Minecraft

You load up the world and look around. You see mountains, hills, trees, and water as far as the eye can see. Welcome to Minecraft.

No objectives, no story, no definitive end until you decide to leave

Minecraft, the most sold game of all time, may not even seem like a game at first glance. When you start, there is no tutorial and no clear goal. Many new players are left asking,

“What am I supposed to do?”

While this question is scary to hear for most games, the lack of clear objectives ironically is one of the reasons why Minecraft is so beautiful.

Minecraft is home to a variety of creatures and different biomes. Players can tame creatures as pets, grow crops, and explore the surrounding landscapes. With a procedurally generated world map, thousands of blocks, and millions of players, there are basically no limits to what you can do in Minecraft

Minecraft requires the player to envision their own objectives. It gives the player a world to create and do whatever they want. Going through the game, a player might want to create a village, become insanely strong, explore unique cave systems, or just create a small farm. There isn’t an optimal or correct way to play. It is the quintessential “sandbox” game.

And like a kid in a sandbox, when I first started playing, I fell in love with building. Perhaps it is a natural human instinct to bring order to the untamed wilderness that is Minecraft. I still remember building my first dirt house in a valley I called my own. The more I played, the more daring my projects became. I envisioned castles, so I spent hours collecting the materials and even more hours building them. After the castles, I envisioned a peaceful village in the desert filled with a variety of flowers and trees. So the desert became my oasis.

Minecraft was the perfect place to learn how to have a vision

The initial dreaming, the collection of materials, and the building process, all come together in one world. Although there isn’t a specific storyline that teaches a lesson, in Minecraft, I learned how to take what was in my head, and turn it into reality. (Well… reality in the virtual world)

I think creativity is very natural for people, but when we don’t have a space to be creative, we start to lose it. Minecraft is a space where children and adults can be creative, so I say, go out and try it if you haven’t already. It might not always have you on the edge of your seat, but you certainly can create lasting memories alone or with a group of your friends.

Players from around the world come together to take on massive projects. For all the Game of Thrones fans, this project is a to-scale replica of King’s Landing made in Minecraft.

In another project, a computer engineer made a working computer in Minecraft out of blocks and Redstone.

A “good” game doesn’t have to have meaning laid out obviously for the player. Just like in life, as we grow up, and nobody is telling us what to do anymore, it's up to us to figure out what is meaningful, what our goals are, and how to achieve them. So take hold of your life as if it was a sandbox game and be a builder, explorer, and visionary.

Works Cited:

MacManus, Christopher. “King’s Landing from ‘Game of Thrones,’ Minecraft-Style (Pictures).” CNET, 30 Jan. 2013, www.cnet.com/pictures/kings-landing-from-game-of-thrones-minecraft-style-pictures.

legomasta99. “[Minecraft Computer Engineering] — Quad-Core Redstone Computer v5.0 [12k Sub Special!].” YouTube, uploaded by legomasta99, 30 Dec. 2018, www.youtube.com/watch?v=SbO0tqH8f5I.