The Sadistic Psycho Minecraft Turned Me Into

I am still amazed at how much violence videogames contain. I am even more amazed at how this violence transfers  into its players. I mean, surely the study published last November showing the inverse relation between violence in videogames and in real life among young people, had to be wrong, right?

You see, it all starts by punching trees. Punching trees is the real root of societal violence, the cause of every homicide across the history of mankind. One day you punch a tree, then a rock, some other day you go to depths of the world to punch zombies, and then suddenly you realise that you are punching people! You may be wondering… what is the purpose of this much punching? I’ll tell you: none. Videogames have taught me that punching is what life is about. I’ll soon upgrade my flimsy and bruised fist into a pickaxe though; I just need to keep punching.

I’ll put it some other way: my lovely mum hates spiders, as in, she would panic and kill the spider if she sees one. I find myself in the same situation, just killing spiders at sight. Surely Minecraft must have taught me this, not my evolutionary instincts. Otherwise, the all-knowing Turkish government would not decide to ban this game for being too violent. Forget about Call of Duty or Garry’s Mod, some of the most popular games in Turkey; Minecraft is the real problem here! And now you tell me that they are including mods in which you can shoot actual guns to other players or spiders? When is this madness going to stop?!

Wait, I think I know the real problem with the game here: there is no line to differentiate between real life and Minecraft. I am not talking about the pixelated graphics or the gamey UI, or the lack of blood. I am talking about all those other mechanics aside from punching: resource collection, resource management, crafting, creative construction, resource variety, player interaction, modding (at this point it is a mechanic of the game), exploration, more crafting, enemy avoidance or any other new mechanic any mod may bring in. They are nothing relevant to the game (and apparently if you thought they were, you were wrong), this game solely teaches you to punch things, it teaches you to pickaxe animals and now it even teaches you to shoot other players.

Maybe Turkey, with the difficult and hindered access to videogames that its population faces, will have to find another multifaceted, versatile and cheap game with low requirements for its youth to enjoy and experiment with. Maybe it is because of the handicapped videogame market here that the industry has to rely on games like this to reach a wide audience. Maybe Minecraft is so popular here in Turkey (to the point that three different kinds of official guides to Minecraft are sold in Istanbul’s Atatürk Airport’s little bookshop) that it has been used as another scapegoat, turning the Turkish youth’s head towards this issue and away from the milieu of critical problems in Turkey. At least, I hope.

Do you guys remember when The Daily Mail blamed Call of Duty for that school shooting in Connecticut? ‘Cause I sure do. People actually talked about that for a bit, didn’t they? They talked about how these games were making the British youth way more violent, and that they were the cause for issues such as the London riots and whatnot. Well, if you happen to be around Turkey this month, where I am living this year before going back to London, you will find that more than one magazine’s cover is, in fact, this issue: Minecraft being too violent. I hope people do not actually believe any of this, and that it is just being used to distract people (Turkish government has certain reputation) from the real issues. This is not a political commentary at all, but giving the number of people that seem to have weighed in on this topic arguing for the ban of the game (politicians, journalists, psychologists, grandmas…), you can tell that the amount of the population involved is huge, bigger than just the national gaming community. Videogames are once more being blamed for violence, being portrayed by the media as this evil thug-breeding conspiracy. It is the same old story all over again, but with new different faces behind it, creating impediments in the development of videogame as a form of expression.

Incidentally, you may note that there were also talks about banning Facebook and that YouTube and Twitter were shut temporarily last year. It seems to be about a good time to get hold of a reliable VPN service in Turkey. In the time all these websites and popular games are banned, I am going to go back to playing Hotline Miami 2: Wrong Number or Assassin’s Creed: Unity, sitting here in my flat in the outskirts of Istanbul. Oh guys; don’t fret; apparently they’re not as violent as Minecraft.