@DevWil: I'd hate to disturb your mental image of me, but yes I really do like being naked. Though I'm nice enough to cover up when it's appropriate. We evolve yes, but evolving past meat-eating is an insult to the years and years of culinary evolution we've gone through. Cooking is an art, and meat is integral to it. As I was practically raised in a French restaurant, cooking meat is as natural as breathing.

I don't rub it vegans or vegetarians faces though like "Mmm this steak is so good and juicy, you really should eat it" and I don't expect the same from the other side. It's simply my opinion that we've dominated the beasts, we're at the top of the food chain, and thus we reap all the rewards. it's simply nature. Animals would do the same to us given the chance.

Dude you can build a portal to hell and fight zombies and you're going to point out the agri-systems as the unrealistic part? I hate you. I know you're some stranger on the internet that is obviously pretty passionate about whatever but seriously, be mad about something that matters.

If you want to play something realistic and ethical in your terms, fuck off outside. Its a fucking game...jesus dick christ.

@Getz: one of us is completely misunderstanding the other. i'm not volunteering that it's me. since you weren't going to continue debating, there's no point in offering more arguments regardless.

@coakroach: we can't do both? i've clearly shown my least patient side in this thread, but being a vegan isn't incompatible with making decisions that are also good to people. it's not one or the other.

@BrockNRolla: the fact remains that minecraft doesn't need to be balanced the way it is. all i meant is that you can interpret minecraft to be unrealistic (of course), but to an unethical (relatively speaking) degree in its representation of ecological situations. i've said this already: allowing people to cut down trees with their hands is a necessary contrivance. steak being many times more efficient than bread doesn't seem to make the game more fun, and it sends a specific message that i disagree with. this blog/thread was supposed to primarily be about game interpretation. i said in the blog itself that i didn't want to argue about the ethical weight of digital meat, just that i think we can look at a game as a system that necessarily teaches values. a game that gives you points for killing teaches you that killing is good. people can typically draw the line between this game's mechanics and reality, but it's still influencing ordinary thought. something like what i've pointed out in minecraft, which is more subtle, may not trigger disbelief as readily, though. people are far more likely to continue eating steaks than they are to start punching trees.

@Voidoid: you could grow soybeans and then craft them into tofu. that's not very complicated at all.

i've got to go for a bit, but i'm definitely going to be checking back on this thread later.

do you think someone is going to sit down, kill a cow, cook it, eat it..then go "HOLY SHIT THAT WAS FUCKING AWESOME IMMA DO IT IN REAL LIFE!! FUCK FRUIT!!"...then u are a tool

You know what, i think you have a point. When i drink shakes in Dead Rising they give me super powers. This is not very accurate. MORE SO! When i eat Veg i only get two pips. of health back . However when I eat a steak I GET IT ALL!! how disgraceful. By these maths. I should be able to eat human meat and become GOD!!!

@Kieran_ES said:

Interacting with a game space like this is interesting. The argument over veganism that this thread has become is not.

I'd say that I can see why you've come to the conclusion you have, I know I've certainly brought my own personal beliefs and history into a game world before and had it react surprisingly or offensively.

Agreed. If this blog had been a personal account of an attempt to live this kind of lifestyle in a few different games it would have been very interesting. Unfortunately it's another offensive pile of crap about how the author's life choices make him a better human being than the reader.

I'm still happy to jump the fuck in, though. Hey DevWil:

A cow has a digestive system that efficiently processes plant matter into muscle protein. We have a digestive system that is not so efficient at that, but very good at processing protein from meat. The whole reason we breed animals is so that they can perform this function of turning food sources that are energy-poor for humans into ones that are energy-rich for us. Every carnivore does this. The argument that it's more environmentally efficient for us to eat only vegetables assumes that every animal has the same capability to digest vegetables, which is not the case.

Your lifestyle depends on finding vegan food sources that can offer you enough protein and energy for survival. In the past much of these types of food would be unavailable over the winter, if at all in the area where you live. The reason you're in the minority as a vegan is your lifestyle would have been viable only for a fortunate few just 150 years ago. We evolved to eat meat millions of years ago in order to survive as a species and it's difficult to argue against that now. That's why we have a strong jaw and sharp front teeth.

