What Are They Crafting Over There?
Centered around the Minecraft base on Reddit is the strong, shared concepts of creativity and originality. You’ll never see the same idea twice while scrolling through the vast expanse of posts from the artists to the engineers. What you WILL see include not only epic builds and ingenious contraptions, but also arguments among these creators that have led to the smaller factions within the community. Buckle up.
The Mellow Miners
So let’s start with the wholesome stuff; as I mentioned before, these users love to share with others! So cute right? Let’s see what they’re posting:
One popular “flair,” or category is News. This is where players look for updates on the game or on its developers. A hot topic for discussion in this section is the 1.17 update which will officially be out Summer 2021. People who have access to snapshots (or sneak peeks) to this update post about the cool new biomes, items, and mobs that they find. Upon finding one of these new features, user danyymonster1997 exclaimed, “I’m gonna be honest this update is the most hyped i’ve ever been for an update, I mean look at this beauty of a cave holy moly dude…” Minecraft is all about discovering after all, and these people use Reddit to discover and learn.
WOAH, A Castle!
Another popular flair on the subreddit is for Builds. This is where most Minecraft Redditors congregate and consequently, where the most engagement is. Here, the players who are more artistically inclined (or just prefer creating rather than fighting monsters) are found. The screenshots of their worlds that they post dazzle thousands; user Drag0n0d posted a picture of their own version of the castle from the Harry Potter franchise that they started building long before and over the course of the COVID-19 quarantine (below), about two years! There are currently about 12.5 thousand upvotes on this post, five different Reddit “awards,” and the comments are overwhelmingly positive, with users like Euffie giving compliments like “Looks pog [cool] man! Cant imagine how long it must’ve took you lol, good work” or asking about shaders (visual effects you can add to the game) used. So not only is Reddit a space where Minecrafters share their ideas, it’s a place to ask advice or get help as well!
Let’s Mine Further, Shall We?
With light comes shadow and the Minecraft community is no exception. While the community has many hotspots for positivity and growth, it also has many for pessimism and hate. You could argue that there are many subgroups of Minecrafters such as the Builders, Miners, Fighters, Engineers, and Speedrunners, who all have their own stereotypes (for example, the slightly misogynistic one that the builders are usually assumed to be women and the fighters are men), but one of the biggest groups faced against all of these are the Noobs.
Short for “newbie,” these people who have just joined the community are constantly facing animosity from experienced players. Some of these “veterans” believe that you aren’t a true Minecrafter unless you remember the alpha or beta versions of the game and some Noobs encounter bullying; even popular YouTube gamer Markiplier was made fun of incessantly for using the wrong pickaxe to mine diamonds — and yes, there are actually several wrong pickaxes for mining diamonds (if you’re interested, you can only use iron, diamond, or netherite to craft a pickaxe strong enough to mine diamond). User KloudoYT posted a YouTube video from their channel in which their friends destroy their base to which bonniedudes647283646 so insightfully added, “Lmao get rekt skrub.”
While this appears to be a very mild case of bullying, this pattern of harassing or silencing new players who don’t know any better is spread everywhere, even in the RULES of the subreddit; rules 11 and 12 state “New users may not post videos,” and no “Tired submissions,” respectively! The hate from players and mods of the subreddit form a kind of toxic waste dump in the backyard of the otherwise respectable Minecraft community.
