Minecraft: To Mine or not to Mine

Kylie was six years old when Minecraft was released on Xbox 360. Her sister, Reese, was 14 at the time and happened to be the main player of their console at home. Reese heard everyone talking about this game and begged her mom to get it for her. After her success, she quickly grew bored of it, leaving her sister to pick up the game for herself. This is where Kylie fell in love with Minecraft. 

While survival mode was fun, the struggle to stay afloat in a world full of hostile AI characters, known as “mobs,” was not the reason for Kylie’s obsession with the game. Her addiction came from creative mode, a game mode where the player does not need to worry about hunger, health, or even walking. The player has the ability to fly and summon whatever blocks they want or need at will with an extensive inventory of building blocks. She used these blocks to unleash her creativity. Her drive wasn’t to survive; it was to create. The unlimited possibility for creation, to build, is what drew so many people to Minecraft. She enjoyed the non-judgement of playing alone and creating. That was Kylie’s favorite aspect of the game: she could build her dream home, different kinds of houses for different biomes.

Though, looking back she does wish her sister had joined her more, got to see her worlds. A lot of people, including me, grew up with our older siblings playing Minecraft, introducing it to us, then abandoning it when it was no longer deemed “cool.” Unfortunately, Kylie admitted that, “ She never really wanted to play Minecraft with me, and sometimes the music gives you this feeling of loneliness. After a while, I just stopped playing." The song she is referring to in particular is “Subwoofer Lullaby” by the artist C418. It’s the perfect blend of calm and nostalgia, often inflicting a lonely feeling as you're playing in a world with no company other than yourself.

While some people have stopped playing Minecraft over time, it still remains the most popular video game of all time, tied with Tetris of course. There are three reasons Minecraft has remained on top of the charts after 17 years: the way it was created, its unlimited creative freedom, and it never gets boring.

Minecraft has a much longer history than a lot of people realize. It all started in Sweden and with a man, Markus Persson known by the username “Notch.” Persson was a young developer and wanted to create a video game that people loved. Working on project after project, he tried and failed time and time again. Not all of his games were hits, like the video game Breaking the Tower, a game where you don’t directly control anything and you have to rely on your minions’ autonomy to win. 

However, Minecraft was not inspired by a game that Notch made himself, it was inspired by a game called Infiniminer, according to the YouTuber OrangE. Made by Zachtronics, the game was released on April 29th, 2009 and was one of the first games to use a 3D sort of grid to break and place blocks. Players of Infiniminer rarely ever progressed towards the objective of mining precious metals to get to $10,000 before the other team. The people often just went on to do their own thing, whether it be building a castle or blowing other people up.

Notch loved the idea this game introduced. It was everything that he was looking for; it was a cave-centric game that allowed the player creative freedom. Two weeks after the release of Infiniminer, Notch had a rough pre-alpha version of Minecraft, known as Cave Game. This was the beginning of Minecraft as we know it, even if it is borderline unrecognizable.

Her drive wasn’t to survive; it was to create. 

One of the biggest draws to Minecraft is the unlimited creative freedom. While Notch had created many games previously, he had never made one simply for the point of letting the players do whatever they wanted. In an interview in Wired in 2014, Persson divulged,  “the game has revealed how much creativity lies undiscovered within us”. Throughout his career, Notch had been trying to make a game like Minecraft, a game where the end-goal is up to no-one but the player themselves. Similar to a game he had previously made with a co-worker, Wurm Online, it has a crafting and material gathering system, the layout of the land fully revolves around what the player decides to do with it. 

The first version of Minecraft to grace console was Minecraft: Xbox 360 Edition, the equivalent to the version Beta 1.6.6 on PC. This was a bare-bones version of the game with all of the core passive mobs, sheep, pigs, cows, chickens, and squid. What started as five in 1.6.6, grew to a total of 33 passive mobs alone as of the 26.1.2 update. While this older version of Minecraft may seem barren by today’s standards, this world was new and full of wonder compared to other console titles of the time such as Pac-Man, Grand Theft Auto IV or even Red Dead Redemption. While GTA IV and Red Dead were open-world games, they still followed a sort of story and did not allow you to interact with your environment to the fullest extent; they did not allow you to terraform and create like Minecraft did.

Minecraft was created to give the people what they really wanted in a video game, not another shooter or flash game. The entire foundation and creation of Minecraft was based off of trends people followed when playing games that gave them an ounce of creativity. People built and people grieved. Players had fun experimenting with what they could do in the crappy engines of the time. So Persson gave the people what they wanted: a game based on nothing but creativity that you can play with (and troll) your friends on.