People learn their eating habits from their parents, not Minecraft. Anyone of an age where they are making the conscious choice to be a vegan is unlikely to be swayed by the ecology of a block building video game, whether they notice this aspect of it or not.

Finally, you're right, Minecraft's ecology is flawed. Unfortunately nobody cares about this but you, and you only care because you want to reconcile your enjoyment of this game with your personal morals. You are quite mad.

He's done this before: http://www.giantbomb.com/profile/devwil/hippy-crap/30-50618/

Pretty much the same arc, except this time I haven't seen any random emboldening of words or underlines.

@DevWil said:

@BrockNRolla: the fact remains that minecraft doesn't need to be balanced the way it is. all i meant is that you can interpret minecraft to be unrealistic (of course), but to an unethical (relatively speaking) degree in its representation of ecological situations. i've said this already: allowing people to cut down trees with their hands is a necessary contrivance. steak being many times more efficient than bread doesn't seem to make the game more fun, and it sends a specific message that i disagree with. this blog/thread was supposed to primarily be about game interpretation. i said in the blog itself that i didn't want to argue about the ethical weight of digital meat, just that i think we can look at a game as a system that necessarily teaches values. a game that gives you points for killing teaches you that killing is good. people can typically draw the line between this game's mechanics and reality, but it's still influencing ordinary thought. something like what i've pointed out in minecraft, which is more subtle, may not trigger disbelief as readily, though. people are far more likely to continue eating steaks than they are to start punching trees.

Any game mechanic could have an effect on the way you think about something if, and that's a big "if," you think about what it means in a deeper sense. This was basically all we did in my college comparative literature classes. We looked for the deeper meanings in our books, and frankly the western canon of literature is full of horrible messages reinforcing gender and racial stereotypes that could have an effect on the way we view the world. But do we throw out the canon for its deficiencies? Probably not, because there is plenty of good there too.

That you feel that Minecraft is providing some kind of subliminal messaging about food is understandable from an academic standpoint. You've thought about it, been offended by it, and now you hope to challenge it. Yet the effect this message has in reality is likely minimal. Would it be nice if Minecraft had a Tofu option? Yes. It would be nice if Shakespeare hadn't chosen to refer to Othello as a "Moor" so often as well. Doesn't mean I would decry either as unethical.

I'm vegan and this is stupid. Proselytysm sucks donkey balls and the OP gives a bad name to an otherwise very respectful and civilized ideology.

it's a fucking game

@DevWil said:

All people get all of their values from all of the media they consume. to believe otherwise is totally ignorant...

Man, that has to be one of the most ridiculous, nihilistic opinions I've seen on the internet in a long time. My parents had an infinitely greater influences on my values than any amount of media I've consumed. My parents gave me the intellectual freedom to make my own choices, but it's no coincidence that I've adopted many of their values - I'm more atheist than my parents, though, and they both drink while I don't.

This is just reminding me that there is a vegan woman at work who I'm attracted to and have considered asking out...but I just can't see how it would work out. Would we ever actually find a restaurant which meets her needs and mine? Meat and dairy products is like 75% of my diet.

In matters as emotional as politics, philosophy and religion, the line between what we perceive as fact becomes blurred. I'm sure that I treat some of my core values as facts, while they are actually opinions, and I'm not alone in that. People can argue that their opinions are totally rational and scientific, but this is impossible; all thought is emotional and irrational in some respects, with the exception of psychopaths. So when there is fairly substantial evidence pointing in entirely contradictory directions, and when parents instill their children with wildly different values, battlegrounds are formed. What is politics, if not at least two parties who treat their intrinsic values as fact and would force these notions upon a populace? There are scientiests who believe global warming is a complete myth, and the notion that human beings can have an effect on something as mindblowingly complicated as a whole planet's ecosystem is adolescent, whereas some treat it as fact. Who do you believe?

This is no different. The OP is making a fundamentally irrational argument, and many of the counter-points people are making are equally irrational. There is no right and wrong here. There's no moral argument and no truly scientific one. By trying to make an ethical argument based on a mechanic in a video game, the OP has made his own position seem incredibly trivial, and linking to PETA's website and comparing the slaughter of animals to rape and murder, entirely contradicting millions of years of human evolution, only cheapens his position. He is wasting your time, and mine as well.

