Minecraft, to me, is many things. It’s a game, of course, and a fantastic one at that. It’s a world to explore—a platform to engage with. It’s also the only way I was able to connect to my childhood basketball teammates. It’s the source of some of my fondest high school memories. There was always something special about Minecraft—something magical, long before Enchanting Tables were added to the game.
Time and time again, I’d return to Minecraft, hoping to relive some of that magic. I mean, it had worked for Club Penguin, right? Yet, time and time again, I’d close the game feeling just a little empty inside. Something was different. What could it be that’s changed?
The first version of Minecraft I ever encountered was Minecraft: Pocket Edition LITE, when I was around nine years old. At the time, Minecraft was still pretty much a one-person project. There were only a couple dozen items in the game, and even though there was a form of survival mode, crafting hadn’t even been added to this release yet. And because it was the lite version, I couldn’t even save my world. It was incredibly barebones, but it was enough to hold my interest, even if a lot of that interest was derived from the simple joy of digging straight down.
Minecraft has always had a very unique charm, one that I think you’re already aware of, one that I think you’ve been aware of since the first time you launched the game. When you first open Minecraft, you’re not given an immediate objective. Some games launch you into a dire threat, drawing you in and forcing you to quickly engage. It’s effective game design, but Minecraft isn’t like this. Minecraft doesn’t need a flashy hook to lure you in; the world it quietly drops you in is already enough. A world ready for you to explore, built of cubes, decorated with low-resolution pixel art. Simple enough to easily comprehend, yet expressive enough to construct landscapes, and buildings, and art. There are many “sandbox games” out there, but I think Minecraft is far and away the best representative of the genre. The sand is literally a box.
I would eventually buy the full version of Minecraft for my iPad. Its $7 price tag was intimidating as a kid, but after a brief stint with Survivalcraft, I realized only Minecraft could satisfy the Minecraft itch.
Something I always loved about Minecraft was its sense of discovery. I don’t know exactly how to describe it, but there was always a sense of wonder exploring a Minecraft world—somewhat of a striking unreality to Minecraft’s world generation. My attention would frequently be caught by the tiny islands of floating blocks that may dot the skyline. Simply walking or flying around a Minecraft world was an engaging activity for a new player, even if the world’s borders were very tightly constrained. Discovering the game’s mechanics was also a core part of the experience for me. If you played on Pocket Edition around the same time I did, you may remember an block known as the “Nether Reactor Core”. To me, the block was the source of a great mystery. I had no idea what this block was for. I mean, it sounded cool, but nothing ever happened when I tried to use it. For months, this thing sat in my inventory, its ultimate purpose unknown. It wasn’t until a friend showed me a contraption of cobblestone and gold that I knew the Core’s true purpose, to summon a chunk of the Nether and its inhabitants to the overworld. The mystery was solved. My mind was blown.
Minecraft would become a game I’d play all the time, whether alone, with my sister, or with friends. I can’t say I was any “good” at it, whatever that’s supposed to mean. In Creative, I’d build minecart coasters and only the tackiest of diamond-block houses. I think one house I built even had five-block-thick walls, filled with layers of wool and lava for “insulation”. In Survival, iron was a rare enough resource for me, let alone diamond. I was, however, very proud of the home I built in a Survival world some friends and I played on. It wasn’t anything special, or big, or nice. Just a tiny underground dwelling with a small entrance made of glass. But I don’t know. I really loved it when I was a kid. I can’t pin down why.
Eventually, I stopped playing Minecraft. Even as I grew apart from Minecraft, Minecraft would continue to grow without me. Today, it’s the best-selling video game of all time, with a community that continues to thrive, even despite the actions of some extremely unsavory actors. It also continues to receive frequent updates, no longer the creation of a single individual, but the product of an entire team of developers at Mojang, now a subsidiary of Microsoft. Maybe that’s why it feels so different…?
In 2017, Mojang held the first ever Mob Vote, allowing players to pick a mob, or unplayable creature, that would be added in the next update. The result was the Phantom, a creature that pesters you if you’re too sleep-deprived. Mob Votes have since become an annual event, though off the top of my head, I can’t tell you any of the winners. To some, a lot of the Mob Vote winners haven’t really added much to the game beyond something new to look at. They’re one-trick ponies. This seems to be a recurring theme with recent Minecraft updates. Seeing copper ore catches me by surprise every time I start a new world. I’d ask a friend if copper has a purpose yet. I’d get “not really” as a response.
