Steve (Minecraft)

Steve
Minecraft character
Promotional art for Steve
First Episode Appearance	Minecraft May 17, 2009
Created by	Markus Persson

Steve is a character from the Minecraft video game franchise. Created by Swedish video game developer Markus "Notch" Persson and introduced in the initial Java-based version of Minecraft which was publicly released on May 17, 2009, Steve is one of two default player character skins available for players of contemporary versions of Minecraft. Steve lacks an official backstory by the developers of Minecraft as he is intended to be a customizable player avatar as opposed to being a predefined character. His feminine counterpart, Alex, was first introduced in August 2014 for PC versions of Minecraft. Depending on the version of Minecraft, players have a chance of spawning as either Steve or Alex when starting a new game.

Steve became a widely recognized character in the video game industry following the critical and commercial success of the Minecraft franchise. Considered by some critics as a mascot for the Minecraft intellectual property, his likeness has appeared extensively in advertising and merchandise, including wearable apparel and collectible items. The character has also inspired a considerable amount of unofficial media and urban legends, most notably the Herobrine creepypasta internet meme which became widely shared around internet communities during the 2010s.

Concept and design

Steve is presented as a human character with a blocky appearance, which is consistent with the aesthetic and art style of Minecraft. His name originated as an in-joke by Persson, and was confirmed as his official name in the Bedrock Edition of Minecraft. Steve's goateed face consists of an eight-by-eight pixel image. He wears a light blue top, a pair of blue trousers, and a pair of smart-casual shoes.

Side by side comparison of the character skins for Alex (left) and Steve (right).

In spite of his masculine name and features, Persson has asserted that Steve's gender was never intended to be fixed. In 2012, Persson explained that Minecraft's blocky graphics inadvertently reinforced a default aesthetic for the game which is "traditionally masculine". He emphasized that Minecraft was designed to "be a game without a gender element" in a game where "gender doesn't exist", and that the character model was "intended to represent a human being" who was genderless. Admitting that limiting the gender option to just male "is telling everybody this is a boy game only", Persson claimed that he once attempted to create a proper female character model in Minecraft, but said "the results have been extremely sexist."

By 22 August 2014, another default skin that is complimentary for all Minecraft players named Alex was added to the Windows and Macintosh versions of Minecraft. The character was added to the console and mobile versions of Minecraft at a later date. Alex's character model is similar to Steve's, but with a more feminine appearance: she has red hair tied into a ponytail, and arms that are more narrow. Commenting on Minecraft's reputation for better gender representation compared to other video games in the industry as of the 2010s, Helen Chiang, the Microsoft studio head responsible for the Minecraft franchise, explained in a 2018 interview that it is important for her company to leverage the power of the Minecraft brand to subvert traditional gender stereotypes. By presenting Alex and Steve as having identical physical capabilities or qualities as each other, Chiang said this reinforces the studio's stance on gender equality and their commitment to its ideals.

Description

Character overview

Steve is one of two default character skins which are available for new players of Minecraft. A skin is the appearance of the player's avatar that represents the player in the game world, which can be changed, altered, or replaced by the player. Players are allowed multiple options to change the visual appearance of their player character's skin.

Prior to Alex's introduction, Steve and up to eight variants of Steve, none of them female, were the only characters players could select for their avatars without paying for a greater variety of characters or changing the game's code through complicated methods. Like Steve, she could not be manually selected in-game and her use is randomly assigned whenever players start a new game.

According to backstory provided Lego Club Magazine, Steve and Alex are in a romantic relationship and both have distinct interests outside of their shared aptitude for building: Steve has a penchant for mining and alchemy, whereas Alex prefers exploring and hunting. All zombies found in Minecraft appear to be wearing the same clothing as Steve, although no official explanation was ever given.

Herobrine

A screenshot from a version of Minecraft which depicts the purported sighting of the Herobrine character.

Herobrine is a fictional supernatural being which originated as a hoax that was propagated by an anonymous post on the English-language imageboard website 4chan. A "ghost" who haunts single-player Minecraft worlds, the character is supposed to look like a standard character model for Steve, except for a pair of glowing white eyes which lack pupils. Theories which explain the character's supposed origins range from his purported identity as Persson's supposedly deceased brother, to an "unlucky miner" who haunt living players out of a desire for vengeance.

The first purported sighting of Herobrine was from the time period when Minecraft was still in the alpha phase of development: an anonymous 4chan poster claimed that they spotted a character who stared at them from the dense fog between the trees before vanishing, and that they received a private message from a user called Herobrine, which simply said "stop". This occurred after a subsequent post they made which inquired about the sighting was allegedly removed without explanation.

