Minecraft: a masterpiece to free the mind

By Skyler Sauer

Staff Writer

Minecraft is the second best-selling video game in history. Released over 10 years ago and more than 200 millions sales, Minecraft is an absolute masterpiece, but not without its flaws.

Minecraft is an open-world sandbox game where the player starts their world in a 3D world full of uniformly-sized blocks. These blocks make up landscapes, structures, and biomes – an entire world at the players’ fingertips.

The game is designed around three primary functions: mining, crafting and building. Each of these functions bring specific joys to the player as they experience the world around them, mining for resources, crafting them to fit their needs and building anything they might imagine. 

Minecraft fulfills the innate human desire to destroy, create and control the world around them. Within our society today, we are stripped of our freedoms, unable to return to the wilderness world of our ancestors. 

Minecraft gives players the freedom to explore, to create, to experience true freedom. Unlike many modern AAA games, Minecraft is incapable of restricting the player. The player is, at all times, capable of anything within the world. The game’s decision not to restrict the player allows complete freedom at all stages of the game, from exploration to building.

The many facets of the game allow players to experience the game as uniquely theirs. “Survival” presents many challenges. “Creative” gives players all the resources to build freely. “Multiplayer”, my personal favorite, lets multiple players come together and experience the game.

Minecraft has a unique and valuable ability to foster a community around itself. Multiplayer worlds allow players to experience social interaction they might lack during lockdown.

Since its first alpha released in 2010 Minecraft has continued to grow and become more and more every day. Updates come along about once a year to give players a reason to return 

The game, and more specifically, its original creator, have a troubled history. After Mojang was sold to Microsoft in 2014, Markus “Notch” Persson, known as Minecraft’s primary creator, decided to retire. Later, Persson went on to make hateful and transphobic comments on Twitter.

Minecraft also struggles with performance issues. The poor optimization of the game forces many players to play at low framerates.

Minecraft certainly isn’t a perfect game but it attains a certain charm I have yet to experience in any other game. Minecraft is an incredible game that will change your life as it did mine.