The Development of Minecraft Game and The Science in It

Minecraft is undoubtedly one of the most influential video games of all time. Created by a Swedish game developer, Markus 'Notch' Persson, and released by Mojang back in 2011, Minecraft already surpassed a million purchases within the first month of its beta phase gaining its popularity through the 91 million active users every month. Because of its notoriety, it became the best-selling video game of all time, marketing over 176 million copies by May 2019. But what sets it apart from other video games?

Minecraft gives its players a vast amount of freedom to choose how they want to play the game. The virtual world follows an unusual design by using actual items from the real world and turning it into 3D objects in the form of blocks such as dirt, cobblestone, granite and so on, Minecraft revolves around the idea of 'mining' blocks and 'crafting' materials. The generated world can extend up to 30,000,000 blocks from the center before an in-game barrier restricts the player from traversing further.

A lot of science was included during the development of Minecraft which is why the preponderance of objects we see in the game presents a virtual translation of what we see in real life. Although the game is quite addicting, Is the science behind it true to life or is it all mistaken? In the game, a primary survival method is to collect materials, specifical food. Mobs are virtually generated non-players that can either be innocent or hostile creatures. To obtain food in the game, slaughtering mobs like sheep, cows, chickens, and pigs will offer you raw food to which you then cook in a furnace with coal. In real life, animals do give raw food that we can cook in a forge with fuel. 

Another thing that Minecraft players have to do is mine. One of the most typical materials that players of the game encounter are Iron. When iron ores are mined, they place it in a furnace with coal and let it smelt until they acquire an iron ingot, a bar of metal used in crafting other materials in the game. Interesting enough, Iron is also one of the most common constituents found on Earth. Smelting is a process done in real life, though, it is much more complex than it is portraying in the game.

Let's now look on the nonsensical side of Minecraft. The game world has two other realms besides the main world: the Nether and the End, both of which are accessed by the means of portals. Realistically speaking, there has been no evidence or any proof in science that other dimensions exist. From what I mentioned earlier, there are also hostile mobs spawning in the game like zombies, creepers, and skeletons, all of which proven to not exist in the real world.

Astonishingly, science can be involved in a lot of aspects of our lives. Whether it be in the games we play, how we think, how we function and so much more. Minecraft just introduced the science of something to its mass players by incorporating it in a game revolving in our everyday real-life survival but making it even more appealing despite the fact that some parts of the game are severely untrue.