Updates made to Minecraft are also progressively making the game more complicated to play and learn. Minecraft has never had the most intuitive progression. For example, I’m willing to bet you discovered how to build a Nether portal via a friend or online, as opposed to figuring it out within the game itself. Attempts to rectify this have been made, of course, from advancements to ruined portals, but with the continuously widening scope of the game, it can be hard to keep up with all of the new mechanics.
Minecraft is a constantly evolving game, and it’s basically expected at this point for it to receive regular updates. But when additions aren’t tightly integrated into the game’s design, or when they’re added seemingly simply to ship something new to see, should they be added at all? Sometimes, it appears that Minecraft is losing itself, becoming too complex for the elegant simplicity of the old days, whilst remaining too simple to host any truly meaningful mechanical interactions.
I’m not the only nor the first to notice this. Whitelight, for instance, has discussed modern Minecraft’s game design extensively, highlighting these potential issues. There exist communities focused around Minecraft’s “Golden Age”, playing the game as it was at its supposed best.
All of these thoughts I’ve had on the game’s design were no more than theories—conjecture conjured without confirmation. So, I thought I would test my theories by starting a survival multiplayer world with friends on an old version of Minecraft. We picked Beta 1.8.1, the last version before the End was added, and the version I thought was most similar to what I remembered of Pocket Edition. The lack of the End was something I was particularly excited about. We would be encouraged, I thought, to be creative with the world, instead of merely chasing “the end” of the game. The result I got, however, was quite a bit different than I expected.
Logging into our new-old server, the first thing I noticed was just how similar the game felt to its modern incarnations. The game’s textures were refreshed and refined years later, but to me both old and new feel unmistakably Minecraft, cut from the same cloth and exhibiting the same essence. You still start a world by punching a tree. Cows, pigs, and sheep still dot the morning landscape. Honestly, it’s kind of shocking how little impact the older version had on my experience playing Minecraft, for better or for worse. After we finished punching trees, we mined through stone, then spotted and smelted iron. After finding a pool of lava, a friend used speedrun strats to build a Nether portal. We explored the Nether for a few minutes, and—
That’s it. We closed the server. We got bored. In terms of our enjoyment, nothing changed. If anything, we enjoyed this “golden age” version less. Why?
Looking at a game’s incentives, its rewards and punishments, can clue us into how the designers want the game to be played. For example, levels in Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga are filled with hidden collectibles. Many of these are inaccessible during a first playthrough because characters with different abilities are required to reach them. The goal of the designers, then, is to encourage players to experiment and play with different characters to explore the world.
So what are Minecraft’s incentives? Well, we could look in-depth at survival mode, discuss how death is punished, and talk about how systems like experience points reward players for engaging with its underbaked combat. We could talk about Minecraft’s confusing path of progression towards The End, and how that affects the game’s (admittedly awful) learning curve. These are all topics I was initially planning to cover in-depth as part of this video. But the thing is, I don’t think any of it really matters. Because Minecraft, at least by my experiences, isn’t a survival game. It’s a sandbox game.
When I look back at what made Minecraft special to me as a kid, this is clear. What stuck with me wasn’t fighting mobs in the night. It was the house I built—not solely for protection but also simply because I thought an underground base was cool. The Nether Reactor Core, perhaps the definition of a one-trick pony, was one of my favorite parts of the game because it provided a sense of discovery and wonder. Minecraft’s recent updates double down on these aspects of the game. Updated world generation and new mobs make Minecraft worlds feel more dynamic and alive than they ever have—the surreal unreality of floating islands replaced with a different, yet still striking, surreal unreality. New biomes give players more to discover. New blocks give players more to build. Kid me would have loved these new versions of Minecraft, probably way more than he did Pocket Edition.
The parts of Minecraft that I gravitated to weren’t survival or the quest to defeat the Ender Dragon. It was building, creating, exploring, discovering. To me and to many other players, this is the core of Minecraft. This is a fact that I don’t think is lost on the developers at Mojang. I think they only want to enhance and expand this core.