@Vexxan said:

Really?

I was just going to say that. So may I add. Wow, really?

@BrockNRolla said:

Eating vegetarian is more efficient. It's a simple, logical notion.

Step 1: Grow Vegetables. Step 2: Eat Vegetables, or

Step 1: Grow Vegetables. Step 2: Feed Vegetables to Animals. Step 3: Repeat Until Animal is Grown. Step 4: Eat Animal

Animals can survive on the parts of the vegetables that we cannot eat or simply waste - the skins, cores, and other shit. They also don't need it to be cooked. They are better with plants than we are, we generally don't compete for the same food resource, and we exploit that.

Crops that we eat take at least a year to grow. Animals can eat shit that grows all year round. It takes six months for a pig to grow to butcher weight.

Meat eaters do not replace vegetables with meat, we eat meat in addition to vegetables.

Shut up.

@Atlas: Indeed.

@DevWil said:

@Voidoid: you could grow soybeans and then craft them into tofu. that's not very complicated at all.

If you really insist on looking at Minecraft as if it were real life, then the situation here is simply that soybeans don't grow naturally in whatever region Minecraft exists in, meaning you can't make tofu, making the steaks important nutritionally. If you want to think veganism is a better way of life in modern society, that's cool, but I think trying to say it wouldn't be more practical to eat meat in a survival situation is a bit delusional.

Nothing baffles me more than the pure ANGER and RAGE shown by meat-lovers when somebody suggests that (heaven forbid) eating meat might be a bad thing and, you know, there'd be loads of advantages to us all eating less of it.

Literal pure rage. Calm down you lot. No-ones trying to take your freedom (fuck yeah).

I don't have a problem with Veganism, but Vegan diets are mostly gender neutral, which isn't optimally healthy for guys. Vegan guys' sources of protein, iron, and other minerals often have so much testosterone reducing and estrogen producing agents in them that they are hurting their hormonal balances. All of this soy based stuff, Tofu and seeds and lentils, literally (chemically) turn men into less of a man. I don't mean that in a dude bro way, either. I mean they chemically alter there natural state in a way that isn't optimally healthy for them.

This was totally unrelated to the conversation, but I thought I would put it out there because most Vegan guys don't really know about utilizing their diet in a way that is best for them.

@Insectecutor said:

@BrockNRolla said:

Eating vegetarian is more efficient. It's a simple, logical notion.

Step 1: Grow Vegetables. Step 2: Eat Vegetables, or

Step 1: Grow Vegetables. Step 2: Feed Vegetables to Animals. Step 3: Repeat Until Animal is Grown. Step 4: Eat Animal

Animals can survive on the parts of the vegetables that we cannot eat or simply waste - the skins, cores, and other shit. They also don't need it to be cooked. They are better with plants than we are, we generally don't compete for the same food resource, and we exploit that.

Crops that we eat take at least a year to grow. Animals can eat shit that grows all year round. It takes six months for a pig to grow to butcher weight.

Meat eaters do not replace vegetables with meat, we eat meat in addition to vegetables.

Shut up.

We grow so much vegetation for animals. http://www.epa.gov/agriculture/ag101/cropmajor.html

Corn: The United States is, by far, the largest producer of corn in the world. Corn is grown on over 400,000 U.S. farms. In 2000, the U.S. produced almost ten billion bushels of the world’s total 23 billion bushel crop. Corn grown for grain accounts for almost one quarter of the harvested crop acres in this country. Corn grown for silage accounts for about two percent of the total harvested cropland or about 6 million acres. The amount of land dedicated to corn silage production varies based on growing conditions. In years that produce weather unfavorable to high corn grain yields, corn can be “salvaged” by harvesting the entire plant as silage.

According to the National Corn Growers Association, about eighty percent of all corn grown in the U.S. is consumed by domestic and overseas livestock, poultry, and fish production. The crop is fed as ground grain, silage, high-moisture, and high-oil corn. About 12% of the U.S. corn crop ends up in foods that are either consumed directly (e.g. corn chips) or indirectly (e.g. high fructose corn syrup). It also has a wide array of industrial uses including ethanol, a popular oxygenate in cleaner burning auto fuels.

