15 Reasons Why Minecraft Is So Dangerously Addictive
People who don’t play Minecraft might take one look at Minecraft players and think to themselves that they’re weird. Who would want to spend years playing a game with subpar graphics that doesn’t technically have an end goal or a ranked ladder for PvP? Who would want to spend months planning out builds, take their time to create them, only to leave them after the build is done, and start a new world with an entirely new build?
It’s hard for a player to let go of Minecraft because of a simple thing called addiction. Many will deny it, but it’s true, we’re addicted, and maybe we can stop ourselves and play for 3 hours every other day. Still, we never stop thinking, calculating, and getting better even outside the game, so here are the 15 reasons Minecraft is so dangerously addictive.
1. The Social Aspect
Minecraft has hundreds of millions of players worldwide, and it’s easy to find like-minded people who you can play with and share your adventures with. Even though most Minecraft servers cost money, it isn’t a lot, and you can find some that are free to use, so playing with friends in real life is not difficult.
Furthermore, you can join countless popular servers with hundreds of players to experience what they do when creating content, for example. These servers are different from the game itself so that you can play with other people and an entirely different game with various fun-to-follow goals.
2. The community
When you see an awesome build, Redstone contraption, or an amazing PvP player, you get inspired and say to yourself, ”I can beat that; I can do it better”. The online community of Minecraft is huge and incredibly creative and intelligent and when you see builds like the ones in the photo, you want to do it yourself.
You want to be better, you want to share your creation with the world, and you want to get as much praise as the next guy. The community encourages creativity, and if you deliver, you’ll get rewarded. Some Minecraft builds are talked about to this day, like the 1hz computer one player made. You want to be a part of that and be like them.
3. You can mod it to your liking
What I mean by this is that Minecraft isn’t just one game. The limit of what you can do inside the game is only as big as the player’s imagination because Minecraft allows you to create mods and different lines of code that change how the game acts and feels.
You can even change how Minecraft looks, and to top it all off, you can get your hands on custom maps and mini-games you can play, or you can make them yourself. Minecraft has multiple games in one, so it keeps it interesting even if you never leave it for another game.
4. It’s easy to play
Although I’ve proved with many points how Minecraft can be a complicated game, the general premise is simple, and truly anyone can play. You start in a new world and must go through it to defeat the Ender Dragon. It doesn’t require a player with incredible mechanics to be good at it.
We are repeatedly proven how challenging it can be if you make it that way. Take Dream, for example, and his manhunts, where he pulls off the most mechanically incredible outplays, but it’s not a requirement for you to beat the game. It’s just an impressive thing to see.
5. Never stops challenging you
Minecraft is updated frequently, and each time, something new is added to the game that you can explore endlessly and use to your advantage to make new builds. This update brought us a whole new wood type so players can make their builds awesome with a new wood type.
You get a cool new boss that you can fight (but it’s best not to), new blocks that you can use to make incredible builds, various new items that each do something different, and then there’s the aspect of trying to find the deep dark, loot it, and experience it fully. That adrenaline rush I’ve talked about before never goes away
6. There’s something for every type of player
Different games exist for different players with different interests. Some players love to battle in PvP, some like to create, and some like to show off that they’re tech-savvy, all of which can be done in Minecraft. If you’re tech-savvy and have great problem-solving skills, the Redstone engineer path might be for you; if you have incredible spatial awareness and are creative, the builder path is for you.
If you think you can beat the game as fast as possible, speedrunning is the way to go, and if you’d like to battle it out in an arena to come out on top, PvP-in is for you. There’s so much more to Minecraft than first meets the eye, and you can test out what you’re good at without ever leaving the game.
7. It’s educational
You might not believe me, but Minecraft is used in classrooms as a study tool. In 2016, it was used in over 10.000 classrooms, and the number could only have grown. But even without the Education Edition, there’s so much to learn.
For example, pandas are an endangered species in the real world mostly because they have a hard time mating. In Minecraft, pandas are the only mob you can breed but there are additional criteria for you to breed them, simulating the real-life world. Similarly, bamboo grows insanely fast in the real world, and it’s the fastest-growing plant in Minecraft.
