Context:

M is a college student at the University of Southern California, he told me about a ghostlike entity on the online game Minecraft, which he has been playing for years.

Text:

“So there’s a game online called Minecraft and I’ve played for years, but I played when it first came out so I was around 10 or 11 years old. There used to be a supernatural entity in the game called Herobrine. Minecraft can be played single-player or multiplayer, but when you played single-player you are alone in the world you created with only the animal mobs. But this “person” Herobrine was supposed to resemble the main character, but instead of having pupils, his eyes were fully white. He was seen as something of an opposing force, or like a scary entity you want to summon. I was playing with one of my friends at the time and we looked up a summon on YouTube and we ended up doing it. Nothing happened initially but that world ended up being corrupted like things would be set on fire, and a whole bunch of random things happened. Herobrine was never seen in the game by me personally but things around me started changing in the game when they weren’t supposed to. In the subsequent releases of the game the developers mentioned that Herobrine was never in the game; they all said he was removed. He was never considered an actual person, some people assumed he was a bug in the game that haunts the system or world in the server. So, like, in my world, when I summoned him, trees would be set on fire, my stuff would go missing, and my house made of wood and stone was on fire even though my friend and I weren’t there, so I knew it couldn’t have been my friend. I believe I made the world on my XBOX 360, so a year ago when I booted it back up, I couldn’t find that world like it was deleted offline.”

Analysis:

The Minecraft entity 303 or Herobrine,is a creepypasta where an ex-employee from Mojang, the game’s developer company, created the entity to haunt servers in order to have his revenge on the game’s developers and the players alike. This is a classic legend narration in which a discontented person will take revenge over those who wronged them by haunting that which was taken from them or lost. This story fits in with a classic phenomenon in videogames where people make up legends about hacks and bugs, trying to scare people; this is an aspect of the postmodern era, as people that are scared of the new and unknown, try to make up stories about the Internet in order to make sense of that which they cannot understand. This trend is particularly notorious in creepypastas, a genre of horror-related legends that are shared on the Internet.