A week or so ago I tweeted “Soon our avatars
will connect and interact with others' in ways that'll transform our lives as
did the Gutenberg press, Phones & Penicillin.”
I
had no idea that there was an anthropology quickly emerging about
a supposed ghost of a popular adventure game author’s dead brother, Herobrine. A friend, anonymous in many ways, filled me in.
So the adventure game is “Minecraft” (originally created by Swedish
programmer Markus "Notch" Persson). It now also runs in pocket version on iPhones and Androids is a
first person game with no specific goals for the player to accomplish, giving
players a large amount of freedom in choosing how to play the game. The game world is essentially composed of
rough 3D objects representing various materials, such as dirt, stone, various
ores, water, and tree trunks, etc.
Players can gather
these material blocks and place them elsewhere, thus allowing various
constructions. The game primarily consists of two game modes: survival and
creative. Unlike in survival mode, in creative mode, players have access to
unlimited blocks, heal when damaged, and can fly freely around the world.
So what’s all the
fuss…
People (players I
suppose whom I can’t vouch for their state of mind) have been, in their words
“freaked out”. A player reports on a popular blog:
“…Guys I saw him! Man oh man I was
freaked out. I was playing single player when I saw him in the distance. I was
astonished. I had enough sense to take a pic as he walked by. He seemed to take
no notice of me as he passed. Before this I thought the Legend of Herobrine was
a cool story but fake. But now...”.
Another, “Herobrine is supposedly the
ghost of Notch's dead brother. He's supposedly haunting Minecraft and is
responsible for every glitch that ever happens in the game. Supposedly, he
appears as a player in the Default Skin during a single player game, usually
right as you die”.
This
is interesting on a number of levels. Firstly, how a game, admittedly, rich in
character and characters can itself evolve to a have history of legends and folklore.
The
second, and perhaps more important is the idea that a virtual character, Herobrine,
isn’t created by man and is formed out of some faulty computer program. Now
that would be the ultimate “bug”. Think Wall Street, Traffic Management and Military
systems and now think about a self generated Herobrine-like rogue playing in these worlds.
