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Turkish Ministry Recommends Banning Minecraft -- Over Violence
An anonymous reader writes: Minecraft is known for a lot of things. It's a fantastic creative outlet and the digital sandbox of youngsters' dreams, for instance. The game has also been known to raise the ire of unrelated companies who somehow think all that creativity by gamers is something that can be sued over. It's known for amazing user-generated content, including games within games and replicas of entire cities. The nation of Turkey is known for very different things. It's a country that absolutely loves to censor stuff, for instance. And, thanks to recent developments, Turkey is also known as a great place to get a front-row look at the incredible violence done by the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq. But the Turkish government has a plan to keep its youngsters from witnessing too much violence: it is calling to ban Minecraft.
Adults tend to get nervous about insanely popular trends or hobbies with kids that they don't exactly understand. They're banning it because it's so stupidly popular with kids, not because it's violent. The problem is that it's such an inherently non-violent game that they end up looking rather silly describing it as such, essentially proving the point that they have no idea what the game actually plays like.
Of course, they'd look even more foolish if they told the truth, which is "We don't know exactly what this Minecraft thing is that our kids are spending all day playing. So, we decided to ban it just to be safe."
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
Of course Minecraft is violent. Do you have any idea how many innocent instructions get executed to make it run?
Quattuor res in hoc mundo sanctae sunt: libri, liberi, libertas et liberalitas.