Is Minecraft a VIOLENT Game?

2015. Minecraft's darkest year. Notch had officially resigned from Minecraft completely in late 2014 and sold Minecraft to Microsoft. In amongst all the business negotiations, the future of the game was completely uncertain, and updates ceased to be - even in snapshot form - for the better part of an entire YEAR.

And Minecraft got banned in Turkey by the government because of its violence.

Officially, Minecraft is rated E10+ for fantasy violence.

It seems a lot of governments and content regulatory boards deem Minecraft to be a pretty violent game. But is it really? Is Minecraft really a violent game?

When one first spawns into the blocky world of retro graphics, it seems like the Minecraft world would entail the opposite of violence. The only thing you'll be punching is trees, so that you can make some wood and craft it into a..... sword. Which you will then use to stab some innocent pigs to death and scavenge their meat. Then you will scoff that meat down your gullet in an effort to not starve to death out there in the open. At night, scary monsters come out in the form of big giant spiders with hairy legs that nip at your flesh; zombies that want to eat your brains out; skeletons that want to shoot arrows through your eye, and a leaf monster that wants to blow you inside out......

....is the description you'd think would have been handed to any government that wants to ban Minecraft for violence without actually playing the game for themselves.

By bending and twisting words, you can make ANYTHING seem violent, or objectionable. And yes, while there is a combat system in Minecraft, and yes, animals (and even humanoid NPCs) can be beaten to death with little in the way of consequences, Minecraft is not a violent game by any means. At least, no more violent than any game where there were enemies whose heads you had to stomp on, or perform a tornado spin move to fling them off the map.

Minecraft is a game that is strictly free of gore. When you hit another entity with a weapon or your "fist" - which by the way isn't even a fist, it's just a stub - they are simply knocked back. There are no visible injuries, no matter how close that mob is to death. You may hear a slight "whack!" sound, but the mob will never become visibly injured. There are no cuts, no bruises, and CERTAINLY no blood. Mojang have revealed Minecraft has a strict no-blood policy. When a creature - ANY creature except the Ender Dragon - dies, they simply rotate onto their side and disappear in a puff of smoke. The mob doesn't look like it's dead or that it's died (although all mobs emit a special "death" sound), it simply rotates 90 degrees and disappears.

Combat does exist in Minecraft of course, but none of it feels in any way violent. When you attack, the lack of any really powerful attacking animation, or mobs showing any injuries really takes away any potential for the game to feel violent. I've often thought, when you hit an animal with a sword, it feels more like you've hit them with a toy plastic sword than a supposed sword made of diamond.

Let's look at the sword-strike animation. When your character swipes an animal with a sword, you see the character's hand quickly swipe the sword downwards, then lift it back up. Your target flashes red indicating it has taken damage. No visible gash appears on the animal, although it may try to flee if it's a passive animal - or hit back if it's neutral. At no point does it feel to the player like any major damage was done. Compare this to other combat games, where we see in-depth animations of the sword being thrust into the target, which crumples to the floor - maybe even with a few pixels or particles of blood - then the character heaves and pulls the sword out of the target's limp body. Even this doesn't feel TOO violent - but this is still LEAGUES more "violent" than Minecraft's attacking animations.

This is the same no matter how you harm a target - be it with a sword, a bow, a trident or an axe. There are absolutely no guns in sight, either.

There are other ways you or a mob can come to harm, however. You can meet a fiery demise. But this simply involves supposed flames around your player and your hearts going down. There are no visible injuries - no burns or blood. There aren't even any screams emitted from your character from being on fire. You simply take damage silently. Drowning is the same - there's no thrashing around or gasping for air - what happens is your meters simply run low until you get a "You died!" screen.

In some ways, the only game less violent than Minecraft is tetris.

There ARE some caveats though. It IS true that you can slaughter a village of people, or stamp on turtle eggs, without consequence. But even so, the villagers do not appear very human, and because villagers are so useful, killing them is in a way discouraged as you lose out on some very useful items. And still, villagers being killed is no different to any other mob's death - totally free of blood and visible injuries.

The Ender Dragon is the only mob in Minecraft that doesn't die like the others. It doesn't simply rotate to its side then vanish in a puff of smoke. Instead, when the game's final boss is slain, we see the thing seemingly slowly and painfully disintegrate and break up more and more, with jets of light seemingly erupting from its body as it breaks up. This is accompanied by a very loud "crackling" sound that starts with what can be interpreted as a brief scream. Finally, the creature explodes in a massive explosion and XP orbs rain down.

Calling either of these examples "violent" is a bit of a stretch. Compare this to a Shrek 2 video game I played when I was about 6. That game had far more involved combat animations than Minecraft could even dream of. Shrek would actually literally punch and kick actual human (enemies) to death (they'd also disappear in a puff of smoke). A Shrek 2 video game I played when I was 6 had more violence than Minecraft. But these examples really are the only example of anything violent Minecraft has to offer.