against having the gendered characters in minecraft and maybe as soon as a big corporation gets involved it seems as though that changes and the

Weird thing about this though is the fact that we always had gendered skins in minecraft if you wanted to choose them and uh you know obviously uh the steve was the default skin and it was a male skin but if you actually look into minecraft and the years between 2009

When it released and 2014 when they added the alex skin there were all sorts of skin options you could add either you could pick your own skin and you could have a female character everyone knows the one female skin you see on every single minecraft server all of the time

I don’t know why it’s so popular but i guess i’m not a teenager playing on minecraft servers but then on top of that obviously with the console edition and uh with any other edition of the game you were also able to buy skins like this princess peach skin for the

Wii u edition obviously that right there is a very much gendered skin i’m pretty sure uh princess peach is a woman based on the princess term being gendered but also you could buy this marge simpson model it’s not as explicitly gendered i mean the much more interesting thing

About this skin is just how tall it is by comparison to the normal ones uh minecraft consolation was a really wacky game because it was a closed ecosystem they could do all sorts of weird things like the gar skin or the r2d2 skin but that’s a point for another time uh the

The fact is there always were gendered skins in minecraft before this point this was just a really easy initiative to say that no we don’t force you to be a male in this game there’s no default male assumption instead it’s about giving you choices so you can have a

Woman’s skin default as well as a male skin default that’s right gender equality in minecraft i would say uh maybe slightly cynically that this didn’t actually add anything to the game because the overwhelming majority of people who care about what their skin looks like aren’t going to use the alex or the

Steve skin anyway right most people who care about what they look like are going to download one of those weird skins from hypixel or they’re going to pay for the lisa simpson’s skin or for the whatever number of different skins that were available they’re going to actually do something to customize their

Character that goes beyond just clicking one of those options i actually think uh that this is true to this day that this is one of those points about corporate messaging that it doesn’t matter about the actual point you’re mentioning it matters about the pr at all i mean the

Fact that microsoft has done a pretty good job managing minecraft make it a wholesome game whereas notch as just an individual has gone from one of the most beloved men who made one of the games uh that we all love to being someone who people genuinely uh like to believe did

Not make minecraft and uh maybe like to believe doesn’t exist right that’s that’s a fascinating world that we can go from one of those things to the other but i think what this really shows is it shows something fascinating about american companies which is that they effectively have to pick a political

Side to some sense minecraft is a progressive company here is minecraft supporting pride here is minecraft supporting black lives matter these are all stances which are inherently political and as a business minecraft is getting involved in those things the uh you know the the position you could take

If you were thinking of corporations as being a separate entity to the political process is that corporations should sell products and allocate resources and ideally employ people to make those products and make those uh resource allocation decisions and the people as the you know the base of democracy

Should be the ones deciding but in the last few decades more and more companies have started to realize that you can do a much better job at selling to people if they think that you’re on their side and one of the most deeply ingrained points inside of us is not necessarily

The politics themselves but it’s the values that underline those politics when you see a company that has your values for some reason it makes you more likely to buy from them in the same way that we have more trust of people who are more similar to us and at least this

Very weird thing where again you can get your left-wing ice cream or you can get your right wing ice cream i learned about just while researching this video a brand called star spangled ice cream who have flavors such as small government and my favorite i cannot get

Over how beautiful this is i hate the french vanilla and uh yeah you can you can uh there’s all sorts of companies that market to both sides of the political spectrum and my initial opinion on all this was just like yeah well that’s that’s weird we should be buying products that are based

On being good products not based on political stances that very big behemoth companies have that clearly they’re not having authentically they’re having for the purposes of promotion but on the other hand it’s what we want and minecraft has cleverly worked out that actually um with the demographics of

Minecraft it is significantly smarter uh to go down the uh you know one side of the political spectrum than the other i mean i’m just saying there is an age correlation with some political positions and so there is some grand point we can make when it comes to the

Politics side of this and be like oh yes so the reason that not wench from being on the exact pro side of like women and gender inclusivity and all those things to being on the opposite side in just 10 years is because actually the political spectrum is the thing that changes it’s

Not you as a person you don’t get more conservative as you age it’s actually just the political spectrum changes around you the definition of what is progressive or whatever different words you want to use is something that is changing all the time and that’s why as

