Minecraft & Self-Discovery
Minecraft. A game that millions of people in their early-to-mid ’20s will call a classic. Created by a man named Markus (AKA Notch), Minecraft began as a small indie game but quickly grew to become one of the most popular games ever made. In January 2023, according to Aakrit Sharma, 176 million players logged into Minecraft. My question is this: What makes Minecraft different from every other game? Why is it that I, along with hundreds of millions of other players around the world, hold a special place in our hearts for this silly block game?
For as long as human beings have been philosophizing, a single question has continued to permeate through our different cultures. It’s a question we’ve been asking over and over again since the moment we became self-aware of our existence, and yet, we haven’t been able to come up with a solid answer. It’s a question everyone in their lives at some point asks: “Why?” There are variations, of course, for example, “Why am I here?” “Why is the universe the way it is?” “Why do the stars twinkle?” “Why do people die?” “Why do I exist?” “Why does anything matter?” and so on and so on, but this one question, is the driving force behind everything we do.
In his blog On Hacking Life, Business, and Learning, Dev Basu wrote, “The best way to get context in any situation is to ask “why” a lot. Asking why eliminates confusion caused by pre-conceived assumptions, which are fueled by lack of knowledge, or more dangerously, partial knowledge.”
Let’s travel back in time for a second. The year is 2012-ish. I’m 10 years old. Minecraft has just been released for the newest Microsoft console at the time, the Xbox 360. One day, I was having a sleepover at my cousin’s house. I’m not sure why, but at some point, we ended up walking down the road to a mutual friend from school’s house to hang out for a bit. While we were over at his place, the friend got really excited to show us about this cool game he had just gotten a few days before. So, he turned on his console, along with his old hand-me-own early 2000s TV, and placed the disk into the slot. “MINECRAFT” faded into existence on the screen with big, bold letters, and a soft, calming piano began playing blissfully in the background. “What is Minecraft” I had asked. “It’s kind of like Legos but with pixels,” he responded. (Sidenote: I hate hearing Minecraft being described as “Legos,” but it was fairly common for me to hear people describe it this way. A sandbox create-your-own-adventure game made entirely of destructible cubes to build, craft, and innovate with” doesn’t really roll off the tongue. Legos it is, I guess.) While my cousin and my friend were busy jousting at the “Tall Tower of Snotting Ham,” I was busy building my dream home. And by that, I mean I was sitting in a small cave hitting a Redstone Ore over and over again, claiming “I made a light switch.”
After 15-20 minutes of hitting the Redstone Ore, I finally got bored of this and decided to expand. I crafted a pickaxe and started mining out the area. I crafted torches for light and a sword to ward off foes. I began excavating the cave out into the elaborate and expansive network of interconnected rooms. My home included a spacecraft launching room, a (currently non-functioning) home theater, a kitchen and dining room area, five or six different bedrooms, a play area where I placed all of my chests, a crafting and smelting room with fifteen or twenty furnaces and crafting tables randomly scattered around the place. The best part was the “secret entrance” created using two blocks of dirt that covered the door. As simplistic as it was, as a 10-year-old kid, I had never thought about architectural design before. I had never wondered why lights were placed on the ceiling instead of the floor or why roofs were shaped like triangles. As I continued building, more questions arose: “Why do lightbulbs need to be switched out every so often, but torches in Minecraft don’t? What is the best color to use for a certain room? Does color make me feel certain emotions? Why is that? What if a house didn’t have any walls?”
After just a few short hours of playing on my friend’s console, I was hooked. We went back to my cousin’s house after this and played some Halo. (Now, quick sidenote: I will always have a love for the Halo Franchise. As a young child, I would often play Halo: Reach with my dad. Whether it is playing the coop campaign or kicking his sorry butt in Slayer, I have so many good memories with that game.) However, as much as I loved Halo, it just didn’t give me that joy that I once felt. No longer was I content with playing through a pre-created campaign. Go to Point A and defeat the enemies, go to Point B and defeat the enemies, Go to Point C–You get the picture. No longer was I content with doing the same thing over and over again. I had a new drive. I had a new purpose. I wanted to create. And so, I went back home and immediately began begging my dad for the niche indie game. “Please, Dad, PLEASE?” I pleaded. For days and days and days. Eventually, one of two things happened. Either he looked up the game online, saw what it was about, and wanted to push me to explore my creativity and self-expression, or he got so sick of me bothering him that he’d do anything just to shut me up–Whatever the reason, he bought me Minecraft, so long as I did the dishes for the next two weeks without complaining.
Over the next few years, playing Minecraft became my life. I created huge 50-floor hotels, a recreation center for zombies and sheep to learn to be friends, a holiday vacation resort for when my home got a bit too familiar, escape rooms, bat caves, arcade games, amusement parks, museums, statues taller than the tallest mountains, secret passageways, underwater roller coasters, space shuttles, churches, and so much more. If I could think of it, I could create it. In 5th grade, I discovered command blocks, a block that allowed me to write code and run it inside of the game. I could quite literally develop my own game if I wanted to learn how to write the code for it. And so, that’s exactly what I did over my fifth-grade summer break. During those 2 months, I didn’t sleep, I didn’t go outside with friends, and I didn’t even talk to my family very much from what I remember. Every single memory I have during that amazing summer is of me sitting at a computer screen during the darkest hours of the night watching tutorial after tutorial about the ins and outs of the Minecraft Command Structure as well as JSON and Javascript. It is because of Minecraft that I started learning about loops and asynchronous functions and what an API does. At one point, I started working every day with a friend from school to code a working soccer minigame in Minecraft. It took MANY hours and hundreds of failed attempts, but eventually, we got it working! We played the mini-game for maybe a day or so before we got bored of that and started working on developing a fully functional custom-crafting mechanism. It is because of Minecraft that I began to realize how much I love not only building cool-looking structures but actually designing how things work.
This is what makes Minecraft different from any other game. While other games like Halo are designed to tell a story, Minecraft acts as the building blocks for you to mine out your own questions and, from there, craft your own story (see what I did there?) Minecraft is so much more than a video game. It is a learning experience. It’s a social gathering. It’s a safe place to explore and innovate your wildest dreams. However, it’s not without its challenges. There are still creatures and monsters that want to kill you, dimensions designed to kill you, and creatures whose sole objective is to blow up your build. Minecraft is a lot like real life. Filled with good times, bad times, and sad times, but at the end of the day, a place where your story is your own. No matter how many dragons or creepers stand in your way, if you put your mind to it, you can accomplish anything. And when you do, you will look back on all of the hundreds of hours spent, and you will smile at how far you’ve grown. It all begins with a simple question. Who do you want to be? What adventures do you want to go on? Why do you want that?
Anna Scheucher, a writer for the Ideapod, put it perfectly when she wrote this: “One way to answer the question “who am I?” is to look at what your motivations are. When you’re trying to understand your motivations, you need to ask yourself why. Why do you do what you do? What is the end result of it? If you can answer these questions, you’ll be on the right track to understanding your actions and why they were important.”
In short, Minecraft helped me learn to ask three life-changing questions: Who are you? Why are you that way? What can you create to express and share that perspective with the world?
Sources:
How many people play Minecraft? 2024 player count - Charlie INTEL
