Minecraft is a lot of different things to a lot of different people; a place to build a word processor, recreate Westeros or trap incredible monsters. For many players it's simply about survival, which means making sure you have shelter at night, forging armor and weapons with which you can fend off attackers, and somehow finding food to keep your hunger meter full. It's that last one that presented a problem for me when I picked the game up again recently.

I decided to stop eating meat over a year ago, around the time I turned 25. My family has a history of heart disease, and the way I saw it my life was practically half over. I also really like animalsand not just dogs, although they're my favoritesand I got tired of killing them for their meat when I know full well there are ample alternatives in our modern society. I had to make a change. I started going to the gym, which hasn't worked out so well, and I stopped eating meatwhich has.

So now I'm a vegetarian, and I'm much happier. But when I started playing the Xbox One edition of Minecraft I found myself in a curious situation: how to play Minecraft successfully without killing any animals?

When Minecraft arrived on Xbox 360 in 2011 my friends and I delighted for hours and hours in the game's splitscreen mode, crafting elaborate bases in which we squirreled away our valuables and set traps for one another. We experimented with redstone; I made a complex five-way track switcherstill one of my proudest gaming achievementswith help from a diagram online. We harassed one another constantly, but we played on "peaceful" difficulty so we wouldn't have to deal with destructive creepers and that pesky hunger meter too.

I did occasionally crank up the difficulty, on Xbox 360 and again later when I built my first gaming PC. I'm not opposed to a challengethe Souls games are some of my absolute favoritesand I wanted to feel that struggle. But the hunger thing vexed me, and I found myself spending way too much time hunting for pigs whose flesh I could roast for food. It was never long before the chicken drumsticks that represent your hunger started ticking down again, and farming seemed boring, so I eventually went back to peaceful mode and then lost interest in the game for a time.

When the Xbox One version came out I upgraded without thinking, knowing I'd probably get back into it at some point. And my prediction became prophesy when my girlfriend's Minecraft-obsessed brother came to visit, his laptop in his bag and his pixelated pickaxe never far away. "Two can play that game," I thought, meaning it literally. So I started it up and, knowing I'd quickly grow bored playing the same way I did three years ago, I selected "normal" difficulty. Daring, I know.

I knew I could spend my time hunting pigs through the woods if I wanted to, but I wanted to see if I could play Minecraft as I live life: by doing as little harm as possible to my friendly animal neighbors.

But I'm also not the first person who's had this thought. There are Minecraft Forum posts suggesting rules for a vegetarian challenge, and the same can be found on many other online communities. Some thoughtful players simply pose the question: "Do vegetarians avoid killing animals in-game?" One respondent says that any who do can't tell the difference between reality and fantasy, which I don't necessarily agree with. Imposing your own external rule set on a game is nothing new; it's called a metagame, and it's common in communities ranging from competitive first-person shooter players to avid Pokmon trainers.

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Taking The Minecraft Vegetarian Challenge