Scott Bennett
Graphic Designer

Video by Kelli Miles

Build your own world, create your own castles, create your own objectives, and essentially shape everything around you. Sound fun? It did to the 1,312,176 and counting people who bought the popular new independent sandbox game by Mojang, Minecraft. The possibilities are endless in Minecraft, but the system is simple.

The game uses a simple mechanic of hitting blocks, gathering blocks, creating things with those blocks, crafting weapons and surviving. Essentially you break, build, craft and survive. The game’s main draw comes from it’s possibility for creativity. People go out of their way to create great things in Minecraft, perhaps entire civilizations.

“Minecraft is starting with nothing but fists to survive in a world of zombies, skeletons, spiders, and creepers,” said senior Arian Bemani, who runs a Minecraft server.

Minecraft is part of a rising genre of entertainment and games on the web called virtual worlds. Virtual worlds, are in essence 3d or otherwise worlds in which you create and interact with only self-driven objectives. The conflict with most virtual worlds is that of simplicity, when does it become too complicated, and when is it too boring and simple?

“Minecraft promotes a great deal of creativity,” said senior Hunter Krieg who plays on Bemani’s server.

While virtual worlds such as Second Life dwell more toward the complex, having to create objects sometimes in third party 3D modeling programs such as Blender, Minecraft tends to do the exact opposite. The main issue is that virtual worlds must not be too complex to where the average user is frustrated by the inability to create.

So where does the indie game’s advertising lie? Word of mouth. Word of mouth is perhaps the most powerful type of advertising with the ability now to contact virtually anyone in the technologically involved world instantly.

“I found out about Minecraft from a friend who heard from another friend,” Bemani said.

The inherent freedom of the game allows for users to spend as much time as they’d like on it, without forced and constant objectives much like games such as World of Warcraft possess, users are given freedom to play when they want, for how long they want, and at any time, remember you create the objectives. Krieg said he plays around four or five hours a week, while Bemani said he played around “15-20 hours a week”.

So what makes Minecraft so much fun to those that play? For some, it’s the simple humorous joy of “watching people get blown up by creepers, the explosive enemy in the game” said Bemani, to others it’s the base gameplay of “using your mind to create things that you think of” said Krieg, but unanimously to anyone who plays Minecraft on a daily basis finds their niche within the already niche game.