Other appearances

Steve has been featured in video game media outside of Minecraft. He appears as an exclusive playable character in the PC version of Super Meat Boy as "Mr. Minecraft". Steve's head appears in Borderlands 2 as an unlockable cosmetic. Steve's head is also unlockable to those who managed to reach level 20 as the Paladin in Hybrid.

Steve is featured as a playable character in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate; his alternate costumes transform him into Alex as well as the Zombie and Enderman enemies from Minecraft.

Reception

Cultural impact

Cosplayers wearing masks and costumes that depict Steve's physical appearance at various fan conventions.

Critics noted that Steve have achieved a level of cultural impact and viral recognition outside of the character's original purpose as a baseline or default skin for new players of Minecraft. As the face of the franchise in promotional and advertising materials, some commentators consider Steve to be the closest character Minecraft has to a protagonist or main character. This is in spite of the fact that his existence is not asserted by way of an official backstory or in-game dialogue unlike most other video game characters. In 2016, Glixel staff ranked Steve as the 4th most iconic video game character of the 21st century. In a 2021 list published by GamesRadar which rank 50 iconic video game characters, Rachel Weber considered Steve to be the "enduring symbol" of Minecraft, and his character model to be one of most instantly recognizable silhouettes in video game culture.

Steve has been the subject of multiple fan theories spread around Internet communities. One theory alleged that Steve is based on Tommy Vercetti, the protagonist of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, due to the alleged physical resemblance between both characters. It relied on a 2009 post by Tumblr Persson which documented his progress working on Minecraft, where he confirmed that he used designs inspired by Grand Theft Auto video games as a foundation for his work. In 2020 Persson publicly responded on social media and denied any tangible connections between both characters.

Another fan-spread phenomenon, the Herobrine creepypasta, is regarded as a notable horror-themed urban legend in the video game industry. Following the anonymous 4chan post, the hoax became the subject of numerous threads on Minecraft internet forums as well as user generated videos on YouTube which report alleged sightings, often annotated with red text and eerily-themed music. Two popular Minecraft livestreamers, Copeland and Patimuss, were acknowledged by Lauren Morton from PC Gamer for their contributions towards popularizing the urban legend into a viral meme. For example, Copeland posted a few edited Minecraft screenshots which shows a depiction of Herobrine to get a reaction from his viewers and staged a hoax sighting for his lifestream using a retextured painting which is made to look like Herobrine. The popularity of the Herobrine creepypasta spawned an unofficial book named The Legend of Herobrine, as well as fan-made skins patterned after the creepypasta. As an acknowledgement of the Herobrine meme, Mojang development staff often include the line "Removed Herobrine" within patch notes released for the game up until June 23, 2020, with the Java Edition 1.16 patch, also known as Minecraft's Nether Update. Fan interest in the meme eventually culminated in early 2021 with the discovery of the world seed which contains the first instance of Herobrine's alleged sighting.

Super Smash Bros.

The announcement and introduction of Minecraft themed DLC for Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, which is primarily represented by the Steve character, was met with a very enthusiastic response from critics and players Some commentators suggested that much of the excitement was due to the character's unprecedented inclusion into a popular fighting game, and that in the aftermath of the reveal, social media website Twitter may have struggled with the volume of postings which were generated in response. Patricia Hernandez from Polygon and Nadia Fox from US Gamer further noted that an awkward animation which is featured during the character's end-of-match win screen scandalized some viewers, which had the effect of generating further publicity surrounding the character's imminent debut in Smash.

In his review of the Steve DLC for Ultimate, Mitchell Saltzman from IGN described Steve as one of the most complex fighters ever introduced in the game in terms of gameplay mechanics, and highlighted the inventive ways which the developers incorporated the resource collection and item crafting mechanics of Minecraft into his moveset. Kotaku staff were divided over the playable iteration of Steve in Smash. Ian Walker considered Steve to be one of the most exciting characters to play for Ultimate after observing an event where one of the players displayed his ingenuity with Steve's construction capabilities. Ari Notis took a less favorable view and called him the strangest character he has ever played. Notis described in detail the visual and gameplay dissonances he observed from the implementation of Steve in Ultimate.

Analysis

"The creative agency that the process of skin design affords is also a feature of the player's interaction with the game's landscape. Here, Steve's role is again central. Whether the player is taking control of the default Steve or an adapted variant, the character itself is always abstract enough to allow players to assign their own meaning to it. The character is human enough to be relatable but not so realistic that meaning is fixed and the avatar's identity is othered. This arguably reduces the distance between the player and the game; players' experience is not mediated by another character, with its own associations, but by an avatar easily associated with themselves. This lack of distinctive backstory and gendered features also means that Steve's appeal is potentially wide; an unexceptional and relatable "every(hu)man"."

— Chris Bailey, 100 Greatest Video Game Characters.

