In its first year, Minecraft found popularity mostly among adult nerds. But sometime in late 2011, according to Alex Leavitt, a Ph.D. candidate at the University of Southern California, children discovered it, and sales of the game exploded. Today it costs $27 and sells 10,000 copies a day. (It’s still popular across all age groups; according to Microsoft, the average player is between 28 and 29, and women make up nearly 40 percent of all players.) Persson frequently added new features to the game, like a “survival mode,” in which every 20 minutes evening falls and monsters attack — skeletons shooting arrows, “creepers” blowing themselves up when they get close to you — forcing players to build protective shelters. (“Creative mode” is just about making things.)
Persson also made it possible for players to share their works. You could package your world as a “map” and post it online for others to download and move around in. Even more sophisticated players could modify Minecraft’s code, creating new types of blocks and creatures, and then put these “mods” online for others to use. Further developments included a server version of Minecraft that lets people play together on the Internet inside the same world. These days, kids can pay as little as $5 a month to rent such a server. They can also visit much larger commercial servers capable of hosting hundreds or thousands of players simultaneously. There is no single, central server: Thousands exist worldwide.
The game was a hit. But Persson became unsettled by his fame, as well as the incessant demands of his increasingly impassioned fans — who barraged him with emails, tweets and forum posts, imploring him to add new elements to Minecraft, or complaining when he updated the game and changed something. By 2014, he’d had enough. After selling Minecraft to Microsoft, he hunkered down in a $70 million mansion in Beverly Hills and now refuses to talk about Minecraft any more.
I wanted to know whether the European tradition of block-play had influenced him, but Persson politely declined to be interviewed. Via a public reply to me on Twitter, he explained that he “sold Minecraft to get away from it.”
Nearly everyone who plays Minecraft, or even watches someone else do so, remarks on its feeling of freedom: All those blocks, infinities of them! Build anything you want! Players have recreated the Taj Mahal, the U.S.S. Enterprise from “Star Trek,” the entire capital city from “Game of Thrones.” It’s the most obvious appeal of the game. But I first started to glimpse how complex Minecraft culture can be when I saw what kids were doing with what’s called “redstone,” the game’s virtual wiring. My two sons had begun using it: Zev, who is 8, showed me an automated “piston door” and stone gateway he built. Gabriel, who is 10, had created a “minigame” whose actions included a mechanism that dropped anvils from a height, which players on the ground had to dodge.
Redstone transports energy between blocks, like an electrical connection. Attach a block that contains power — a redstone “torch,” for example, which looks like a forearm-size matchstick — to one end of a trail of redstone, and anything connected to the other end will receive power. Hit a button here, and another block shifts position over there. Persson ingeniously designed redstone in a way that mimics real-world electronics. Switches and buttons and levers turn the redstone on and off, enabling players to build what computer scientists call “logic gates.” Place two Minecraft switches next to each other, connect them to redstone and suddenly you have what’s known as an “AND” gate: If Switch 1 and Switch 2 are both thrown, energy flows through the redstone wire. You can also rig an “OR” gate, whereby flipping either lever energizes the wire.
These AND and OR gates are, in virtual form, the same as the circuitry you’d find inside a computer chip. They’re also like the Boolean logic that programmers employ every day in their code. Together, these simple gates let Minecraft players construct machines of astonishing complexity.
One day this winter, I met Sebastian, a 14-year-old, at his home in New Jersey, where he showed off his redstone devices. One was a huge “trading post,” a contraption that allows players on either side of a large wall to trade items through an automated chute. It required a large cluster of AND gates, he said, and took him several days to figure out.
“Hop down here,” he said, moving down into a subterranean pit beneath the apparatus and looking around. (In Minecraft, you see the world from the viewpoint of your in-game avatar.) It was like being in the bowels of a factory: the redstone sprawled in all directions. He pointed out different parts of the wiring, rattling off components like an architect at a construction site. “Coming in from these two wires are the lever inputs from the side — and from over here, the other side. And what these do is, when they’re both on, they power a piston, which pairs redstone to this block up into this tower dispenser.”
Mastering redstone requires rigorously logical thinking, as well as a great deal of debugging: When your device isn’t working, you have to carefully go over its circuitry to figure out what’s wrong. One fifth grader I visited, Natalie, was assembling a redstone door on her iPad while I watched. But nothing happened when she flicked the “on” lever. “I did that wrong,” she said with a frown, and began tracing her way through the circuit. Eventually the problem emerged: A piece of redstone was angled incorrectly, sending the current in the wrong direction.
This is what computer scientists call computational thinking, and it turns out to be one of Minecraft’s powerful, if subtle, effects. The game encourages kids to regard logic and if-then statements as fun things to mess around with. It teaches them what computer coders know and wrestle with every day, which is that programs rarely function at first: The work isn’t so much in writing a piece of software but in debugging it, figuring out what you did wrong and coming up with a fix.