But if Minecraft’s changes aren’t why I don’t enjoy the game, what’s the actual reason? The only factor left is the player. The only factor left is…me.
Getting bored from doing nothing, I decide to start a new Minecraft world. I quickly encounter a village. After usurping a villager’s home as my own, I wait for night, then falling asleep in the house. The next morning, I reap the wheat planted outside my house, replant the seeds, turn the wheat into bread, and eat. I stand in the house, waiting for nightfall. I go to bed. The next morning, I reap wheat, plant seeds, make bread, eat, wait, and sleep. Again, I reap wheat, plant seeds, make bread, eat, wait, and sleep. I close Minecraft, getting bored from doing nothing.
When I first built an underground base, I thought it was the coolest thing ever. I would make an almost identical base on nearly every world I played on after that, and slowly, priorities shifted. It was no longer about the cool factor—I’d gladly turn the entrance into a greentop if it meant I didn’t have to work for resources. Instead, it was easy. It was safe. And eventually, it was stagnant. I no longer wandered around the world, instead staying close to my base so I wouldn’t lose my inventory. Yes, that behavior comes from the game’s incentives—dying far from home would mean I’d spend a lot of time getting it back. But that didn’t matter to me as a kid. Why should it matter now? In creative, I no longer built tacky diamond houses…I didn’t build at all. If I did, I worried, it would be bad, or lame, or worst of all, cringe. Both in creative and survival, I was afraid to take risks, and I think that says a lot more about me than it does Minecraft. In my fear, I refused to explore. I refused to create. I didn’t just miss Minecraft—I missed the entire point.
It’s kinda funny how games can reveal a player’s personality. I’ve since realized that my adversity to risk in Minecraft in many ways mirrors my adversity to risk in real life. For years, for instance, I’ve wanted to learn how to draw. I didn’t start, telling myself I was “too busy” for it. I now know that wasn’t true. I just didn’t want to draw diamond houses. I’ve also noticed I very easily fall into mundane rhythms if left unchecked, an unbroken cycle of working, eating, and sleeping, getting bored from doing nothing. I stopped enjoying Minecraft because of these fears. And I thought Minecraft was the problem. I missed the Minecraft that I loved as a kid, a Minecraft that never really left. Now knowing what was missing—what changed—I still long for the days I found Minecraft fun. I miss the wonder of exploration, the joy of creating even if my creations sucked. To me, these things are Minecraft. I miss Minecraft.
You probably came to this video because you, too, yearned for “the old days” of Minecraft—for the days when you had fun playing this game. To that end, maybe this resolution is deeply unsatisfying for you. Maybe you did actually enjoy survival mode’s mechanics and progression. Maybe going back to older versions really does fix all of your problems with the game. Or maybe you found joy in one of countless modpacks and their often more complex systems. Everyone experiences Minecraft differently, of course, whether that’s through advanced redstone builds, theme park recreations, or speedrunning—this variety is one of the things that makes it special. There’s a reason why the Minecraft movie is officially titled “A Minecraft Movie”, a detail that may be the only thing I truly liked about that trailer.
After shutting down the Minecraft Beta server, I started a new server, running the latest version, 1.20.6. This time, I resolved, I’d force myself to build something different, even if it sucked. In a way an evolution on my old underground bases, I decided to build a space loosely inspired by a location in Dungeon Meshi. It’s no masterpiece, it’s far from done—and, to be honest, I doubt it’ll ever be completed—but, for the first time in a while in Minecraft, I’ve been enjoying myself. I finally started drawing, too, and even though I’m still a noob who knows next to nothing, I can tell that I’m improving and I’m really, truly proud of that.
When I first considered making a video about Minecraft, I fully expected it would be yet another video tearing apart its game design, highlighting how good it Used To Be, and how feature creep and bloat meant its downfall. But, that’s not the video I ended up making. As much as Minecraft’s changed, everything that previously resonated with me is still there. What’s changed much more is, well, me, and I’ll continue to change for as long as I live. But that doesn’t mean Minecraft will never be fun for me again. Because just as quickly as I can swerve to joyless repetitions and succumb to fear, I can choose to reject all that. I can embrace creativity. I can embrace discovery.
I’m on the adventure I make for myself—we all are. And isn’t that what Minecraft is all about?