People age they slowly start to be as enthralled by the radical crazy positions have burned down the establishment to build a new one there’s a very interesting point there but i wanted to finish this video talking about gender in minecraft because by adding alex to the game although they

Made a great move that i’m sure excited uh women everywhere it might even be this great decision that makes people go wow if i can be a minecraft character i can be anything that’s that that is entirely possible that’s true but by doing that they’ve set the precedent

That although every single animal in minecraft is agenda the humanoid characters are not and where does humanoid start end i’d argue that zombies are definitely humans there are no woman zombies if you look at the zombie skin it’s so clearly based on steve there is no zombie skin based on

Alex seriously there is you can get baby zombies and baby zombies riding chickens and baby zombies riding chickens with diamond arm ron but you cannot find a zombie that looks like alex because alex will never be bitten by a zombie and become infected it seems it also means

That when you look at for instance zombie pig men uh obviously the word men and man don’t always mean uh you know male or whatever you want to make that link with or the gender of man it can mean human that’s where the basis for a

Lot of like you know like putting a man on the moon uh means you know you wouldn’t call it putting a woman on the moon or you might call it that or you might think that mankind actually just refers to men there’s we could we can

Have debates about this all day but this is a minecraft video so can we just go to the catchy point that like okay so zombie pig man or pig lenses they’re now referred to are entirely men the villagers are the weirdest example though because villagers uh as you can

See quite clearly in a world where we’re not meant to say that there’s no gender in minecraft and it’s so what you want man no there is gender in minecraft that is explicit they have put it in there now all of the villagers in minecraft very clearly present man i’m not going

To assume uh what that means about their biological parts it could be uh that it’s actually a village of 50 uh men and 50 trans men of course that is entirely possible uh however if we judge it from the fact that from birth they all look exactly the same and they

All look like men therefore we can pretty reasonably assume that the the villagers have one of the weirdest reproduction systems in the world because all of them are men again there is gender in minecraft is very explicit it is a very progressive view but there is no women villagers and yet they can

Still reproduce all they need is food and a bed and they can magically make babies come out and on the one hand it’s pretty crazy that minecraft makes the bold uh step into the world of homosexual reproduction on the other hand what i think is interesting uh is

The fact that by uh adding gender to minecraft in this one specific place they’ve accidentally made a whole minefield of other continuity errors uh but in reality come down to this question of like does the main character really matter in my humble opinion i actually think the answer is no i think

That the way people actually look at the alex and steve’s skin which is meant to represent what like man and woman as a baseline for which you put your skin on top of people actually just see it as one skin or one skin with slightly smaller legs and arms that you build

Your own thing on top of do you want to be a genderless green blob or you know let’s be honest so that we’re less controversial do you want to be a genderless orange blob wow that skin is available for free if you go to the toy cat let’s play world on the marketplace

Did you know but do you want to be a genderless orange blob you totally can i think that the beauty in minecraft is in when you give the players the power to make their own decisions when you give the players the power to do whatever they want i think the true objective of

A sandbox game should not be that yes we have all of these opinions and you need to have these opinions too because we worked out that’s good for marketing i think the goal behind a sandbox game like this one should be that we don’t throw messages heavy-handed messages

Onto the player and instead as the player base we can work out what they want i mean think about it this way as an example uh the way the frogs work in the new update is that you can breed any two frogs of the same gender together which means that minecraft literally

Made the frogs gay or did they that’s the question i’m gonna be leaving with you as the ending for this video i hope you all enjoyed this video i’ve i found it to be fun i’m sure it’ll be non-controversial in those comments i just want to also clarify that i’m not

Going to rely on you agreeing with my political positions whatever they are i don’t think they’re relevant to minecraft um to to enjoy these videos i think it’s more important that you decide uh what you like based on the quality and the the attributes of that thing rather than based on whether i

Vote for the same politicians as you because as a fun fact statistically i don’t live in the same country as all of you and so i cannot vote on your politicians because i don’t live there that’s something everyone forgets on the internet we all talk about american

Politics and this and that and the other but like it’s not it’s not my decision to make right like i don’t i don’t have a horse in the race because it’s not my politicians and it’s not my country but that’s a controversial opinion so thank you for watching i hope you’ll enjoy and

I’ll see you all next time goodbye You