Minecraft is a sandbox mini game created by Marcus ‘Notch’
Persson. A sandbox game is
one where players roam virtual worlds and approach objectives
freely, as opposed to games with more linear gameplay. Players in sandbox games
are free to explore an environment and can choose what tasks they do and allows
the player to express themselves creatively within the game. The game was fully
developed and published by Mojang in May 2009, which is their most popular
independent game.
Minecraft is set in a 3D world and has no specific
goals to complete. This gives the game freedom and allows creativity to each
player. A player can either play in a first person perspective or a third
person one. The world is made up of textured blocks which represent materials
such as dirt, sand, water, trees and lava as well as others. Players can also encounter non-player
characters known as mobs such as animals, villagers and hostile creatures.
Minecraft has several types of mode. Survival mode
is where players have to gather natural resources to craft certain blocks and
items. These natural resources may include wood and stone. This mode has a
health bar goes down when the
character gets attacked by monsters, falls, drowning, falling into lava,
suffocation, starvation, and other events. Players also have a hunger bar which
must be occasionally refilled by eating food in the game. Players acquire
resources to craft tools, such as axes, shovels, or pickaxes, used to chop down
trees, dig soil, and mine ores.
Other modes
include creative where players have access to all resources and items in the
game through the inventory menu, and can place or remove them instantly. Players
can toggle the ability to fly freely around the game world at will, and their
characters do not take any damage and are not affected by hunger. The game mode
helps players focus on building and creating large projects. Another mode is adventure. It was designed specifically so that players could
experience user-crafted custom maps and adventures. Gameplay is similar to
survival mode but introduces various player restrictions, which can be applied
to the game world by the creator of the map. This forces players to obtain the
required items and experience adventures in the way that the map maker
intended. Adventure mode was added to version 1.3.
Minecraft was
first released in May 2009. Since then, many new versions and updates have been
added to make Minecraft better for the player’s benefit. There are still updates
to this present day and at this point of development, the game was considered
"complete", both having an "ending" and being ready for
ratings and reviews. The game's price also increased from what it was in Beta,
but users who previously bought the game were not charged extra.
Minecraft
surpassed over a million purchases less than a month after entering its beta
phase in early 2011. At the same time, the game had no publisher backing and
has never been commercially advertised except through word of mouth, and
various unpaid references in popular media such as the Penny Arcade webcomic. By April 2011, Persson estimated that Minecraft
had made €23 million in revenue, with 800,000 sales of the alpha version
of the game, and over 1 million sales of the beta version. In 2014, Mojang sold
Minecraft to Microsoft in 2014 for $2.5 billion (£1.9 billion). Since this
deal, Minecraft has been spread onto many different platforms. Some of these
include Microsoft’s own Xbox, Windows 10 and Window phones, as well as Nintendo
Wii U, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation and Android phones. As well as this,
spin-off games have been used in education facilities global. In 2019, a
Minecraft movie is set to appear in cinemas.
Social media
sites such as YouTube, Facebook, and Reddit played a significant role in
popularizing Minecraft.
Research conducted by the University of Pennsylvania's Annenberg School of
Communication showed that one-third of Minecraft players learned about
the game via Internet videos. In 2010, Minecraft-related
videos began to gain influence on YouTube, often made by commentators.
