Minecraft? Why is it not any fun?

Minecraft is one of the best selling games in the world, having sold over 300 million copies world wide. It’s been one of the biggest pop culture phenomenons of our generation, and is still popular over a decade after its release. 

Being born in the early 2000’s means being caught in the awkward gap between millennials and Gen Z. Even though we might technically be a part of one or the other, it’s hard for us to identify with them. To us, “Gen Z” is a bunch of eight year olds who screamed at their x-boxes while playing Fortnite, and Millennials were practically dinosaurs by the time we finally started growing up.

Early 2000’s kids don’t have a whole lot going for them. We were the last generation to grow up without cell phones and tablets. To entertain ourselves, many of us had Nintendo DS-es, Nintendo Wii’s, and we would watch whatever was on Disney Channel or Cartoon every night.

We also played Minecraft. It was one of the only things we had.

Most of us have one memory or another of staying up past our bedtimes, playing with friends and listening to C418’s music as we dug for diamonds or built bases. Player-versus-player servers were also huge at this time, with servers like Mineplex and Hypixel being extremely popular. It seemed like there was no end to what we could do in the game, and the fun we could have.

Whenever we try to recreate those feelings nowadays, most people play Minecraft for two weeks and then burn out. This has commonly begun being referred to as “that two week Minecraft phase” on various social media forms.

So what’s happened since then? Why do we struggle to recapture those feelings of wonder and joy while playing one of our favorite games?

The easy answer is that we’ve all gotten older. We have more responsibilities, we look at the game differently, the game itself is different. But I think there’s also more to it than that. At its core, Minecraft is a game with player made objectives and goals. If people want to play the game long-term — for more than two weeks at a time — they need to change the way they’re approaching and looking at the game.

In my personal opinion, players struggle to “stay motivated” in their Minecraft worlds when they fail to set their own goals. Many people play Minecraft simply to max out their gear, beat the Ender Dragon, and maybe fight a Wither if they really don’t want their playthrough to end. These are objectives and goals the game sets and creates for you.

Once you’ve accomplished them, that’s it.

Players who play for “in-game goals” can play through modpacks for more bosses to kill and gear to collect, but once they get through its content, they’re right back at square one. No more gear to collect and enchant, and no more bosses to fight. 

Setting your own goals drastically changes the way the game is played. Let’s say you load into a brand of Minecraft world and want to build a cool base, specifically one where slimes travel through the floor of your base in minecarts. In addition to gathering gear and materials to build your base, now you’re tasked with building a slime farm, creating a railway beneath your base, farming iron and wood, all the while trying to make it look nice so you don’t give yourself a headache.

A minor note is that I think too many of us try and look up how to do everything on YouTube. Why wouldn’t we? We can either spend eight hours trying to learn game mechanics — like learning how iron golems or slimes spawn — or we could just watch a twenty minute video and copy what someone else did. I think that a lot of satisfaction comes from trying to reason out problems on your own. 

Playing Minecraft for your own goals can get tedious and grindy real quick if you’re not playing with friends, or can’t find ways to make it fun. However grinding and putting in large amounts of time to create these wonderful builds is what makes worlds last longer than two weeks. It’s the gameplay loop that keeps servers like Hermitcraft alive.

It’s totally fair not to want to grind Minecraft when you could work on something like a journalism article, bake cookies, homework, or do something that could be a bit more fulfilling in the real world. Or, if you even don’t want to grind when you could be playing competitive games like League of Legends or Fortnite. It just comes down to how you want to spend your time.

At the end of the day, there’s nothing wrong with the “two-week Minecraft kick.” The game is a sandbox game for a reason, it was made to be played the way players wanted to play it. The game’s infinite potential is what captured our imagination and hearts as children, and why it holds memories that have kept us coming back over the last decade.