Ever since the first tunnel was carved block-by-block, Minecraft has been a roaring success. For just as long, people have question why. That’s understandable, considering Minecraft lacks all of the typical tricks of the regular video game titans: flashy graphics, overwrought narratives, and famous soundtracks.By now, the general consensus seems to be that it’s Minecraft’s freedom of gameplay, unmatched anywhere else, is what’s made it such a hit. But what is the product of that freedom, and what innate goals cause players to crave that freedom anyway? Does it all boil down to the desire, like a captain of industry erecting a new skyscraper, to build giant, blocky wangs? Christian Donlan ponders the question in a great essay at Vice:Sure, if you really want it there's leveling up to do, pigs to slaughter, and a wonky end-game involving a giant dragon. If you fancy, you can play a version of Minecraft where you have to eat to stay alive, and where zombies and other weirdos come out at night and explode, often fatally, in your face. For a lot of players, however, Minecraft's not about any kind of structure or challenge other than the structure and challenges they bring to it themselves. In other words, it's about building a cock the size of Grand Central Station that you can also run around inside.
And it turns out that a surprising number of people really do want to build a cock the size of Grand Central Station and then run around inside it. They want to muddle through a largely empty game world, digging holes, accidentally setting themselves on fire or rakishly drowning in unpredictable torrents of blocky blue water. They'll not only put up with a game with few obvious goals and absolutely no tutorials, they'll tell their friends about it and then they'll all grab a server and merrily build giant cocks together.
Look online and the depth of Minecraft love can be almost troubling. YouTube Minecrafters have made themselves famous by talking over videos as they play. Wiki Minecrafters have sounded out every last possibility offered by the game's strangely delightful item creation system. Notch hasn't just built an audience. At times, it looks like he's built an army: hundreds of thousands of virtual architects and landscape gardeners who are fleeing this world to take over another, where the ocean is made of rippling pixels and the horizon is built from thousands of funny little boxes.Minecraft users’ unquenchable thirst to conquer every last corner of the game isn’t surprising — how many people explored every inch of maps in games like Grand Theft Auto? But, at the same time, when presented with a world easily created and destroyed, as in Minecraft, what do the results say about the human nature of its users? Click through to Donlan’s piece for the answer.Follow Derek Mead on Twitter.
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