Minecraft has been one of my favorite games since I was in elementary school. I still remember my first Minecraft world where I had played in creative mode but couldn’t figure out how to break or place blocks. I quickly got stuck in a ravine. (For some reason, little me thought I could summon a bunch of pigs and use them to get myself out of the ravine. It didn’t work, of course, but I would name the ravine Pig Canyon in honor of that event.) I suppose I could be called a Minecraft veteran. I wasn’t there when the game was in alpha or beta mode, but I remember things like when the game first released acacia wood or when we got different door types.
It’s been over ten years, and so much about the game has changed since I started. Isn’t that amazing? I know that some long-time players don’t like all the changes. (I specifically recall that some players got up in arms when the developers overhauled a lot of the textures to make them arguably better. And they are better now.) However, there is something so joyous about seeing how this game from my childhood has changed and yet still remains the game that I always loved.
“The words change. We do not change.”
Gough
It’s funny how the way I play the game has changed too compared to when I was younger. When I was younger, while I was building a lot, I think the thing that made me really proud was my super long sugarcane farm. Instead of just having a small batch of sugarcane for my own use to make paper and sugar, I would spend a long time just harvesting all of my sugarcane before planting it all back, just so then the sugarcane farm went across the entire river I lived near. I had wanted to make the longest sugar cane farm in the universe! I even planned some of my builds around that farm at the time. I wanted to make a sugar mill near a certain section of the farm, and I made a pop-up market near it too. (Though, because I was so focused on harvesting and planting the sugarcane, I did not have as much time to build what I wanted. Oops.)
Now when I play, I am more focused on making pretty buildings. Obviously, as a college student, I don’t have the same time to play like I used to. However, I do still have a little survival world where my sister and I have been playing together. The current build I was working on was a little cherry gazebo that I was hoping to put our Nether portal in while my sister is working on designing our mining area. That is another thing that is different too; my sister and I can play together. We used to share a singular account. Even now, I can’t imagine playing without her.
“And the universe said you are not alone”
Gough
But just like Minecraft, a lot of things have stayed the same too. Or, more accurately, stayed the same while having a different flavor about them. When I was younger, my sister and I were obsessed with Herobrine. (For those unfamiliar, he is a bit of a Minecraft legend. You can’t get into Minecraft without hearing about him.) We used to make various worlds where we would do those silly Herobrine spawners, not knowing that they didn’t work. We may not try to summon him anymore. However, in our recent Minecraft world, my sister and I have just started to pretend that Herobrine is a part of the world. It started with us making a third bed so then we could turn our beds into a pansexual flag. Then, we joked that it was for our ‘third friend’ who was not actually playing with us. I am not sure when we decided the third friend was actually Herobrine, but now we are designing a bedroom for the Minecraft cryptid.
My sister’s and my habit of wanting to add story to our worlds has stayed the same too. We used to spend forever making backstories for our Minecraft characters, even when we shared an account and thus shared a character. My sister ended up having the original account, so she has our first character. However, I adore making stories with my current Minecraft character as well. Maybe the stories aren’t the same ones I made when I was younger. (Which, admittedly, wasn’t the best. I was twelve, sue me for having badly made stories.) And yet, now my Minecraft character has a million lives they get to live.
“And the game was over and the player woke up from the dream. And the player began a new dream. And the player dreamed again, dreamed better.”
Gough
One thing that has definitely stayed the same throughout my years of playing Minecraft is my love of the Minecraft End Poem. In case anybody doesn’t know, after you beat the Ender Dragon in game, you get shown a poem. I feel like the poem is a bit of a forgotten part of the game, especially since a lot of people don’t go and defeat the dragon. I am using the word forgotten a bit loosely, since I have seen many others reference the poem. However, with the grand number of players that Minecraft has, most don’t seem to acknowledge the End Poem’s existence.
Compare that to me, who, when I was younger, would go into creative mode in every single Minecraft world I made so that I could find the portal and kill the dragon. Again and again, in every world, I would complete the game just so I could read the End Poem. I don’t do that anymore because I now want to actually complete the game legitimately, which has the unfortunate side effect of reading the poem a good bit less. However, it was the love of the Minecraft End Poem that pushed me to make a world just to complete the game with my sister as a gift for ourselves this last Christmas. We read the poem out loud together, and reading the poem with my sister was the best part of that Christmas.
“You are the player.”
“Wake up.”
Gough
Citation Source
Gough, Julian. “End Poem”. Minecraft. Mojang, 2011.
Edited and Reviewed by Zoe Carter
