Minecraft
DISCLAIMER. THIS IS NOT A CHILDS GAME, I REPEAT, THIS IS NOT A CHILDS GAME. HAVE YOU EVER SEEN A CHILD MAKE THIS WITHOUT COPYING A YOUTUBE VIDEO?
At one point or another, I’m pretty sure everyone has either heard of, played or watched something to do with Minecraft. This incredibly popular game first came into Beta; December 20th 2010 and was fully released November 18th 2011, given how long ago that was, Minecraft could still be considered the most popular game of all time. The original developer, Notch, created what I consider to be the perfect Sandbox game, it is now in the hands of Microsoft and they continue to do an amazing job making each and every free update better than the last.
When I first played Minecraft back in Beta update 1.3, the update which introduced the immensely useful Bed block to help you skip those pesky nights, I was on a rubbish PC in the corner of my Nan’s living room. The game had such a simple premise and yet there was nothing else like it? It was so engrossing and sparked a creative side of me that no game ever has. Minecraft definitely took time to get itself on its feet, with a lot of design choices that made little sense which were eventually changed. Why didn’t food stack? Why did Notch think this was a good idea? Why?
The game has, in recent years, been taken in by a large audience of children due to popular Youtubers making it a staple in their regular content. At its core though, the majority of hardcore players are the adults such as myself that grew up with the game as it slowly evolved into what it is today. However, as I found myself growing up I found that creativity is not what it used to be, due to this Minecraft is not a game that I come home and play every day like I did when I was at school, now it is a game that I tend to play with my Girlfriend and friends every so often. It tends to be a binge session of Minecraft once a year after a new update has come out and then we will put it back down and come back at a later date.
To me, this is what Minecraft represents, something you can play with your friends and have zero competition throughout. No one can be bad at Minecraft, which is what I think a lot of games today lack as there always needs to be a winner in modern games but Minecraft still encapsulates that feeling of accomplishment even if it is something small. If it’s a building playstyle you enjoy, or an explorative one Minecraft encourages you to do so and doesn’t penalize you for not doing the other. No other game gives you this feeling like Minecraft does.
The community that Minecraft has is astoundingly creative, some amazing builders are apart of this community, recreating amazing scenes such as large cities from Lord of the Rings or the entirety of Hogwarts, even with its own Flu Network system just like the Harry Potter series. I will include a picture beneath this paragraph as some of these builds are jawdroppingly good. Not only does the community have amazing builders, it has an amazing array of Mod developers too. These developers can sometimes be aspiring game developers, content creators or simply bored players that think their mod is a feature that should be in the game, some of which actually inspire in-game updates.
So I’m going to wrap this one up, I know it was a short one but Minecraft is such a simple yet beautifully made game that it doesn’t need long rambling paragraphs about each individual feature, the game simply speaks for itself. I just hope that in another 10 years, this game is still as popular as it is today.
Harry.
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