I've been playing Minecraft for over half my life, here's why I'll never stop

Minecraft was first unveiled to the world 15 years ago today. That makes it as old as Final Fantasy 6 was in 2009, when Minecraft first launched – time is a scary thing. Speaking of, I’m 24, which means Minecraft has existed, for over half of my life – depending on how old you are, this may not be scary to you, but I can assure you the rest of the GLHF team was terrified.

Still, it means I was exactly the right age when Minecraft skyrocketed into popularity and got swept up in the wave of this strange block game that could suck hours of your life away without you noticing. A major anniversary like this is as good a time as any to reflect, and I realize that it may be the most important game I’ve ever played, in terms of the knock-on effect it had on my life.

There are landmark pieces of media that fundamentally changed or directed how I view things in my life. Watching Doctor Who as a kid instilled my love of complex narratives and character-rich stories, while more recently, playing the Xenoblade Chronicles series gave me a more optimistic and hopeful perspective on my life and the people in it. However, analyzing Minecraft’s impact is more difficult because the ways it pushed me aren’t as direct or obvious.

In reality, it comes in two parts. There’s the game of Minecraft itself, and then there’s the cultural movement around it. For me, that latter part came mostly in the form of YouTube, both directly in the form of every gaming channel suddenly churning out Minecraft content and in how it pushed me to explore the online space in a way I never had before.

While I did use the internet in the tail end of the pre-social media era, I’d never properly engaged with it as a major part of my life, but engaging in YouTube via Minecraft content was my gateway into the endlessly creative world that the internet had become. It’s cringy in hindsight, but those stupid Minecraft pop song parodies led me to teenagers like Bo Burnham creating music in their bedrooms, or creators like Tomska making comedy sketches with their friends.

It was a realization that not only did I have creative ideas I wanted to express, but it was incredibly easy to find ways to express them. All I needed was a space where I could use the tools given to me to build anything my imagination could conceive. Some sort of digital space – video game, if you will – where I could easily take the images in my mind and put them on the screen. If only there were a game like that…

Oh yeah, Minecraft.

It was a weird symbiosis, where Minecraft pushed me into a space where I could realize my inner creativity and then the game itself was a place where I could be creative. Sometimes with friends, sometimes alone, but I always found it fulfilling. Of course, looking back now I see I was hardly a master builder at 12 years old, but those were important formative steps.

It also pushed me deeper into the gaming space, and I came to learn what exists beyond the major games on the major consoles. Minecraft creators are directly responsible for me finding an interest in other indie games. I may never have played some of my all-time favorites like FTL or Towerfall if not for them, and in turn they have a major impact on how I analyze games today as a critic.

Many years later, these perspectives and attitudes are ingrained in me, and yet I still can’t put Minecraft down. There may be a period of many weeks, maybe even a couple of months where I won’t play it, but I will always come back, and when I do, I lose myself in it for ages. There are a couple of reasons for that.

Firstly, there’s the simple fact that Minecraft never died off. As a new generation grew up, they too had their imagination captured. It’s a space that always has fresh ideas, creators, and fans coming in and inventing whole new genres of Minecraft content. Simple Let’s Plays still exist if you like that, but now we have heavily edited stuff like civilization experiments, or competitive events like the MC Championships that keep everything feeling as lively as it’s ever been.

Secondly, the benefit of a massive community staying active for 15 years is that there is so much fan-made content available in the form of mods that you’ll never be short of new things to do. Sure, the official game adds armadillos and new wolf skins once a year, but that pails in comparison to the things I can turn Minecraft into with a bit of tinkering.

I’ve spent the last couple of years regularly playing the Vault Hunters modpack, which turns Minecraft into a roguelike dungeon crawler with the kind of in-depth gear modification, resource grinding, and power leveling that would put even a Diablo game to shame. On the flip side, I’ve also found joy in more chill modpacks like BigChadGuys which, despite what the name suggests, is a bit like Stardew Valley meets Pokémon meets Minecraft.

I’ve named just two of hundreds of mods there, but vanilla Minecraft with friends is always a good time no matter what. Minecraft is a permanent fixture in my life, and I believe it always will be in some shape or form. It means something different to me now than it did a decade ago, but it’s still a place I can go whenever I feel like making something, even if it’s just a cute little hut in the middle of a forest – I’m a much better builder now than I was at 12, honest.