People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals (or PETA) is launching their own private server for the wildly popular indie game, Minecraft.
This Saturday, PETA will creak open the gates to their new Minecraft server, home to vast vegetable and flower gardens, an abandoned circus and slaughterhouse, and even a recreated version of their very own headquarters.
The sights to see aren’t the only reason PETA is appearing on Minecraft, however, as plugins on their server completely disallow the killing of any of the land’s natural animals.
The server is set to go live tomorrow morning at 10 am EST, with log-on details posted on PETA’s blog. The plugins that they took the time to add to their server will send links to articles and YouTube videos of the abandoned circus and slaughterhouse, among other things.
This isn’t the first time PETA has attacked or taken advantage of a video game to spread their views. They’ve sprung up some interesting creations in the past, such as creating a parody game for Pokémon, called Pokémon Black & Blue, where the player goes on a journey to ‘liberate’ enslaved Pokémon. They’ve also taken stabs at Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed franchise to criticize the ability to go whale hunting in Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag.
I, for one, would like to see how their Minecraft server is going to turn out. Unless they take away building permissions from everyone–which seems unlikely at this point–their server probably isn’t going to turn out like they expect it to.
Although PETA’s ideals are morally just, many people see them as a radical group, which attracts what the Minecraft community likes to call ‘griefers’. These griefers could go around, ruining the plan that PETA sought to put out by working around the animal immortality rule that they so eagerly implemented.
PETA has a lot of work cut out for them if they want to be successful with spreading their message through Minecraft. As they continue to expand their horizons through the use of video games, they seem like they enjoy the results that they are getting, because they keep doing it. It seems like even PETA has caught on to our growing industry and sought to make something worthwhile out of it. Let’s see where it takes them.
