Unlock the Editor’s Digest for free
Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.
While A Minecraft Movie was being filmed, the producers set up a series of private servers for cast and crew to play Minecraft during the shoot. The most dedicated player by far was Jack Black, who clocked up 100 hours of playtime during filming. Originally cast as a talking pig but later promoted to the everyman player character Steve, the actor stayed up late to collect in-game lapis lazuli. “He was just completely manic, hoarding stuff in the mines,” one of the game’s developers told Variety. In his precious free hours outside of long filming days, Black might have wanted a break. But he had been enchanted by the same spell as hundreds of millions of players since the game first officially launched in 2011. Even if the film (which is released in cinemas this week) doesn’t end up pleasing critics, the game’s magic is undeniable. Once you start mining, it’s hard to stop.
Minecraft is, by a very long way, the best-selling video game of all time. As of last year it had sold 300mn copies, or 3.6 per cent of the planet’s population. It has players in every country, including Antarctica and Vatican City. Yet for both non-gamers and hardcore players, there remains something mysterious about this popularity — the game’s graphics are basic, its action rudimentary. In our age of lavish gaming blockbusters, how did this simple block-building game survive a decade of industry upheaval, a corporate buyout and the dramatic downfall of its creator to become the defining game of our times?
Minecraft casts players in a near-infinite landscape composed of 3D blocks, where they can mine resources, craft items and build structures. There is an objective-based version of the game, in which monsters come to hunt you at night and there’s a dragon to defeat, but the game’s heart is its Creative Mode, a virtual playground for free-form building. Compared with more violent games, Minecraft has been seen by parents as a relatively benign force in their children’s lives. After all, kids have been playing with blocks for centuries; Minecraft is merely this century’s Lego.
At an age when they don’t have control over much of anything, younger players can enter this world of blocks and find agency and freedom. Here they can let their imaginations run riot, using the game’s simple tools to construct complex traps, castles and machines in a game that actively encourages them to tinker with its systems. Minecrafters have made, among countless dazzling projects: the Taj Mahal, the USS Enterprise, a functioning mobile phone, the entire map of another game, Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and a 1:1 recreation of New York City, accurate down to every trash can, window and stop sign.
They often share these creations within the game’s unusually good-natured community, where they’re likely to receive words of encouragement and affirmation. This is the second pillar of Minecraft’s success: its ability to foster large, nurturing communities in which players share tips, secrets and game mods for others to try. It has spawned huge followings on YouTube, where many creators base their entire careers around Minecraft content, and among speedrunners, who feverishly try to shave seconds off the record time for beating the base game (the current best time for defeating the Ender Dragon is seven minutes, one second — down from the original record of more than an hour).
All manner of projects have found a foothold in the flexible space of Minecraft. The Hour of Code initiative uses the blocks as an intuitive way to introduce children to programming. The Block by Block charity, which works with UN-Habitat, uses Minecraft to encourage children to reimagine their local living environments, building a model of how they would like them to change. The NGO Reporters Without Borders created a map called The Uncensored Library, where people who live in countries with strict censorship laws can read books or articles forbidden by their governments.
A key reason why Minecraft’s community avoids the toxicity of many online games is that the game’s multiplayer components are largely collaborative rather than competitive. Children often use the game as a social space to hang out with friends after school. Many have written about how the game was a lifeline during the Covid-19 lockdowns, how it helped them to come to terms with their gender identity, or how it enabled parents better understand their autistic children. Almost every Minecrafter has stories of adventures undertaken with friends, often ending in daredevil feats and unexpected deaths, explosions, or something going hilariously wrong — tales recounted with the same joy and vividness as things experienced in real life.
It’s a smart move to call the film A Minecraft Movie, the indefinite article underlining that this is just one of many stories told within this vast world. The sensitive touch calls to mind Minecraft developer Mojang’s cautious stewardship of the franchise. It has never made a sequel or switched to the live-service business model of key competitors Fortnite and Roblox, only rolling out subtle refinements over the years and trusting that the game’s innate flexibility will continue to satisfy its players.
The biggest test for Mojang, which was bought by Microsoft in 2014, was when the game’s original creator, Swedish developer Markus Persson, better known as Notch, underwent a dramatic transformation from a beloved indie gaming darling to a far-right Twitter troll. Having sold all rights to the game because he found dealing with fame and fans too stressful, Persson spent the late 2010s posting discriminatory comments online about women and LGBT+ people, also promoting QAnon conspiracy theories — all of which is particularly troubling given that a large portion of his fan base is children. Microsoft swiftly excised Persson’s name from the game’s loading screen, excluded him from future events and released a statement disavowing his comments.
The high-profile downfall of its creator could not bring down a game with such pure intentions and smart design. Minecraft is now old enough that there are adults who feel nostalgic for a childhood spent playing it, and which now evokes blissful memories of a space for play and creativity without adult oversight or responsibility. There are many stories of grown- ups playing with their children, or even three generations playing together, passing down knowledge like an inheritance, sharing the pleasure in a digital haven for creation whose blocks can be configured into anything you need them to be.