Minecraft is thus an almost perfect game for our current educational moment, in which policy makers are eager to increase kids’ interest in the “STEM” disciplines — science, technology, engineering and math. Schools and governments have spent millions on “let’s get kids coding” initiatives, yet it may well be that Minecraft’s impact will be greater. This is particularly striking given that the game was not designed with any educational purpose in mind. “We have never done things with that sort of intent,” says Jens Bergensten, the lead Minecraft developer at Mojang and Persson’s first hire. “We always made the game for ourselves.”
Other Minecraft features resemble the work of software engineers even more closely. For example, programmers frequently write code and control their computers through a bare-bones interface known as the “command line,” typing abstruse, text-based commands rather than pointing and clicking. Many programmers I know complain that while the point-and-click world has made computers easier to use for everyday people, it has also dumbed us down; kids don’t learn the command line the way they would have back when personal-computer use emerged in the ’70s and ’80s. This is partly why newcomers can find programming alienating: They’re not accustomed to controlling a computer using only text.
But Minecraft, rather audaciously, includes a command line and requires players to figure it out. Type “t” or “/” while playing the game, and a space appears where you can chat with other players or issue commands that alter the environment. For example, typing “/time set 0” instantly changes the time of day inside the game to daybreak; the sun suddenly appears on the horizon. Complex commands require a player to master chains of sophisticated command-line syntax.
One day last fall, I visited Gus, a seventh grader in Brooklyn. He was online with friends on a server they share together, engaging in boisterous gladiatorial combat. I watched as he typed a command to endow himself with a better weapon: “/give AdventureNerd bow 1 0 {Unbreakable:1,ench:[{id:51,lvl:1}],display:{Name:“Destiny”}}.” What the command did was give a bow-and-arrow weapon to AdventureNerd, Gus’s avatar; make the bow unbreakable; endow it with magic; and name the weapon Destiny, displayed in a tag floating over the weapon. Gus had plastered virtual sticky-notes all over his Mac’s desktop listing the text commands he uses most often. Several commands can be packed into a “command block,” so that clicking on the block activates them, much as clicking on a piece of software launches it.
Mimi Ito, a cultural anthropologist at the University of California, Irvine, and a founder of Connected Camps, an online program where kids play Minecraft together, has closely studied gamers and learning. Ito points out that when kids delve into this hackerlike side of the game — concocting redstone devices or creating command blocks — they often wind up consulting discussion forums online, where they get advice from adult Minecraft players. These folks are often full-time programmers who love the game, and so younger kids and teenagers wind up in conversation with professionals.
“It’s one of the places where young people are engaging with more expert people who are much older than them,” Ito says. These connections are transformative: Kids get a glimpse of a professional path that their schoolwork never illuminates. “An adult mentor opens up these new worlds that wouldn’t be open to them,” she adds. Of course, critics might worry about kids interacting with adults online in this way, but as Ito notes, when there’s a productive task at hand, it’s similar to how guilds have passed on knowledge for ages: knowledgeable adults mentoring young people.
Ito has also found that kids’ impulse to tinker with Minecraft pushes them to master real-world technical skills. One 15-year-old boy I interviewed, Eli, became interested in making “texture packs.” These are the external shells that wrap around 3-D objects in the game, like a drape thrown over a table: Change the pattern on the drape, and you can change what the object looks like. Designing texture packs prompted Eli to develop sophisticated Photoshop skills. He would talk to other texture-pack designers on Minecraft forums and get them to send him their Photoshop files so he could see how they did things. He also began teaching himself to draw. “I’d be downloading the mod,” he says, “looking at the original texture and saying, ‘O.K., how can I make this a little more cartoony?’ ” Then he would put his own designs up on the forums to get feedback, which, he discovered, was usually very polite and constructive. “The community,” he says, “is very helpful.”
While Minecraft rewards this sort of involvement, it can also be frustrating: Mojang updates Minecraft weekly, and sometimes new updates aren’t compatible with an older version. Players complained to me about waking up to discover that their complex contraptions no longer worked. One player spent weeks assembling a giant roller coaster whose carts were powered by redstone tracks only to have an update change the way rails functioned, and the entire roller-coaster mechanism never worked again. Others ruefully described spending months crafting cities on their own multiplayer servers, only to have a server crash and destroy everything.
For Ito, this is all a culturally useful part of the experience: Kids become more resilient, both practically and philosophically. “Minecraft is busted, and you’re constantly fixing it,” she says. “It’s that home-brew aesthetic. It’s kind of broken all the time. It’s laggy. The kids get used to the idea that it’s broken and you have to mess with it. You’re not complaining to get the corporate overlord to fix it — you just have to fix it yourself.” This is a useful corrective to other software. “IPhone apps are kind of at the opposite end,” Ito says. “And the way that kids react when things are broken in the Apple ecosystem versus the Minecraft ecosystem is totally different. With [Apple] it’s, ‘Why are they broken?’ Whereas with Minecraft it’s like — ‘Oh, they messed with something again, it’s broken, we have to go figure out what they changed.’ There’s a sort of resignation to that the fact that you’re tinkering all the time.”
