Iranian Major General Killed in Minecraft.

In the early morning hours of the third of January, a US special operations team connected to vanilla.soleimanicraft.ir, the private Minecraft server of general Soleimani. Until recently the server had been whitelisted, but intelligence agencies noticed that sometime last week the whitelist had been disabled during a login server outage. A specialized team of cyber warfare experts was assembled before the whitelist could be re-enabled, and within minutes Soleimani had been reduced to a pile of items on the sand.

Mojang has denied all accountability when asked if the outage was intentional. They have cooperated with the US military during practice exercises in the past, but it is unclear if they were authorized to respond to such sensitive leads. Up until now, international law and the UN have left Minecraft warfare as a gray area in their policies, but this one may develop into a landmark case in the coming Gamer Geneva Convention. Notch, the original creator of Minecraft, declined comment on his involvement, but the long standing relationship Microsoft and the military implies that they acted as more than just the current owners of the game.

This is the first time cyber warfare has been leveraged since operation Desert Shield, when the US briefly targeted text based BBS games with experimental turn based combat strategies. Originally developed by the NSA, the strategies were initially successful, but with the adoption of Unicode and support for right-to-left Arabic script, their western keyboards quickly became obsolete. If the middle east is to continue enjoying this barrier of protection, they will have to go back to playing text based games, however experts consider this to be an unlikely outcome.

Minecraft has become an open attack surface to more than just the military. Far right gamer death squads have proudly seen their opposition hanged in Minecraft, or sometimes even dragged out in the streets and shot in Minecraft. Eager yet cryptic comments predict the “Day of the Lead,” on which journalists and executives of mainstream media giants will be publicly hung from fence posts (in Minecraft). Economists have speculated that this style of cyber warfare could potentially unite YouTube lets players with the private defense sector, giving rise to a new breed of weaponized influencers.

As for our own safety, the US has doubled the number of federally mandated Minecraft moderators in each of its territories, what is a clear sign of what is to come. While many countries will go the way of China and opt to segregate themselves from their opposition with some form of firewall, the NSA continues to rely on metadata collection and surveillance to supplement other forms of defense. Meanwhile, some of our own lobbyist groups continue to deprive the masses of gigabit internet speeds in favor of antiquated copper cables, leaving citizens at the mercy of their internet service providers, without the bandwidth to defend themselves. With this brief victory we can only hope to see a future where every American can live free in Minecraft, but this could mark the end of our digital “golden age.”