That corn could have been eaten by people. Or those farmers could have grown other crops. There are far more efficient ways to grow animals, just like you've described for animals that eat foods that we don't. That implies free range farming though, which is a small industry at best. Don't get me wrong, I take no umbrage with people eating meat. I think people who try to eat more efficiently grown meat are just as thoughtful as any vegetarian or vegan. It is more efficient to eat the crops you grow rather than to give them to something else and then eat that animal later. That shouldn't be contentious. If you like the taste of meat, that's a wholly different argument, and that's a fine point.

But come on. Let's not get ridiculous. It takes a whole year to grow corn, beans, or carrots? Please. As someone from Wisconsin, I can tell you that snow doesn't allow for a 12 month growing season, and since agriculture is the main industry of the state, I can't imagine how the farmers have managed to get by all these years under your facts.

I realise that eating meat may seem a bit barbaric, however that animal would not have lived were it not for the meat. Some life is better than no life at all.

there's been a lot of discussion, some (most?) of it predictably ridiculous and unproductive, and other than addressing the most recent post (as of me writing this sentence), i'm not going to address everybody specifically. replying over multiple pages is kind of inconvenient, and i don't think anybody arguing against me is open-minded enough at the moment for it to be worth the effort.

@SuperSambo said:

I realise that eating meat may seem a bit barbaric, however that animal would not have lived were it not for the meat. Some life is better than no life at all.

"some life is better than no life at all" couldn't be further from the truth, in my opinion. an oppressed, confined life isn't better than no life, at least in the case of a non-human.

so, now that i've had a few hours away from this conversation, i want to say a few general things. after this, don't be surprised if i don't post in this thread again.

1. i probably haven't been as diplomatic as i could have been. i've used some very sensitive words which, though i stand by their usage and don't think i was inaccurate, clearly have rubbed people the wrong way. even the word "unethical" in my original post is a very heavy term. i only meant it in a relative sense given that, as we've discussed, the minecraft ecology COULD be more ethical (which is to say, less unethical) without ruining the gameplay. what's ethical in my opinion has been made very clear, but i never wanted that to be the focus of the discussion.

2. because i know what a mess it caused the first time around (as has been pointed out), i didn't mean for this to spark a debate about meat. i like to talk about the subject, though, and clearly i can get very passionate about it. once it was brought up as a topic of discussion, my vegan propaganda switch went off (for better or worse). my original intention, however, was not to debate the moral implications of meat in minecraft or any other game. if you read my original post closely, this much is clear. working from what i thought was a reasonable, well-supported premise (meat is less efficient than non-meat food), i was simply offering that minecraft can be interpreted to be unrealistic in a way that most people wouldn't expect, in a way that doesn't involve infinite water or tree-punching.

given people's reactions, i don't think i was wrong. obviously my interpretation was indeed unexpected.

3. i don't think minecraft is evil. i said in my very first sentence that i love it. my admiration for it has led me to investigate it in some depth, and i came up with what i think is an interesting conclusion. a couple of people have understood this.

4. seriously, read my original blog. i don't say minecraft is bad for having meat in it.

5. my main point was that games teach/communicate/express values through their rules, in minecraft's case that steak is a more efficient food source than bread. given minecraft's one-dimensional nutritional system, real-world nutrition doesn't enter into their message. while, yes, i wouldn't argue that minecraft has definitely convinced anybody to start eating more steak, you can't say that media does not influence our thoughts. people can usually delimit where a game's values (killing people is good, for example) end and where real, social values begin (killing people is bad), this is mostly just because games tend not to try to express anything meaningful about reality. i do think, however, that certain expressions in games can subtly affect our psyche. furthermore, somebody said that his or her parents informed his or her values, and this isn't something i would argue against. however, how did they communicate with you? and when their teachings stopped, where did you learn about new things to integrate into your values system? media. media includes spoken word. i think games can be harmless, just like movies and any number of media in which violence has been decried. however, they aren't insignificant, nor do they exist in a vacuum.