Because Minecraft is now seven years old, Ian Bogost will soon have students at Georgia Tech who grew up playing the game. The prospect intrigues him. “I’m very curious to see what their attitude to technology is,” he says.
Two years ago, Ava, a fifth grader who lives on Long Island, whom I met through her aunt, a friend of mine, tried Minecraft for the first time. She started a “survival” world and marveled at the jagged hills receding into the distance. But like most new players, she had no idea what to do. Night fell, mobs arrived and a skeleton staggered toward her. She mistakenly assumed it was friendly. “I was like, Oh, hi, how are you?” Ava says. “And I died after that.”
Minecraft is an incredibly complex game, but it’s also — at first — inscrutable. When you begin, no pop-ups explain what to do; there isn’t even a “help” section. You just have to figure things out yourself. (The exceptions are the Xbox and PlayStation versions, which in December added tutorials.) This unwelcoming air contrasts with most large games these days, which tend to come with elaborate training sessions on how to move, how to aim, how to shoot. In Minecraft, nothing explains that skeletons will kill you, or that if you dig deep enough you might hit lava (which will also kill you), or even that you can craft a pickax.
This “you’re on your own” ethos resulted from early financial limitations: Working alone, Persson had no budget to design tutorials. That omission turned out be an inadvertent stroke of genius, however, because it engendered a significant feature of Minecraft culture, which is that new players have to learn how to play. Minecraft, as the novelist and technology writer Robin Sloan has observed, is “a game about secret knowledge.” So like many modern mysteries, it has inspired extensive information-sharing. Players excitedly pass along tips or strategies at school. They post their discoveries in forums and detail them on wikis. (The biggest one, hosted at the site Gamepedia, has nearly 5,000 articles; its entry on Minecraft’s “horses,” for instance, is about 3,600 words long.) Around 2011, publishers began issuing handbooks and strategy guides for the game, which became runaway best sellers; one book on redstone has outsold literary hits like “The Goldfinch,” by Donna Tartt.
“In Minecraft, knowledge becomes social currency,” says Michael Dezuanni, an associate professor of digital media at Queensland University of Technology in Australia. Dezuanni has studied how middle-school girls play the game, watching as they engaged in nuanced, Talmudic breakdowns of a particular creation. This is, he realized, a significant part of the game’s draw: It offers many opportunities to display expertise, when you uncover a new technique or strategy and share it with peers.
The single biggest tool for learning Minecraft lore is YouTube. The site now has more than 70 million Minecraft videos, many of which are explicitly tutorial. To make a video, players use “screencasting” software (some of which is free, some not) that records what’s happening on-screen while they play; they usually narrate their activity in voice-over. The problems and challenges you face in Minecraft are, as they tend to be in construction or architecture, visual and three-dimensional. This means, as many players told me, that video demonstrations have a particularly powerful explanatory force: It’s easiest to learn something by seeing someone else do it. In this sense, the game points to the increasing role of video as a rhetorical tool. (“Minecraft” is the second-most-searched-for term on YouTube, after “music.”)
That includes Ava on Long Island — who, after being killed by skeletons, began watching “survival mode” videos to learn how to stay alive. Soon she had mastered that, and also discovered the huge number of YouTube videos in which players review “minigames,” little challenges that some Minecraft devotees design and load onto servers for others to play. (In one popular minigame, for example, players are shown a sculpture made of blocks and then try to copy it exactly in 30 seconds.) For young Minecraft fans, these videos are a staple of their media diet, crowding out TV. Ava’s mother is genially baffled by this. “I don’t understand it,” she told her daughter when I visited them last fall. “Why are you watching other people play the game? Why don’t you just play?”
Ava had recently started her own YouTube channel with her friends Aaron and Patrick, where they play and review minigames. Her father set up a high-quality microphone on a telescoping arm bolted to the computer desk; her sister drew Ava a white sign that says: “RECORDING.” (Its back says: “NOT RECORDING JUST WANT YOU TO BE QUIET.”) As the family’s gray cat wandered around Ava’s keyboard, she dialed up Patrick on a Skype video call.
When they record a video, they improvise freestyle banter while playing, and simply start all over again if something goes awry. (Which, Patrick said dryly, “happens often.”) So far they have 19 subscribers and have posted 21 videos.
She played a recent video for me, in which they tried to navigate a difficult map filled with lethal, flowing lava. Their conversation is loose and funny; it’s like listening to two talk-radio hosts, or perhaps the commentary over a game of basketball — if the commentary were delivered by the athletes themselves, while they play.
Considered as a genre, YouTube Minecraft videos are quite strange. They take elements of “how to” TV — a cooking show, a home-renovation show — and blend them with the vocal style of podcasting, while mixing in a dash of TV shows like “Orange County Choppers,” where ingenious mechanics parade their creations.
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