Minecraft Essay

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.