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Why we love Minecraft

Silverbards Studios's Avatar Silverbards Studios7/11/19 1:44 pm
6 emeralds 209 5
7/15/2019 1:59 am
Energy Master's Avatar Energy Master
Hello everyone. This is going to be an essay/vent/thoughts kinda thing, so just prepare yourself, get whatever snack you prefer and sink in.


Minecraft is technically a bad game.


Minecraft by design just isn’t good. Let’s face it - it’s had so many issues over the years, so many bugs, bad engines, unoptimized... It’s a rare example of a game where the bugs start being constantly used as features, as evident by numerous exploits many Redstone creations use.


Minecraft is horrible in managing memory, it’s chock-full of memory leaks. It’s sound engine is straight out of the 2000s, its physics engine is clunky, its graphics engine chokes everything up eventually.


Now, I wouldn’t have even thought about this all hadn’t I had a talk with one of my friends about all the things that make modern MMO(RPG) games good.


One of the points that was brought up was the constant evolution, change, adaptation, new content those games offer. Huge patches, new content, new stories, so much being worked on and done that you know it’s bound to be stable and constantly interesting.


But, one day, when the game stops earning the developer money, when it’s no longer profitable keeping it up, when the cost of maintaining the game’s central servers outweigh the profits, it’s going to be shut off. And just like that, it’s going to die.


But Minecraft is a local game, it’s decentralized. Even if Mojang takes down the authentication service servers (the only thing we’re dependent on), there are so many workarounds already possible around it - and it only affects multiplayer anyways.


Mojang can’t just kill Minecraft.


The creations that we’ve made, the maps, memories, everything stays. Take a modern, popular MMO like Fortnite. What actual memories, what actual creation did anyone ever make in Fortnite. A new round starts, and voila, everything ever made gets deleted.


Minecraft is about you shaping the world, not the other way round.


Minecraft is not just delocalized in servers, it’s delocalized from the player too. You don’t build your character, you build around you. Most other games revolve around you building your profile, but what good is that when one day that game eventually dies.


We, as a community, go against change.


Changes have always been particularly tough for us. The pinnacle of Minecraft has always been the creations you produce, the adventures you have along the way are just a by-product of creating things.


Everything is possible in Minecraft. Literally. That means every potentially implemented feature in the game has already been probably done by someone in the form of a map, mod, plugin, or whatever else medium we have. Entire eras of our community have revolved around making some things possible.


When we got slime blocks, flying machines suddenly became viable. We became able to roam the skies - something we could have only dreamed of in survival before. We spent so long trying to reach it, and when we finally did, an entire era of the community revolved around these, starting from 1.8.


And then less then a year later, Elytra came out, together with 1.9, giving us an easy way of flight. Piston and slime block based flying machines were slow, clunky, hard to operate compared to Elytra, and it just obsoleted them. One item was all it took to end an era, put an end to thousands of people making things, creating things. It made a creation that was considered revolutionary seem dull and useless.


Changes kill projects. Projects are the heart of Minecraft. This is why we hate change.


Minecraft has one nostalgic charm. It makes you remember: your first dirt house, your first actual house, that fad in time where we all built houses out of diamond blocks, some old YouTubers from back in the day, some long-lost servers you’ve played on. And then, the music. Probably the most amazing aspect of Minecraft, designed as such due to the very technical issues that plagued the sound engine, music made things rememberable. You know, it made placing thousands of monotone blocks in patterns fun. Doing a repetitive thing over and over, and suddenly a classic like Haggstrom or Sweden creeps in and just gives you the will to continue.


Minecraft is peculiarly nostalgic, almost overflowing with it.


At the same time tho...


Nostalgia doesn’t play well with change.


So now we have a conclusion about why we, as a community hate change. It’s multiple factors, and we see it every major update. From talks about how 1.9 ruined everything, to talks about how 1.14 ruined everything, it’s always the same thing, insert update name ruined Minecraft! Yes, it might have ruined some builds, worlds, creations, but no, it’ll allow for even better things in the future. But we’re a community based on user-made content, not dev-made content, which is why we act how we act.


This has been a good segue into my next point tho.


The beauty of Minecraft comes from the lore that we create, and not the developers.


MMOs like Fortnite or Battlefield have little to no lore. MMOs like Warframe and most classic RPGs (like Undertale or Earthbound), have rich lore, but it’s purely written by the development team, not by the players. And then… you have Minecraft. A game which doesn’t even have a tutorial (alright, yes, before Microsoft recently decided to put it in, but that’s not my point), let alone any preset lore.



Think of 2b2t. That place has such a lore to the point where it’s comparable to the real world. It’s rich history, the story of struggles, power, greed, the events, the eras it underwent - and none of it was forced. The ones writing the lore were the ones in power, and the ones in power were the most capable ones at the time. No preset rules. Rules were created by leaders, leaders were chosen by the general public. If the public was unhappy, or the opposing factions were too strong, well... it’s over for someone. No ‘team red vs team blue’ that games usually have. Minecraft played its most powerful card there, its ability to let a community create something more than a simple game. It lets you create history.

Even small servers, tiny communities you stumbled upon have histories. They have factions, teams, stories of betrayal, loyalty, stories of wars and builds and ruins, stories of rises and falls, people you looked up to, items you wanted, places that grew familiar and loved... you found your unique position and home in every one of those.

Heck, even singleplayer worlds have those moments that stick that feel almost real. Sitting under a tree as it rains, looking at a nearby lake, just taking in all of it as the beginning of Mice on Venus plays. Every moment Minecraft offered is cherished by us all. Weird how such a bad game offers so much.



Minecraft is literally a blank canvas, its value isn’t in the physical canvas, its value is in what’s been created on it.


This, is why we love Minecraft. Together with the nostalgia. The opportunities Minecraft offers are not comparable with any other game. We love Minecraft because it’s stayed with us for over a decade, and will stay with us for much, much longer. We love Minecraft because we don’t need the best in everything to make things that are the best in everything.


We love Minecraft because it’s a bad game, but we didn’t care at the time when we started playing. We love Minecraft because it’s a bad game, but that just made us work harder to fix that.


We love Minecraft because… it’s our game, and not Mojang’s.

Its heart is in the community, creations, lores, and not in the technicalities behind.

Thank you for reading!
Dusan <3~
Posted by Silverbards Studios's Avatar
Silverbards Studios
Level 29 : Expert Architect
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2
07/14/2019 3:29 pm
Level 23 : Expert Procrastinator
Energy Master
Energy Master's Avatar
Whats 2b2t?
1
07/14/2019 4:06 pm
Level 29 : Expert Architect
Silverbards Studios
Silverbards Studios's Avatar
A very old, kinda (in?)famous Anarchy server. More or less the founder of the genre. Has amazing history and amazing things happened there. Really goes to show how strong communities can be. :)
1
07/15/2019 1:59 am
Level 23 : Expert Procrastinator
Energy Master
Energy Master's Avatar
Oh, ty for taking time explaining to my smol brain
2
07/11/2019 2:29 pm
Level 21 : Expert Engineer
Thonck
Thonck's Avatar
I don't even play Minecraft as a "game", I use it as a creative outlet.
1
07/11/2019 2:51 pm
Level 29 : Expert Architect
Silverbards Studios
Silverbards Studios's Avatar
Exactly!
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