In an entry about Steve from the 2017 publication 100 Greatest Video Game Characters, Chris Bailey explained that what little is known about Steve helps illuminate how video game avatars are being perceived in relation to player identity, because the character embodies and conducts the spirit of freedom and customization inherent to sandbox video games. He further elaborated that Steve exemplifies the "centrality" of relatable avatars in affording players their own creative agency in and around video games: while other games allow a certain level of avatar customization, Steve embodies this possibility more than most with a process akin to a kind of scaffolded pixel art enabling the redesign of the entire surface of the body beyond changing a pre-defined hairstyle or skin color. This process is particularly visible through the proliferation of online communities and forums set up to share user-generated adapted skins.

With regards to the concept of Steve's gender being neutral and non-binary as asserted by Persson, Bailey took the view that it is "initially difficult" to account for the inclusion of an avatar with an "evidently gendered name". Nevertheless, he observed that Minecraft's player communities have embraced the game's general principle of openness due to their enthusiasm in engaging with the possibility of customizing their avatars' appearances. This is achieved through the process of overlaying a new skin over Steve's original form, which represents a player's direct input in how they want to be represented in-game. Similarly, H. Chad Lane said that the concept of skins in Minecraft, represented by Steve and Alex as the baseline, can act as a reflection of the player's identify and self-perceptions, regardless of whether it is similar to or in contrast to the player's identity in the real world.

Gabriel Menotti cited the Herobrine hoax, which involved a character which was never a real in-game entity, as an example of how the recording of playthroughs might influence the universe of Minecraft in a radical way. He believed that Persson's ambiguous answer on whether Herobrine will ever be integrated into Minecraft suggests that there is always a possibility for player imagination to be incorporated into one of the game's future updates, which is consistent with the logic behind Minecraft's open development as well as its history of frequent updates that sometimes introduce game-changing novelties. The authors of Mixing and Re-Purposing Realities observed that the popularity of the Herobrine meme represents the Minecraft community's embrace of creative efforts by its members with the transition of spontaneous user-generated content into Minecraft folklore. Their survey of the study's respondents found that Herobrine is treated as a mythological destructive character which some similar traits as superhero characters.

Further reading

• Anderson, Emma; Walker, Justice; Kafai, Yasmin B.; Lui, Debora (2017-08-14). "The gender and race of pixels: an exploration of intersectional identity representation and construction within minecraft and its community" (in en). Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on the Foundations of Digital Games. FDG '17 (Hyannis Massachusetts: ACM): 1–10. doi:10.1145/3102071.3102094. ISBN 978-1-4503-5319-9. https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/3102071.3102094. 
• Ames, Morgan G.; Burrell, Jenna (2017-02-25). "'Connected Learning' and the Equity Agenda: A Microsociology of Minecraft Play". Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing. CSCW '17 (New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery): 446–457. doi:10.1145/2998181.2998318. ISBN 978-1-4503-4335-0. http://www.morganya.org/research/ames-cscw17-minecraft.pdf. 
• Ohlendorf, Roman (April 21, 2016). "Playing with the Legend: Ostension and Extra-Textual Production in Minecraft". Heidelberg Journal of Religions on the Internet 10. doi:10.17885/heiup.rel.23547. https://heiup.uni-heidelberg.de/journals/index.php/religions/article/view/23547. Retrieved September 26, 2021. 
• Bayle-Spence, Callum (August 2020). Minecraft's Sandbox: Play in a Virtual World of Creative Exploration (Master of Arts in Child Development thesis). Sarah Lawrence College. https://digitalcommons.slc.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1049&context=child_development_etd. 
• Ames, Morgan G.; Burrell, Jenna (February 25, 2017). "'Connected Learning' and the Equity Agenda: A Microsociology of Minecraft Play". Proceedings of the 2017 ACM Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work and Social Computing. CSCW '17 (New York, NY, USA: Association for Computing Machinery): 446–457. doi:10.1145/2998181.2998318. ISBN 978-1-4503-4335-0. https://doi.org/10.1145/2998181.2998318. Retrieved September 26, 2021. 
• Garrelts, Nate (2014). Understanding Minecraft: Essays on Play, Community and Possibilities. Jefferson, North Carolina. ISBN 9780786479740. 
• Goldberg, Daniel; Larsson, Linus (2013). Minecraft: The unlikely tale of Markus "Notch" Persson and the game that changed everything. ISBN 9781609806866. 
• Wolf, Mark J. P., ed. (2017). The Routledge Companion to Imaginary Worlds. New York: Routledge. doi:10.4324/9781315637525. ISBN 978-1-315-63752-5. https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/edit/10.4324/9781315637525/routledge-companion-imaginary-worlds-mark-wolf. 

External links

• NameMC—a searchable skin database