MInecraft Addiction, Good or Bad Jeremy Oh and Sean Van Dyke

Minecraft Addiction: Good or Bad

By Jeremy Oh and Sean Van Dyke

The Minecraft Creeper An Ionic Icon From Minecraft

You wake up in the morning on a stranded island surrounded by trees, not knowing how you got to this place and not knowing what to do. What do you do? Minecraft is a game about immense creativity, you create your own adventure where you are the hero. You can build vast castles of stone bricks or quaint shacks out of dirt. With most games there is a clear set goal, but Minecraft does not have a goal which sets it apart from the other games such as Modern Warfare and Battlefront. But what sets Minecraft apart the most is its community, always creating new maps for you to explore or giving you new modifications to play around with. With most games the community is small and doesn’t grow after the initial release, but Minecraft doesn’t have that problem. In January of 2011 Minecraft passed 1,000,000 units just after releasing Beta a month before. Minecraft was initially created by Markus “Notch” Persson, and now maintained by his partner Jeb along with their company Mojang AB. Minecraft was fully released on November 18, 2011 and by that time it had already sold 4,000,000 copies. With such a high amount of players there is no question about why Minecraft is so popular. In our poll of 18 people, everyone knew what Minecraft was and 12 people, two-thirds of the poll actually liked and have played the game Minecraft. 30,953,549 have registered for the game of Minecraft. There are also many famous youtubers that do commentaries solely on Minecraft and are pretty famous such as Yogscast and CaptainSparklez and this gets more people to like Minecraft and the popularity increases. There are still people registering for Minecraft as the popularity is increasing rapidly. Why is this? What makes Minecraft such a popular game? Part of it is it’s endless playability and amazing gameplay.

The gameplay of Minecraft is endless for you can do anything you want, from surviving zombie hordes to creating beautiful works of art out of wool. There are 3 different types of game modes in Minecraft: Survival mode which puts you in a randomly generated world with a set amount of heath/nothing to your name with an obvious goal of surviving the night and giving something to your name. To do that, you have to craft tools such as pickaxes, shovels, and axes to mine stone and ores, shovel dirt and sand, and to cut down trees respectively. You can also craft weapons and armor to help yourself from dying against zombies and skeleton archers as well as exploding Creepers. You die if you lose all of your hearts! But how do you regain them you might ask, well you can regain your hearts if you eat food which restores your hunger bar. To get food you have to either kill some animals and cook some meat or you can farm some wheat. Notch also added a companion to the game! You can befriend dogs and have them attack monsters/animals to get food or mob drops like bones and iron for you, as well as breed them with pork chops. Now with all this you might be asking what the goal is in Minecraft. Well there is no “real” goal in Minecraft, but there there actually has been a boss in Minecraft but nearly no one accomplishes it. How do you get to this boss? Well to get to this boss you have to get 12 Eyes of Ender and find an "Ender Portal", you find “Ender Portals” in naturally generated Strongholds deep underground, along with abandoned mine shafts which can contain loot that can help you along your quest. But back to the quest, once you fill in the “Ender Portal” with your Eyes of Ender you have to jump into the portal, which teleports you to  the another dimension called “The End”. This is for people who are bored with the game and want to accomplish something. Other than that, this gamemode is all about the survival. The second mode of Minecraft is called Creative mode. In this mode, you are given infinite supplies of anything you want. You can make the most vast worlds out of diamond or gold and be as creative as you want. This also makes it way easier to make buildings as high as the sky which you wouldn’t be able to build in survival mode. It is also fun just to blow stuff up with Flint and steel  and TNT. And of course, playing by yourself can get a little bit boring but in Minecraft, you can play with other friends or players. You can eat with your friends, craft tools with your friends, and just plain communicate with your friends in the game Minecraft.

What makes the game Minecraft a lot more fun is also the pixelated graphics. In most games, one pixel off could make a big deal but in Minecraft, one pixel off is no big deal at all. The whole beauty of Minecraft is in the pixels. The trees are pixelated, the animals are pixelated and the food is pixelated. This adds a whole new effect in this family friendly game. It makes the zombies and skeletons seem a whole lot more kind and it just adds to the friendliness of the game Minecraft immensely.

“I think that the skeletons and zombies are actually kind of cute!” Says Matthew Oh while Sean Van Dyke says “I think that they are actually pretty creepy.”

It also makes it easier to identify ores and different characters in the game and after you play for about half an hour you forget all about the pixelated graphics and you get right into the gameplay. But one downfall to the game Minecraft is that there is a lack of in-game tutorials. You wouldn’t know right off the bat how to cook pork chops, make iron helmets, or even how to smelt iron ore into iron. The good side of this is you can have the fun of figuring out how to make all of the items in Minecraft and when in doubt, use the Minecraft Wiki. Overall, the graphics of Minecraft make the game a whole level higher in family friendliness and kindness.

The Minecraft Logo


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