Since 2011, Minecraft has worked its way into the imaginations of gamers across the world, making it one of the most popular games of all time. And it’s got real lasting power. While other gaming sensations have come and gone, Minecraft is still going strong. Over a million people play the game every day.
So what is it that makes this game so great? What do gamers get out of playing it? And why might you want to think about giving it a try (or a second look)? Here are some of our top answers.
So Many Possibilities
One of the greatest things about this game is that there are so many different ways to play it:
- There are two different versions of the game, Java and Bedrock, which offer their own possibilities and performance characteristics.
- There’s vanilla Minecraft and modded Minecraft, with tons of different mods to explore.
- The gameplay itself spans several genres: It’s a survival game, a crafting game, a simulator game, and more.
New updates are coming out all the time to adjust and improve the quality of life of current features as well as to introduce new ones.
If you’re a gamer who likes to change it up and not just play the same game every time you log in, Minecraft has so much to offer. It’s like going to the buffet, with dozens of different dishes all on offer at once. Every time you go, you get to pick whatever you want.
Mind-Bending Creative Expression
Minecraft is the ultimate sandbox game and is famous for its wild creations. You can find servers that host authentic representations of real-world cities and landmarks, full-scale replicas of starships and fantasy realms, and computers and other tech that actually functions in-world.
You can also set up your own server with the latest version of Minecraft and any customizations you want. It’s your own miniature world where you and your friends can create whatever you can imagine!
If you’re a gamer with a creative side, Minecraft is definitely worth trying out at least once. You can build your house just the way you like it, or a tower, or a freeway. You can build gardens, parks, or forests. You can build underground civilizations and castles in the sky. And you can do it all your way.
Most of what you can do in Minecraft just isn’t possible in the real world, or would be enormously expensive. This game unlocks the power of your imagination and lets you truly go wild.
The Benefits of Working on Mega Projects
Minecraft is unusual among games in that you can undertake enormous projects in it. These builds can take weeks, or months, or sometimes even years of real-world time. Building your base or some other giant creation isn’t just about creative self-expression. There are so many other benefits:
- Improve your long-term planning, project management, and design talents.
- Get practice on seeing things through and honoring your commitments.
- Experience the joy of beginning something incredible without knowing how it will end.
Clueless people often say that video games are a distraction from real life, but the truth is that games can make us better people who are better equipped to deal with life.
And there’s one more benefit of doing a mega project in Minecraft: You have an excuse to upgrade your computer and get better frame rates and graphics.
Community and Belonging
Minecraft is a game you can play alone, and many people do. But when you play with friends and everyone is really into it, some truly amazing things can happen.
For starters, it makes the game a lot more vibrant. You can go exploring together, fight mobs together, or divide up the work of farming, crafting, and building. You can amass your own resources and trade with other players for their resources—recreating the basic ideas of a real economy.
Even better than that, you can share your creations. It’s awesome to build stuff in Minecraft, but when there are other human beings there, who love this game and appreciate how hard you have to work and how talented or persistent you have to be to create some of these colossal builds, there’s no better feeling than hearing their admiration and excitement at the things you’ve made.
If you want even more freedom you can start your own Minecraft server and open up your game to truly limitless possibilities. This gives you the power to tailor the game exactly how you want with mods and plugins as well as keep the world open all the time so your friends can always jump in (even if you’re not online).
And that leads to the very best part of community-building in Minecraft: It’s a shared experience. It’s a place for you to belong, to fit in. Who would say no to that?
Relax
The last reason that Minecraft is great for gamers is that many players talk about how soothing and therapeutic the game is. Games can do a lot of good in our lives. There’s something trancelike about the repetitive work of digging and building, all in the service of slowly watching your creation come together.
Life is hard, and sometimes it’s nice to come home to a game and just take a load off for a while. In Minecraft, you don’t have to worry about what life is throwing at you. Whether you love fighting off mobs or digging pits to gather resources or just want to build pretty things, Minecraft lets you unwind for a while—and that’s priceless.
