Minecraft: The Start of Something New

An adult gamer remembers their introduction to gaming.

BY CHLOE HURRELL: Minecraft is one of the most, if not the most popular survival sandbox games around. It sports simple controls and simple objectives but ultimately leaves the rest of the experience up to the player.

When I played Minecraft for the first time, I was still in my pre-teens, only just getting into gaming and I was pretty clueless about what playing video games, in general, entailed but the game had seemed fairly easy to understand. So, I had jumped right in after I watched a few guides on how to survive my first night.

At first, I thought it was difficult because I was so scared of taking any damage and I wouldn’t even wander outside during the night because I was so afraid of dying. I would be scared of creepy cave noises and could only be in caves for a small amount of time before I got spooked and had to go back up to the surface with barely any ore or loot in my inventory. So my first world was fairly bland due to how nervous I was. But it wasn’t that way for long. Soon enough I had an ample supply of hours under my belt which made me feel more confident while playing, and I started to take more risks. I wasn’t completely terrified of dying anymore and so I started to realize something else about the game. Surviving is only a small part of what makes Minecraft fun.

Minecraft is a canvas that allows for almost anything and at the time, I had no idea what to do with it. But the more I played, the more I came to understand the scope of what I could do, and Minecraft quickly became my creative outlet. The number of hours that I have in the game now almost a decade later is embarrassingly large, simply because the game allows so many different things. I’ve spent hours building complex machines with redstone, I’ve created cities that have taken days to plan out, I’ve made new friends and stayed connected with old ones on servers, I’ve played minigames, changed game textures, and modded. I’ve truly learned not only how to survive, but how to thrive in the game.

So for me, this was the start of my gaming experience, and it was a really great start. This game has stuck with me for years because of its ability to allow for creative freedom. To this day I will still go and work on projects that I have left unfinished, or I will still go and start a new project or a new world. It has become a type of stress relief for me. And there is no limit to what I can do and make or what others can do or make. Even now, the game is still being updated so there is even more content coming and I am excited to see what is still in store for this amazing game.