Editing Steve (Minecraft) (section)

===Analysis===
{{Quote box
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| quote = "The creative agency that the process of skin design affords is also a feature of the player's interaction with the game's landscape. Here, Steve's role is again central. Whether the player is taking control of the default Steve or an adapted variant, the character itself is always abstract enough to allow players to assign their own meaning to it. The character is human enough to be relatable but not so realistic that meaning is fixed and the avatar's identity is othered. This arguably reduces the distance between the player and the game; players' experience is not mediated by another character, with its own associations, but by an avatar easily associated with themselves. This lack of distinctive backstory and gendered features also means that Steve's appeal is potentially wide; an unexceptional and relatable "every(hu)man"."
| source = — Chris Bailey, ''100 Greatest Video Game Characters''.<ref name="Greatest" />
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In an entry about Steve from the 2017 publication ''100 Greatest Video Game Characters'', Chris Bailey explained that what little is known about Steve helps illuminate how video game avatars are being perceived in relation to player identity, because the character embodies and conducts the spirit of freedom and customization inherent to [[sandbox video game]]s.<ref name="Greatest" /> He further elaborated that Steve exemplifies the "centrality" of relatable avatars in affording players their own creative agency in and around video games: while other games allow a certain level of avatar customization, Steve embodies this possibility more than most with a process akin to a kind of scaffolded pixel art enabling the redesign of the entire surface of the body beyond changing a pre-defined hairstyle or skin color. This process is particularly visible through the proliferation of online communities and forums set up to share user-generated adapted skins.<ref name="Greatest" />

With regards to the concept of Steve's gender being neutral and non-binary as asserted by Persson, Bailey took the view that it is "initially difficult" to account for the inclusion of an avatar with an "evidently gendered name".<ref name="Greatest" /> Nevertheless, he observed that ''Minecraft''{{'s}} player communities have embraced the game's general principle of openness due to their enthusiasm in engaging with the possibility of customizing their avatars' appearances.<ref name="Greatest" /> This is achieved through the process of overlaying a new skin over Steve's original form, which represents a player's direct input in how they want to be represented in-game.<ref name="Greatest" /> Similarly, H. Chad Lane said that the concept of skins in ''Minecraft'', represented by Steve and Alex as the baseline, can act as a reflection of the player's identify and self-perceptions, regardless of whether it is similar to or in contrast to the player's identity in the [[Real life|real world]].<ref name=":0" />

Gabriel Menotti cited the Herobrine hoax, which involved a character which was never a real in-game entity, as an example of how the recording of playthroughs might influence the universe of ''Minecraft'' in a radical way. He believed that Persson's ambiguous answer on whether Herobrine will ever be integrated into ''Minecraft'' suggests that there is always a possibility for player imagination to be incorporated into one of the game's future updates, which is consistent with the logic behind ''Minecraft''{{'s}} open development as well as its history of frequent updates that sometimes introduce game-changing novelties.<ref>{{cite journal |last=Menotti |first=Gabriel |date=2014 |title=Videorec as gameplay: Recording playthroughs and video game engagement |url=https://www.gamejournal.it/3_menotti/ |journal=The Italian Journal of Game Studies |volume=1 |issue=3 |page=91 |issn=2280-7705}}</ref> The authors of ''Mixing and Re-Purposing Realities'' observed that the popularity of the Herobrine meme represents the ''Minecraft'' community's embrace of creative efforts by its members with the transition of spontaneous user-generated content into ''Minecraft'' folklore. Their survey of the study's respondents found that Herobrine is treated as a mythological destructive character which some similar traits as [[superhero]] characters.<ref>{{cite journal |last1=Flint |first1=Tom |last2=Hall |first2=Lynne |last3=Stewart |first3=Fiona |last4=O'Brien |first4=Catherine A. |date=July 2018 |title=Mixing and Re-Purposing Realities |url=http://dx.doi.org/10.14236/ewic/hci2018.39 |journal=Proceedings of the 32nd International BCS Human Computer Interaction Conference (HCI) |series=Electronic Workshops in Computing |publisher=BCS Learning & Development |page=6 |doi=10.14236/ewic/hci2018.39 |s2cid=53062295}}</ref>