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Minecraft Creator Originally Intended For "Steve" To Be Genderless

Markus "Notch" Persson wrote up a blog recently about the issue of gender in Minecraft. Persson's original intention when designing the game was to have the player character be entirely genderless. He regrets adding a goatee to the character and the name Steve came from a joke response when someone asked him about the character.

Persson also wrote about the gender of the animals in Minecraft, saying he intentionally designed them to be ambiguous. Persson wrote, "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."

Persson also stated that the genderless nature of all the animals and characters in the game makes them all technically homosexuals. "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!"

You can check out the full blog by clicking here.

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Comments
  • This nonsense was worth writing an article about it? I thought GI had standards...
  • And here I thought that was his mouth...
  • http://tinyurl.com/top2biz     .. ..

  • Huh. Never used the Steve skin long enough to bother with it. As in, I changed by skin in between guying and actually downloading the game.

  • I don't see this putting a damper on how we look at or play Minecraft from here on out, so, nothing should back-fire or raise riots.

  • So would you say he would have been "wiener-less" then?

    Me thinkst Notch watcheth Replay?

  • Notch sounds like an all around nice guy to hang out with.
  • Is this a joke? Musing about the meaning of gender in a game like minecraft? Persson is trying to make his game more meaningful than it is. You punch trees in a game he programmed in Java. There are no comments about gender or homosexuality except those which he's attempting to retrofit into his otherwise shallow game.
  • Poor, poor Steve. lol

  • Oh, I never thought of gender before in Minecraft besides other players in servers?

  • The stupid things we discuss.

  • Thought it was a brown smiley face. So Steve doesn't have a mouth then? But he has a beard? um

  • It's pretty ridiculous that now we have to have a discussion about the gender politics of Minecraft and pretend that it's some kind of academic pursuit.

  • It could be just me but for whatever reason....I feel like notch has become a complete conceited and full of himself D-Bag....I dont know.

  • Damn it GameInformer. How dare you talk about a video game on your site. Blasphemy.
  • never knew it was a goatee...
  • Do you know how long it took me to figure out how to go 3rd person? I had no idea what my character looked like till after about 30 hours of play when I accidentally hit f2 or something.
  • Well, IF you only have two cows for example, you breed the together one of them's going to give birth to the baby cow, you do it again with the same two cows, the same cow's gonna drop the baby, technically making that one a female. ...If I got that right I just proved Notch wrong...
  • Who cares. It's all a dream within a computer simulation within a dream. Or whatever.

  • I just love the way he said "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!"

    Notch you're awesome!