Minecraft, for those who aren’t aware of the phenomenon, is a sort of sandbox/world building game, centered largely around construction in a cube-filled, primitively polygonal world:

Minecraft is a sandbox building[1][2] indie video game written in Java originally by creator Markus “Notch” Persson and now by his company, Mojang, formed from the proceeds of the game. The game is focused on creativity and building, allowing players to build constructions out of textured cubes in a 3D world.

Only..there are ‘monsters‘ in this virtual world too, including ‘Zombies, as well as ‘Skeletons’.

Perversely, these Undead entities are depicted as being completely and uniformly hostile to the players; bizarrely, they also burst into flames at dawn, conflating all Undead with certain types of Vampires (who still wouldn’t deserve this treatment).

But perhaps the game tells a different story than the one most people take away? Clearly the player is meant to think of the Zombies as the evil party here, but think about it: you are going into their world and radically reshaping it, terraforming it to suit your own purposes. In fact, I would go so far as to say that the players of Minecraft are the invaders here. If anyone is in the wrong, it is surely them, and not the native denizens of the game world fending off a hostile takeover and the destruction of their entire way of virtual life.

Which brings us to today. Where Anti-Zombie games roam, they are inevitably followed by those who seek to glorify their culture of violence and discord. In this case, as in so many others, with a snazzy Youtube video:

Oh, wow. I haven’t even played the game Minecraft yet, and this still somehow manages to be awesome. The vid starts off slow, but don’t worry, the music jacks into high gear, and the duo of survivors bust out their newly crafted weapons for some zombie killing.

Delightful how eager this individual is for ‘zombie killing’, isn’t it? Uggh.

We’ve embedded the video below, so that the ZRC readers can see how even an intentionally ‘retro’ depiction of Anti-Zombie stereotypes can lead to cutting-edge malice against the Differently Animated.

Tags: Videogames, Youtube Mischief

This entry was posted by John Sears on Sunday, February 20th, 2011 at 6:30 pm and is filed under Zombie Media. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.