What is Minecraft?

Minecraft® is a game for those who love to create, survive, and build. Mojang® released Minecraft in 2011 on November 18th, at the MineCon® keynote. Since then over 17,510,500 (as of 2014) people have bought the PC/Mac version. My favorite thing about Minecraft is that you can play by yourself, or with your friends and family. Whether you work through the realistic trials of Survival Mode or build up entire worlds in Creative Mode, it is an amazing game for everyone.

In Minecraft there are two modes, which you can play: survival mode and creative mode. In survival mode, you enter the world without anything and must gather resources from the world around you. There are trees to gather wood from and mountains to gather stone from. You can use these materials to create tools to mine the ores you will find in the caves or underground. You can also make farm tools (such as the hoe), and so much more.

There are seeds that you can find and grow into food so that you won’t starve. Then there are the animals (known collectively as non-hostile mobs) which can be found all around you. They can yield much needed materials, such as wool to make beds and rugs, meat to help with starvation (cooking it is an advisable option) and leather to make books or armor. In addition, animals can be bred to multiply the amount of resources you receive in the end.

If you decide to explore beyond your immediate surroundings, you might discover some new territories such as the Mesa Biome or Ice Forests. In such places you might find new kinds of wood and other useful items. You can also find villages, desert or jungle temples and dungeons, to name a few. In addition to finding traps hidden in the beautiful structures you can find rare loot of all sorts (armor, gold, gems and weapons). Sometimes the risk is worth it.

I have seen a lot of different approaches to surviving the trials of this mode. For instance, I have seen some use the farmer approach, where they kill animals as little as possible, breed the animals into flocks or herds, grow their food in huge fields, etc. Others simply obtain enough to survive as they explore the land and discover new things. Some just fight their way through everything and build fortresses. Then there are the miners who explore the caves and don’t like leaving the vast caves for anything. Some build giant red stone contraptions, some giant castles. Some people (like me) play a combination of the different approaches, but in the end we all have the same goal: to survive.

Beside hunger, falling, burning in the lava pits, and drowning in the vast bodies of water, there is yet another menace which you can turn off or leave on as you please. This menace is the hostile mobs such as zombies, skeletons, spiders, creepers, and endermen. These mobs can make surviving more challenging. I personally like playing with a community, and having mobs on adds an aspect to the game especially in a community setting.

I am a build focused player. While I enjoy survival mode a lot, I also use Creative Mode both as a tool and as a place to build without resource restraints. In this mode, you have endless blocks, you can fly, and there are none of the restrictions of survival. I often use Creative worlds to put together build ideas I want to make in survival, like seen in the image.

Creative gives you the opportunity to solve and to understand how the game works, and how each item reacts to certain things – knowledge that you can take with you into Survival Mode. Some say Minecraft is like an interactive LEGO® world and I feel like that is mostly accurate. I have heard it described as a sandbox game, a game where the possibilities are only limited by your imagination and time.

In my opinion Minecraft is an entertaining game for all ages, especially if shared with friends and family. Every year new things are added and the game expands to new levels of fun. The stated vision behind creating this game was “This was a game about placing and breaking blocks in a 3D world. The primary motivation was to create an experience where each individual component felt fun. A game that could be both accessible and emergent.” I think the creators accomplished their vision, maybe even beyond their wildest expectations.

Note: this post was originally posted in 2014. It has since been rewritten and updated, however some of the data has not been changed.

References:

Author Unknown, “What is This Game?” Minecraft.net (Date Unknown): Mojang. Accessed December 16, 2014. http://minecraft.net/game   Author Unknown, “Home Page.” Minecraft.net (Date Unknown): Mojang. Accessed December 16, 2014. http://minecraft.net