Notch: Minecraft Is A Genderless World

Notch: Minecraft Is A Genderless World Notch: Minecraft Is A Genderless World

Minecraft’s main protagonist is named "Steve," but that doesn’t mean that he is a male, the game’s creator explained in a blog post where he revealed that the game has no notion of gender whatsoever.

In fact, the name "Steve" was given to the protagonist on a whim when Notch answered a question spontaneously.

The creative mind behind the phenomenal success of Minecraft explained that the blocky nature of the game gave him leeway to make all characters and animals in the game "gender neutral" by giving each individual the most prominent traits of both genders of its species.

"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 decision about gender in a game where gender doesn’t even exist.

All the other mobs in the game are genderless and usually exhibit the most prominent traits of both genders. Cows have horns and udders (even if I’ve later learned that there are some cows where the females do have horns), and the chicken/duck/whatevers have heads that look like roosters, but still lay eggs. For breeding, any animal can breed with any other animal of the same species.

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."