Sophomore Ali Duval sits in the Summit Center, staring intently at her screen, focused on the task at hand. She could be finishing some homework. She could be checking her email. Walk behind her and take a peek at her laptop display. A palette of earthy browns and greens fills the screen. The block like figures resemble a pixelated photo, but upon further inspection, the recipient of her attention is obvious. She’s playing Minecraft. And she’s not the only one.

Both in and out of school, Minecraft is one of the most popular PC games. A two billion dollar franchise recently purchased by Microsoft, Mojang, the company that produced Minecraft, describes the game as “A sandbox construction game where you can build anything you can imagine,” according to its website. Minecraft is centered around survival in a digital world, mining for materials to build structures and battling monsters as you go along, until you reach a place called the nether, in which the user can fight a giant dragon and “win” the game, but continue to survive and build their world afterwards. So what’s the appeal in it?

Junior Sam Matenaer was first introduced to the game in middle school. “In seventh grade, [junior] Justin Zanaska talked about it all the time, and he showed it to me, and then I bought it,” Matenaer said. Immediately afterwards, he “became obsessed with it and played it all the time.”

Sophomore Ali Duval’s first exposure to Minecraft was similar: “my best friend was really into it, and I used to go over to his house everyday because I lived far away from school. He was building this massive castle, and he showed me it, and I was like ‘wow, that’s cool’, and a year later, I started to play it,”she said.

Minecraft, much like reading a book, can be experienced in a variety of ways depending on the player. Matenaer takes the multitasker route. “I [play] on my laptop and I would Skype with friends, and we talk while we [play],” Matenaer said. Duval prefers playing with a split screen, half devoted to a window with Minecraft, and half with a video to watch. Similarly, freshman Erik Quillopa prefers to watch Netflix or listen to music while playing.
The biggest satisfaction Matenaer gets from playing is the sense of reward that comes from improvement: as he describes it, “the satisfaction of logging into the game and knowing that I’ve gotten so much better than everyone else at it.” His specific strengths in Minecraft include gameplay features and making servers.

Duval especially likes building in Minecraft. “You can build anything!” she said. “I have [built] a secret underground room, it’s pretty cool,” she said. “It’s cool because you start out with nothing, and you have to find everything that you use, it’s like Sims, but without people.”

A game centered around building a world of your own, Minecraft can be pretty time consuming. Duval estimates an hour of Minecraft screen time daily. Quillopa, who doesn’t consider himself a particularly avid Minecraft user estimates that his average Minecraft session lasts about half an hours. Yet, he notices that it gets very distracting. “Once you’re on [Minecraft], you can’t [leave] it until someone pulls you off,” Quillopa said.

Matenaer’s passion for minecraft went beyond that of your average player. He created a server on the game and made approximately $800 off of running it. “I played it all the time, and that’s all I did at school, try to manage the server,” Matenaer said. Such earnings didn’t come easy. After playing for an average of three hours of Minecraft a day, the game lost some of its luster for him. “I played it way too much and it just got boring after a while,” Matenaer said.

The biggest appeal in Minecraft is in the aesthetic of its simplicity. This includes the pixelated screen and trees or characters reminiscent of legos. The vast array of imaginary land that could be built upon however the player sees fit is, surprisingly, one of the most unique and appealing features of the game. A character could survive by staying in a cave or building an extravagant castle. Best of all, there really is no point to Minecraft. The simplicity, versatility and inherent casualness of the game are what make the imaginary world something of a respite from a complicated world in reality. Duval sums it up in one sentence: “I have a house, I have a diamond pickaxe, I’m pretty much set for life.”