Minecraft Forums

Ah, the Internet ... where men are men, women are men too, and 12-year-old girls are FBI agents.

Admittedly I play single-player, so nobody else has to look at me, but I wouldn't care if I had an untextured gray skin. Heck, look at what I have for a forum avatar! I know I'm out on the end of the bell curve with this opinion, but to me, what skin is on my toon matters less than nothing. When I was playing WoW, when transmogrification came out, everybody rushed out to mog their gear into whatever they thought was awesome/glitzy/blingy. I did, too, eventually -- I went and bought some newbie gear from the vendor, and mogged my stuff into that. Except my mage's staff, because I could make that into the staff equivalent of my warrior's old Arcanite Reaper, the spinal column and all.

But I digress. My point is, for at least some people (namely me), skins are a kind of trivial thing. I don't care what my MC toon looks like. I don't care if it's male, female, or neither. It could look like a creeper for all I care. I particularly don't care if it looks like me IRL. As I once said, I'm not made of blocks. It's like the color of Band-Aids: if your skin is ever really that color, you don't need a Band-Aid; you need a paramedic! Sure, "Steve" looks very little like me. But even if you had the world's best skin artist working from full 3D images of me, it's still not going to look much like me. It's going to look like a MC person made out of blocks. Y'know, like "Steve".

I suspect if I were to buy a skin pack, and pick a non-default skin, it would probably be the creeper in a suit, mostly because the whole concept is just so twisted. But think about it: if something as unlike oneself as a creeper (with or without a suit) is a suitable skin ... something that doesn't even exist! ... then what's the issue with something that does exist, something that's a part of our own families, that we see in real life every day? There isn't a skin out there that looks like me. They're the wrong sex, the wrong race, the wrong species, the wrong something. Since it's not going to look like me anyway (thank God!) why should it matter more that it's the wrong sex instead of the wrong race, or the wrong age, or the whole freaking wrong species?

I know some people are all hung up on having a skin that matches their RL appearance in some specific way (though I've never understood why any given way matters more than any other way ... why does sex matter more than skin color, for instance?). Good for them, I suppose. But, frankly, I want the Powers That Be to work on things more important to me than skins. (there's that whole opinion thing again) I'd be content if we were all just made of plain gray blocks with no skins at all.

P.S. As for "unfair", the fundamental purpose of skins is to differentiate players on multi-player servers, so they don't all look alike. If we assume that everyone is using a different skin, that neutral skins (creepers, stacks of birthday presents, whatever) can be used by either sex, and that the player breakdown on multi-player servers is about 80% male, 20% female, then the female players have a much greater assortment of skins to choose from, because in my count for another thread, the available skins were about 30% female.