Building a beautiful house, becoming a virtual farmer and harvesting wheat is the simple dream of a player who is already familiar with Minecraft, the world’s most popular sandbox. However, there are users who consider this project “childish” and do not realize that even an experienced gamer has something to do in it. Cybersport.ru explains why Minecraft is a great game for all ages.
$ 2 billion retrospective
Many believe that Minecraft was a breakthrough due to a fresh idea and the lack of games similar to it, but this is not so. Sandbox author Marcus Notch Persson inspired by the game Infiniminer, in which gamers needed to extract valuable resources faster than others.
Persson was fond of programming since childhood and after the developers of Infiniminer published the source code of the game, he decided to create his own version called Cave Game, and then renamed it Minecraft. Thanks to the ability to “code,” he played out an almost biblical scenario: first he added heaven to the game, then animals, and then he populated it with zombies and other creatures.
The first version of Minecraft was released in 2009, and a stable client for PC was released in 2011 – before that, I had to dance with a tambourine for two years to install the game on a computer. Persson sensed the commercial success of the project and realized that he needed extra hands to realize all the ideas – that is how Mojang appeared.
In 2014, Persson’s studio was bought by Microsoft for $ 2.5 billion. This went to the game’s benefit: the giant copes with the technical part superbly, and the active community and the initial orientation of the gameplay to the creative of users do not allow the creative to be ruined.
Now the author of Minecraft is no longer engaged in programming, and when selling Mojang, he even declared: “I became a symbol. I don’t want to be a symbol responsible for something huge that I don’t understand. ” Persson is currently creating electronic music under the pseudonym Markus Alexei.
I built my house out of mud – and then what?
Minecraft is available on all popular platforms: PC, Android and iOS, Nintendo Switch, Xbox, PlayStation and others. This played a huge role in popularizing the title. The gameplay does not require complete immersion, and the duration of the session is not important: it turned out a minute – I launched the application, and just as painlessly left the game world.
The first Minecraft experience is about the same for everyone. You are simply thrown into a randomly generated world, there are no clues and quests, and the abundance of right angles in graphic elements is a little scary. After a few minutes, it turns out that the developers did not plan to babysit with you, and therefore you will have to google a lot for a comfortable game.
Minecraft survival begins with getting resources. For some time you wander aimlessly through forests and fields, with your bare hands mining a tree or breaking blocks under your feet. Having rummaged in the earth, you surely run into a cobblestone which it is impossible to get without special tools. After some time, the game darkens, and monsters begin to climb from all sides. Experienced gamers know that at this moment the best you can do is build a “mud house,” the first cozy bungalow.
There is no tutorial in Minecraft, therefore, users who are alien to self-learning do not stay in the game for a long time. Basic recipes for creating items are remembered quickly, but you will have to read about them on third-party sites. After some time, you understand how craft works, and you begin to experiment. And if now once the created objects are added to the recipe book, then it used to be painful to remember how to place the sticks on the workbench to get a fence, not a wicket.
Most users have enough resources and crafting to enjoy the game, but for fans this process is just a routine that only precedes the realization of crazy fantasies. The client also has a separate mode for creativity, where all materials, flight and a variety of cheat codes are available.
One of the most interesting features that Minecraft provides to a player is invention. Thanks to simple mechanisms with electrical circuits, you can make a progressive chicken farm, an automatic collector of cacti from plantations, a labyrinth with traps, a spaceship or an entire station for the extraction of infernal growths.
Aesthetics of straight lines
You will be surprised, but with all the simplicity of the graphics, I consider Minecraft one of the most beautiful games in the world. It’s not about the number of polygons in animal models or the realism of textures: the views that open up to you when traveling through a randomly generated world are amazing. Plus you can add a few touches to the landscape with your own hand. Here are some of my favorite screenshots found on the net:
Minecraft Railway
Experienced players create wonders of the world in Minecraft. The variety of biomes makes it possible to knock out Peter in the rocks with your own hands, grow the gardens of Babylon or create the Great Barrier Reef. If there is not enough light in life, you can open a portal to the infernal hell called Nether. There, by the way, pretty creepy:
Academy of Cubism
Interest in Minecraft does not fade away thanks to the powerful support of developers and a large number of user-generated content. In this game, it is not the same as in many popular projects. Sandbox videos on YouTube, nude modifications and other favorite entertainment for gamers are available, but Minecraft has recently become a platform for educational institutions, a springboard for testing unusual projects before their implementation, and also an island of safety for people with unpopular ideas .
On Cybersport.ru we often write about such projects. For example, recently, the international non-profit organization Reporters Without Borders created a huge digital library, which placed texts that were censored in different countries.
With the transition to distance learning because of the coronavirus pandemic, many schools and universities began to look for alternative courses. Minecraft of them is probably the most unusual, only Half-Life: Alyx can compete with it. Microsoft Helps Educators Distribute Special educational version of the game Minecraft: Education Edition. Well, in what other game can you make a trip inside the human eye or go to the International Space Station, recreated with maximum accuracy?
ISS in Minecraft
Microsoft has maintained a good tradition of gradual development of the game. Every year, new blocks appear in Minecraft, the recipe book is updated, and interesting creatures populate the world. Of the latest additions, I most remember the “sea season”: for hours I cosplayed a treasure hunter, and many pirate maps appeared on the wall of my cozy hut.
After the “sea” patch in the game appeared pandas, bamboo, bees, honey and many other unusual blocks. Each addition expands the possibilities both for aesthetes who build beautiful cities, and for “techies” who are fanatical by logic. Honey, for example, has the property of “stickiness” and unusual in contact with characters moving around the block.
Up to 16 and older
Most of my friends are deeply over 30, and I am no longer 18 on my passport, but we often get together on a Minecraft server. Usually our game is based on some popular challenge. Once we built houses only on trees, and in the last game session we created a world almost entirely of the ocean – we had to get the necessary resources on small islands, crossing vast distances by boat.
In our group there are people who teach at the university, work in the prosecutor’s office, and even at the Rostov atomic station. Minecraft combines: the search for the first diamonds, the sharing of loot from the mines and fortresses of Nether, trips to the Dragon and the Sear – if you play with the company, then Minecraft for some time becomes a full-fledged MMORPG.
Many will say: this is a game for students! Statistics suggest otherwise. According to Microsoft, the average age of Minecraft players is 24 years. Such are the over-aged students who like to create.
The popularity of the “sandbox” speaks for itself: more than 180 million copies of the title have been sold worldwide. By the way, you can buy the official version of Minecraft for PC for ₽1.9 thousand – not a cheap pleasure. However, it is not a pity to give any money for the embodiment of crazy fantasies.
