I first started paying attention to Minecraft when it was in alpha. In December of 2010, the game moved from alpha to beta, and I finally bought into it. That means it’s been more than ten years since I played Minecraft for the very first time.
A lot has changed since then. The game has most certainly changed, and the world around it has changed as well. Yet there’s still something comforting about returning to Minecraft and firing up a brand new world.
It’s staggering to think about how many games have come and gone since then. As just one example, Minecraft predates The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (at least its alpha and beta versions do), and the world seems to finally be cooling down on Skyrim. That’s not the case with Minecraft — this game is still going strong. It’s maybe not quite as relevant as it was at its absolute peak, but it’s certainly not going away any time soon.
The thing that makes Minecraft so endlessly enjoyable is that its gameplay loop is up to the player to decide. You begin with nothing but your imagination and the character’s fists (which you’ll use to punch trees to get everything started), dropped into an infinitely large, randomly generated world that’s yours to explore, mine, terraform, and build upon.
Since you can move any block (up to the high reaches of the sky and down to an unbreakable layer of bedrock), this world has very few limits. With enough work, any flat piece of ground can become a tower to heaven or a gaping chasm to the pits of hell.
Want to carve your own face into a mountain, with a waterfall pouring out of your mouth and lava spilling from your eyes? Go for it! Want to build the entire real Earth to scale? You can do that too! Want to find (or build) yourself a sufficiently large sea and then construct a fleet of pirate ships? You can absolutely do that as well (though your ships will be stationary).
In Minecraft, you’re not really given much of a goal, which means players are left to create their own projects and decide for themselves what the benchmarks for failure or success are. In a world as enormous and malleable as Minecraft‘s, this is a tantalizing prospect for creative types.
Minecraft changed the way we think about video games. In fact, Sean Murray, the man who became the public face of No Man’s Sky, said this in a 2014 interview:
The kids who grew up with Minecraft will really struggle to relate to something like Assassin’s Creed. They won’t want to be that guy. When they say ‘I love games’ they don’t mean the same things that we do when we say it. The Minecraft generation has a totally different expectation.
I think time has proven him mostly right, to some extent (though Assassin’s Creed is still doing pretty alright for itself). We’ve broken away from defining games as lists of quests and arrow markers, or guided jaunts through predetermined story events. No, video games are bigger now. Video games do so much more than they used to. Sure, those old-fashioned games that guide you from point A to point B still exist (and probably always will), but Minecraft proved that there’s a viable alternative.
I fired up Minecraft again yesterday, for the first time in more than a year (aside from my brief encounter with the Star Wars add-on), and it was just as welcoming as before. It was like visiting an old friend I’d been missing, and finding our time together be exactly how I’d been picturing it in my head. It’s astonishing how satisfying this game continues to be, and I’m sure I’ve got hundreds of more hours ahead of me. I can already feel myself getting re-addicted.
I think it’s fair to say at this point that Minecraft is here to stay. In fact, Minecraft just might outlast all of us.
