When I see that a contest has started, I jump at the chance to enter. I put in the time and effort and make something amazing- except it’s not amazing. It’s bad. It’s bad compared to the ridiculously good things people have made. But I submit my project or skin or blog in an attempt to win, though I don’t expect to be #1. However, never have I made the top 50, or even the top 100. After the contest, I know I wouldn’t win but I feel bad about my skills. So why do I keep checking in anticipation, waiting for a new contest for that vicious cycle of trying, losing, and feeling bad to start again? Are contests bad? Are they broken? That’s what I’m here to discuss.

I’m not sure if anyone else has shared my experience of feeling bad for losing a contest, but even so, let’s look into why we lose. The reason we lose is simply because we’re not good enough, right? Wrong. You could be incredibly skilled at building, for example. You put in all this work and time into making in incredible castle or house or giant robot and submit your project. No matter how good you are, however, you’re never going to beat those crazy good people that make nonsense like this or this. How are we supposed to compete with that?! I mean, we have school, and sports, and clubs, and (I assume) friends and a social life. And there simply isn’t time to make something that ridiculous. And even if the time was there, it takes incredible precision and artistic ability. Is that our answer? Minecraft is for artists? Yes. If you think about it, Minecraft is just a huge graphic design game. With all the building and skin designing, it’s hard to win without being extremely artistic. Even writing blogs takes artistic ability. Minecraft is, in a sense, it’s own art form.

What does all of this have to do with losing contests? Well, Minecraft, like all art, takes practice. It takes a lot of practice to perfect your own building style. However, when a learning, young artist enters a contest with confidence and loses to an insane creation like this, it’s very easy to become discouraged and give up. Imagine being in Art 1 in school and going again an AP Studio Art in an art contest. Not very fair, is it? You would expect to go against your classmates in Art 1. And losing a contest, even an unfair one, can be discouraging. This means that contests can cause potential artists give up. My advice to you is to not give up or be discouraged! It’s likely that you will never win a contest, but giving up is even worse than losing. Never give up, keep creating art!


I have added a new article, called, 'Why Contests are the Worst 2', and I would appreciate it if you took the time to read that as well! I updated it with my main idea that I failed to mention in this article.