And the real reason people get drawn back to Minecraft time and time again, is that it never gets boring. Often, people get what they call the “Minecraft phase”. This is where people play the game for a couple weeks to a couple months at a time non-stop. Then all of the sudden, drop it. A few months later, the blocky terrain is back on their screen and the cycle repeats. The Roaring Bengals suggest that this phenomenon is caused by the game bringing “a sense of comfort and relaxation, reminding us of simpler times.” As Gen Z grows up, they suggest that Minecraft acts as an escape among an ever-changing chaotic world, among adulthood. While parts of this maye be true, what I believe is that Minecraft simply has too many possibilities to become boring. 

Some may argue that, from a factual standpoint, any game can become boring after awhile. While that is normally true, I have to disagree in this instance. If you become bored playing Minecraft, I am convinced you just are not playing the game correctly. A game of endless possibility, to kill, to fight, to build, to farm, to explore, the list is endless. And if a player somehow gets bored of the regular or “Vanilla Minecraft,” they can install one or more of the billions of mods that regular people like you and me have created.

One such mod that I enjoy playing, to no small level of masochism, is a mod called Minecraft is too Easy, or MITE for short. I, by some miracle, convinced Kylie to play it with me, a girl who is used to the bare minimum or “OG” Minecraft.

The mod, MITE,  has experienced a recent pickup in interest due to a somewhat famous Minecraft YouTuber, Mud Flaps, who released a video where he beat the game in hardcore, something that no one else has ever been able to accomplish. MITE is an interesting take on making Minecraft harder. Instead of adding creatures and features that try to kill you–like dragons, hypothermia, or thirst–they make it harder by taking things away. You start with your health and hunger reduced from 10 each to three, but you still maintain the ability to sprint. The developers made quite a few changes to the early-game. Killing passive mobs such as sheep, pigs, cows, and chickens don’t drop experience points, which you need to gain more hearts and hunger; every five levels gained will give you another of each. In MITE, it takes a total of 12 seconds to break a single block of dirt, which is 16 times longer than the .75 seconds it takes in Vanilla Minecraft.

 Like a lot of other “making Minecraft harder mods,” you can’t just punch a tree for logs and progress from there. The entire process begins with gravel. The first day decides how the rest of the playthrough goes. The first thing I did was hunt animals for food. The best target is cows, yielding the most nutritious meat as well as leather which becomes useful a little later in the playthrough. From there, based on my many playthroughs, the two best blocks—and only blocks—to go for were either dirt or gravel. Gravel is the best overall option because it can be used to build shelter as well as to yield important materials such as flint chips and nuggets of various metals. Although gravel can be harder to find than dirt and will slow progress slightly, if the cards are dealt right, the time is negligible. Since it takes so much longer to break blocks, the strategy for early-game in MITE is drastically different from the norm. There is no first dirt hut, the developers aimed to give the opening phase a more nomadic style, an interesting take on a mod that I haven’t really seen before.

One such mod that I enjoy playing, to no small level of masochism, is a mod called Minecraft is too Easy, or MITE for short. I, by some miracle, convinced Kylie to play it with me, a girl who is used to the bare minimum or “OG” Minecraft.

Like regular Minecraft, the days and nights each last 10 minutes, resulting in a 20 minute day cycle. I have 10 minutes to gather food and materials, but I also have to survive the full 10 minutes at night. A few minutes past noon, the goal becomes finding a suitable tree to shelter on top of. Once I manage to get on top of the tree, I have to break the top leaves to stand on the very top log, protecting myself from attacks below. From there, I have to wall myself in with either dirt or gravel or face the consequences of an arrow to the face. In this mod, skeletons can shoot through leaves, so leaving yourself uncovered is certain death, a death which has befalled me more than I would like to admit. Once I have fully established a base (a hole in a tree), for the next few Minecraft days, the task is repetitive: hunt for food and find gravel. Be careful not to lose track of your base, because if you get caught outside in the middle of the night, you’re dead.

Looking for a new challenge and inspired by MudFlaps, I thoroughly enjoyed (and hated) playing MITE. It took me around 70 hours in a single world in hardcore to be able to construct my own base, but I truly believe the experience was worth it. I truly think players around the world who think they have gotten bored with the game to revisit it and see what they’re really missing out on. Kylie hopped back on the computer after about 10 years and she has fallen back in love with the game she once new. It has changed over time, it’s evolved, but so has she. She is having more fun than ever with her newfound creativity and ability to build and be free within the blocky world. It’s just up to the rest of the population to deem Minecraft “cool enough’ to play.

 It has changed over time, it’s evolved, but so has she.

Just about all of Gen Z has grown up around Minecraft, whether they’ve played it or not. Kids talk about the games they play, what makes them happy, what they love. It is hard not to love Minecraft, especially when you have engaging YouTubers coming together to create a fun and creative space that children are just born to love. Since its first release in 2009, Minecraft has always been about letting people explore their own creativity. Giving them an outlet to build, to connect, to experiment. This factor on top of the sheer unending possibility makes Minecraft the perfect game.