Minecraft Wiki. Minecraft Wiki Explore. Main Page All Pages. Minecraft Minecraft Earth Minecraft Dungeons. Useful pages. Minecraft links. Gamepedia support Report a bad ad Help Wiki Contact us. Explore Wikis Community Central. Register Don't have an account? Lydia Winters. History Talk Every day presents something new and different, and even she herself admits that no two days in a row are ever the same.
I asked her to walk me through a typical day at the office, and what became immediately clear is that she really does have her hands in pretty much everything the company does. But naturally, there are some things that are set in stone. One of those things is her morning routine. My home is a minute walk from work — but I can make it in seven minutes if I run. I'm usually running with a really delicious coffee that my partner has made for me, and I'm kind of spilling it and drinking it as I run into the office.
On the day I spoke to Winters, she had kicked off her day with a three-hour meeting with one of Mojang's merchandising partners, who pitched a whole host of new ideas for her team to consider. Winters, who said she was "maybe the eighth person hired at the company," now has a team made up of product designers and project managers who help her with the approval process on each and every piece of merchandise.
Her focus is making sure that everything that gets made has an extraspecial touch and "isn't a label slap where the same artwork goes on everything. What happens when you aggravate a Wolf? Well, MinecraftChick aka Lydia from Mojang! We've animated her story with LEGO stop motion, of course!
A little kid is not going to say, 'I understand this shirt was very thoughtfully picked for me,' but they may say, 'Yeah, that is exactly what a skeleton does. This is more special than I thought it would be.
It's not just animals and baddies that get a critical look, either. Minecraft used to predominately focus on a guy named Steve, and Winters was instrumental in getting a second main character, a female named Alex, added into the game as well.
He is definitely a guy. He can be whatever gender he wants to be, but his name is Steve. How many Steves do you know that aren't male? Alex has red hair like Jeb, the lead designer, and green eyes like Winters herself — injecting a little bit of the Mojang personality into the game they spend so many hours each day perfecting. But she's also a focal point for many of the conversations that Winters has with her merchandising partners on a day-to-day basis, pointing out the type of relegation that can happen to a female character without a critical eye: "If you're not really careful and vigilant, Alex is always pushed behind Steve.
Or she's loving animals, and never doing any of the fighting. They both have to be shown in many different roles, because we have so many different players — on a daily basis, I'm talking about this, and looking at it constantly. The conversations that Winters has on a daily basis to avoid gendered typecasting are, in her eyes, crucial to putting forth the best possible version of the game to its users.
One example of this is the struggle she went through with a specific brand who didn't understand the importance of equally weighted roles for the "male" and "female" characters. For Alex, it said, 'She likes to build, explore, and mine. You are saying that because Steve is male he has a job — Steve's not an architect, he's just a dude that builds.
But if you're going to say he has a job, at least use the same language for both of them. Either they both have jobs or they both like to do certain things. Over the years, Winters has seen countless examples of Alex being mentioned with regard to fashion and Steve in relation to great careers and always puts the kibosh on it immediately. There's no world in which we will approve this.
Rewrite it. This not gender equal. The statement applies not just to descriptions of the two characters, but their positioning, the weapons they use, and the real-life models that are used to show off the goods that the company signs off on.
In her mind, both characters should be portrayed as badasses — not one over the other. It's clear in looking at Mojang's myriad offerings that these "soapbox moments from Lydia" have made a tangible difference — and an unexpected extra benefit is that it has also affected the workplace culture of Mojang as well.
Winters, who once saw herself as a lone wolf hopping around doing whatever needed to be done, now has five people reporting into her and a whole lot more women standing by her side when she has these conversations. In Seattle. Photo by vubui. Fashion by nittygrittywomen. But she's not just a manager and a brand champion.
She's also a brand ambassador, so Winters spent the afternoon before we got on the phone planning out the big reveal for this year's annual Minecon: that she'll be joined on stage with Will Arnett. And I think he's amazing and I have for so long that I'm like, oh my god I'm going to pass out.
And it will be so bad if I just faint," she said, noting that while she may be fangirling out now, the most exciting part of him hosting is that he's a huge fan of Minecraft himself. There are some clouds on the horizon, however. Mojang's success has made it a target, and, currently, they are one of a large number of developers being sued for patent infringement by Uniloc. It's something that when starting this company we never imagined we'd need to handle.
We've gone into a group of defendants and there is a firm in the US that represents all of us. So we just pay a huge sum of money every month to this lawyer firm and hopefully they'll win. But obviously the money would not be fun either. Mojang's battle here is not simply for their own well-being — the precedent set by Uniloc's victory could suffocate indie development as a whole. Patents only slow it down.
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