6. regardless of if i'd been more tactful, i still think a lot of the same vitriol would have been launched my way. i don't think eating meat is defensible, and when i say i've never heard a reasonable argument for it, i mean it. it's possible to disagree with something while appreciating that your opponent has a logical basis for their position. you can disagree with their initial premises, but it doesn't mean their logic is invalid.

this is why i dare people to come up with a real, reasoned argument that doesn't have huge flaws i can point out. if it sounds arrogant, it's only because i've challenged people to this for a long time now, never having heard a rational argument.

as such, i truly believe that meat-eaters, as a psychological defense, project their guilt onto vegetarians, and that's where the shouts of elitism and proselytizing come from. in their hearts (whatever that means), they really know what they're doing is wrong, so anybody who points it out is annoyingly hyper-right. i think this phenomenon, in general, is fairly well documented in psychology, and it seems extremely appropriate for the matter at hand.

i don't feel that i'm a categorically better person than meat-eaters. the dalai lama eats meat, and i look up to him. i also don't know why the hell he eats meat. it's confusion more than anything that inspires me to speak out against meat. i just don't think it makes any sense, and it obviously does a lot of harm. whether you think it matters is up to you. i think animals, particularly the ones we eat, have nervous systems similar enough to our own that we should be able to empathize and think "hey! if i was a cow, i'd really not be into being killed for food, especially if the animal killing me can eat something else."

so if you actually don't care about the moral implications of meat, don't get involved in a discussion like this. if you're actually apathetic to the issue, don't waste your time here; you don't belong.

i'm willing to concede (and i have been since my earlier blog about vegetarianism that has since been dragged up in the comments of this blog) that there are two logically acceptable positions on meat. veg*nism isn't the only one. the alternative is that killing an animal doesn't have any moral significance whatsoever. given the overlap of people who eat meat and people who have (and love) dogs, cats, etc, though, i don't think this is what people actually think.

my challenge, as you've seen in this thread, is then to ask people for a pro-meat argument....

(IN-POST EDIT-THING) i actually forgot that i hadn't finished and submitted this comment for like an hour, and in the meantime, someone pointed out to me in another venue that there's a line in Genesis 9 that has God telling Noah and his sons that he can/should use animals for food. it's also right before a verse advocating for the death penalty, and i personally won't be swayed by that text at all (and it seems like the kind of thing Jesus would tell people to disregard in the New Testament, though i'm not an expert), but it's an argument that i have to respect! its internal logic is totally sound, from what i can tell.

nobody in this thread had appealed to the Bible, though.

so i think that may well cover everything.

Opium restores 100000 points of health n real life :O

Arguably the slipperiest slope I've ever had the pleasure of taking a ride on.

Holy shit.

Sounds to me like someone just wanted to get into an argument and/or show everyone how cool he is for being "different". I have no problem with you being vegan/vegetarian, whatever. But don't be so stupid as to expect a game to properly portray how "efficient" food is.

Ever eat steak? It's fucking delicious and you should try it. Fills me up more than a fucking salad that's for sure.

@DevWil: I'd be proud to be killed and eaten as a snack for some higher alien being who was such a superior intelligence that we were like livestock to it. Hell, if it was that much better than people, letting it die to save my own skin would be more of a crime than offering up a side of deep fried me.

"Though I won't argue about the ethical weight of digital meat..."

@Make_Me_Mad said:

@DevWil: I'd be proud to be killed and eaten as a snack for some higher alien being who was such a superior intelligence that we were like livestock to it. Hell, if it was that much better than people, letting it die to save my own skin would be more of a crime than offering up a side of deep fried me.

Quoted for truth!! Now if you'll excuse me I've made a pact to eat twice as much meat as I usually do everytime a vegan tries to preach this bullshit to me. So I'm off to KFC!

Coming up next...a study of ethics and the mustard stain on my shirt.

Many people in this thread have broken GiantBomb's number 1 rule of "don't be a dick." Guys, don't be dicks. We all have different lifestyles, aint nah reezon 2 b hatin'.  
So, I'm locking this thread. 
Also, I ate vegan chicken once. Vegan chicken.