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The FDA wants to use Minecraft to keep people from smoking

The FDA wants to use Minecraft to keep people from smoking

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Minecraft has proven a useful tool for teaching life lessons. For instance, if you don't have somewhere safe to sleep at the end of the day, bad things might happen to you. Also, cave exploration can be extremely dangerous without enough light, or if you run into molten lava — which is frequently. Now the US Food and Drug Administration is keen on tapping some of that environmental learning on people who might become addicted to cigarettes and tobacco. Ad Week reports that the public health agency has hired prominent Machinima video creator SkyDoesMinecraft to produce an anti-smoking PSA using Mojang's hit game.

Details of just what exactly that video will end up like are unclear. What's not is just how many people might see it. SkyDoesMinecraft, who is actually 21-year-old Adam Dahlberg, has 10.3 million subscribers, and his videos have been viewed more than 2.1 billion times. The FDA hopes that will get the eventual video in front of many eyeballs. Dahlberg's most viewed video is a parody of Coldplay's "Paradise" set in Minecraft that's been watched 43.2 million times.

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