8. Time goes by fast
You don’t feel the passage of time quite as much when playing. What started as ”I’m going to hop into my world and build a cute base, it’ll take 2 hours” ends up turning into ”I didn’t build my base yet because I had to make a farm for the materials I wanted, so that took a while and then I died, and then I realized I’m out of coal, and I really need glass, but I also needed to get some XP because I need the efficiency enchantment to work faster, so I spent the whole day playing” you see where I’m going with this.
There are just too many distractions within the game that’ll lure you away from your goal. A day in Minecraft lasts around 20 real-life minutes, which means time is sped up there. Well, time is sped up in real life as well when you’re playing Minecraft since you feel like you’re going to do so much when you hop into the game but a thing that you thought would take 20 minutes to complete ends up taking an hour and a half.
9. The adrenaline rush
When I first started my world, I was curious about what I could interact with, what would happen, where I might end up, and how my world would look. I didn’t think Minecraft would be scary, and as I went caving, I started hearing weird sounds. My room was dark, and there was nothing but the zombies and me.
Suddenly, a wild creeper appeared, and I was blown into bits. I jumped out of my chair and felt the adrenaline rush through my body. It’s addictive, and a study found that the rush you get from the hormone being released can get people addicted to that feeling.
10. Things can take days to create
I said things could take days to create, but that would be the understatement of the century. I’ve been working on a mega-build of my own for months now. Partially, it’s because I’m kind of slow with building and don’t have a clear plan when I’m starting, but the other part of it is that it does take a while to make something, even if you’re playing in creative mode.
Look at any Minecraft content creator who’s built something that went viral. Most of the time, they’ll say that it took months, and it’s hard to pace yourself and know when the last block you placed should be the final one.
11. It Allows you to try and be the best
It’s really easy to try and be the best at something in Minecraft. Take speedrunning as an example. If you were to finish the game in under 8 minutes, you would get on the leaderboard, and you’d likely be praised by the community of millions of players who doesn’t want that type of glory, even if it’s just for a second.
Although the road to being the best at something in Minecraft is paved with a lot of time spent grinding and ironing out your mechanics, the principle is simple. We all know how to beat Minecraft; if we could get fast enough, we’d be famous.
12. Removes the fear of mortality
Minecraft is, first and foremost, a survival game, so it gives you that rush without having to fear your own mortality. You can do it repeatedly, and there’s no limit to how many times you can die.
There are barely any repercussions; you might lose some of your stuff that took days to get a handle on, and your XP certainly, but that’s it. The exception can be hardcore Minecraft because you end up losing your entire world if you die even once,e but the only thing to come out of that type of world is rage quitting once you do die.
13. It’s an online game
Yes, technically, Minecraft isn’t an online game, but what I mean by stating that it is an online game is that you’ll mostly share your success within the game online. You might play out a world alone and feel like you’ve achieved nothing but take it online, and you’ll receive praise, maybe some constructive criticism, and undeniably hate.
The internet gives a sense of false security, and we feel as if there are no repercussions to what we say and do, especially if we’re talking about a game, so it’s easy to get lost in that.
14. Minecraft content is fun to watch
Did you know that Minecraft-related content exceeded 1 trillion views in 2021? I’m not surprised because if YouTube content were only related to Minecraft, you’d still have so much variety in content being produced.
You’d be able to watch Minecraft-made movies, roleplay, awesome builds being made, weird experiments like Mr. Beast does, and so much more. There’s seemingly no end to how much content can be put out that is related to Minecraft.
15. The game is endlessly fun
It’s plain and simple, Minecraft gives you the freedom to do whatever you want, and not a lot of games in this day and age provide you with that. Additionally, Minecraft is one of the oldest games that are still popular today, so there’s just so much history and nostalgia packaged into it.
As humans, we tend to live in the past, and Minecraft is the perfect game to do just that, but it’s not that the game is just reminiscent of much simpler times; it’s becoming increasingly obvious that a new player base has emerged and will keep emerging so even if other players leave, a new generation of gamers will come and take their place, experiencing everything the ones in the past have.
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