Turkey’s Family and Social Policies Ministry has launched an investigation into video game “Minecraft” on grounds that it encourages violence, especially against woman.
First paragraph and it’s looking okay. States the story briefly and to be fair, yes Minecraft could be said to be ‘encouraging violence’. However, given how its set up graphically and the lack of gore/blood/etc. I’d say it was cartoon violence at worst, and most of the time not even to that standard of violence.
And “especially against women”? Unless you play as Alex, the second default character, in a single-player game you’re the only ‘woman’ in-game and there are no other human beings around even if you’re playing as Steve! Cows, pigs, Testificates – they’re all specifically set up to be genderless! Even in a multi-player setting, the concept of ‘gender’ for a character is merely implied through whatever skin the owner of the account chooses to apply and once again, any violence is less than cartoony. Heck, you can even apply mods that stop players killing each other.
The investigation aims at inspecting whether or not the game contains motives to trigger violence in its players.
What possible motives could Minecraft be applying to trigger violence in players? Zombies, skeletons, creepers – they really don’t exist in real-life and I doubt most people think that crafting a weapon is as simple as accumulating sticks, stone, string and all the other things.
Minecraft is a video game that allows the player to make designs with cubes in 2D or 3D. The game has several modes and in some of the modes, the player needs to survive in order to proceed with the game.
“Several modes”? There’s about three gameplay modes – Creative, Survival and Hardmode. And yes, two of those do require survival to proceed with the game, although I don’t know many people who play Minecraft to finish its story with the Ender Dragon. It’s just not what most people use this sandbox game for anymore.
To survive through all of the various levels one may fight with monsters, create handmade weapons and use them. If the player cannot survive and dies in any of the levels, he/she has to start the game all over again.
Levels? I think you’re a bit confused as to what sort of a game Minecraft is. Minecraft does not, and has never had ‘levels’, unless you’re in a map specifically built with such things. It’s not a part of the vanilla game at all, and judging the game based on what the players do with the game is a bit unfair, especially if you’re ‘thinking of the children’ as most people who level the ‘violent video games’ argument tend to. These maps need to either be installed into a save by yourself (and it’s a bit of a pig’s ear to do so sometimes) or need to be found on multiplayer servers set up by other players – well outside of Mojang’s responsibility and parents should be watching where their children are browsing anyway.
And if you die in Survival mode, you lose your hotbar and inventory (and some of your base/farm if you were unlucky enough to get caught by a Creeper) – you don’t need to start again provided you can get back. It’s not a roguelike.
The range of monsters the player has to fight in order to keep playing include zombies, skeletons, spiders, witches, giants, dragons, guardians and killer bunnies.
Giants were removed from the game – did you mean the Iron Golems? They’re non-hostile unless you provoke them.
In the higher levels of the game the player may need to kill women, allies and even friends for survival reasons.
There are no levels! There are no other people in a single-player game, allies, friends or women! And in a multiplayer game you generally kill your friends for laughs, or because the game requires you to do so to win. Respawning takes a lot of the sting of ‘death’ out of it. The only way you’d be killing friends for survival reasons would be if you were playing a round of the Survival Games or the Wall or some other similar map.
The ministry has received many complaints regarding the violent elements, especially against women, in the video game and thus launched an inspection.If the ministry’s investigation decides that the game encourages violence, the ministry will proceed by opening a law suit against the game for a country-wide ban.
Who’s been complaining? Are they watching the same game that I know as Minecraft? Have they just been watching competitive PvP maps online and thought that was the entire game?
And a lawsuit? For a game that only has anything near the type of violence talked about in player-made maps that you can so easily avoid contact with? Really?
Minecraft, which had been sold to Microsoft for $2.5 billion, had also caused debate in the U.S. for containing elements of violence.
Oh yes, America’s got a good record of blaming video games for violence. Doesn’t mean that they’re correct about it.
To give it the benefit of the doubt I actually checked up and found more sites saying why Minecraft wasn’t violent than saying it was. There was one story I found though from 2013 where a kid was found with a hammer, a knife and a gun in his bag and his father blamed Minecraft saying:
“They use hammers to dig and knives and guns to protect themselves from zombies,”
Hammers, knives and guns do not exist in the vanilla Minecraft game. Once again, they can be added with user-made mods but such things can be avoided! And if you’re a responsible parent, you should be making sure that your child isn’t finding these things or understands that it’s all fantasy and reality would never allow them to do such things.
To me it seems that whoever was tasked with writing the article did their research by watching videos online (most of which are of Modded Minecraft, because few play Vanilla for videos anymore) or else was passed research by someone else who had watched those videos. They might have read up briefly what the game was, but they don’t know the game. This is clear.
We once again have someone trying to justify the ‘violent video games’ argument by present falsehoods or half-facts in just such a way that it will rile up parents. Even the most INNOCENT of games is violent! They’re hiding violence in cutesy blocks! Save your children lest they become violent monsters!
This is why I value honesty in journalism. So stories like this can be called out for being the rubbish they are.
