Minecraft isn't just a game. It's an art form.

All of these pictures: the sun-dappled landscapes and surreal undersea worlds, the abstract
sculptures and slightly-hazy futures were all made...here.
In the video game called Minecraft.
It’s the type of art that gets collected in coffee table books
and gets made by design collectives.
With more than 100 million copies sold, Minecraft has become more than a game.
This game has become an artistic medium.
And it is also a business.
But even though Minecraft is a liberating game,
building a business in a virtual world can be just as tricky as building it in the
real one.
“At first I thought, OK, you know, the graphics aren’t great, but I had a sort of childhood
fascination with Lego.
About two weeks I got bored with the whole survival aspect and then started looking at
this thing called creative mode.”
James Delaney is from London, and he’s one of the people who runs Blockworks, an artistic
collective and company.
He’s talking about how Minecraft works.
Players choose between two different modes: one is survival mode, which is a little like
a traditional video game, since scary spiders and other creatures come out at night.
There’s also creative mode.
It is a blank canvas, in which players can design unique worlds.
It really is like making something out of Legos - you arrange a variety of digital blocks
with tons of options to increase the complexity.
As Minecraft grew, a new industry grew with it.
To play Minecraft online, players choose from a bunch of different servers that can host
the game.
In the beginning, these servers weren’t owned by Mojang, the company that created
Minecraft.
So as different servers tried to attract players, they added lots of bells and whistles, like
intriguing worlds, or maps, and even their own mods of the game.
An industry was born.
All sorts of companies and guilds sprung up to make Minecraft maps.
Just like players, they were located all around the world.
“We have another director, Sean Davidson, who’s over in Canada.
We have 62 members from over 20 different countries.
But everything’s done remotely, so there’s no office with more than one person in it.”
Their company, Blockworks, started with maps for servers, but the artistic potential kept
them going.
Though they might beautify their work using plugins and textures, all of it is made in
game, with obsessive detail that fans can download and appreciate for themselves.
They create beautiful surreal worlds, like a map about...Minecraft, the game, or a beautiful
dreamscape of clouds.
“I started thinking about this city which would be constructed from giant musical instruments
with a very sort of mechanical steampunk theme.”
As Minecraft grew, big companies saw potential to promote their stuff through Minecraft maps.
Blockworks scored tie-ins for movies like Tomorrowland and Batman v. Superman.
They even made a Batmobile.
But as unusual as it sounds, building ads inside virtual worlds is not a new idea.
This is Chex Quest, a 1996 game built on top of Doom’s engine.
People got it from a CD-Rom inside Chex boxes.
At the time, Doom was considered an ultraviolent video game.
So they remade it with…
Chex.
For a small fee, Chex licensed the software and built a world inside a world.
That trend of virtual world ads continued in Second Life, a platform launched in the
2000s that’s still going today.
Companies from Reebok to American Apparel built virtual stores there, earning a lot
of press.
But as the platform started to decline in popularity, the headlines disappeared.
Minecraft, however, might have the biggest opportunities and risks.
In May 2016, Minecraft and Mojang’s current owner, Microsoft, declared that branded partnerships
- like the glorious Batmobile - were no longer allowed.
Microsoft said it “didn’t feel right, or fun.”
It also meant they wanted to retain control of how money was made off Minecraft maps.
Blockworks made out OK — Microsoft hires them to make gorgeous maps like the seven
wonders of the ancient world.
They stayed in the club when other mapmakers got kicked out of the branded map game.
“We’re lucky enough to work with Microsoft, and obviously they’re exempt from their
own guidelines.
I think a lot of other teams did struggle as a result of that.
And it closed a lot of doors.
At the same time, it’s quite understandable that Microsoft want to keep control over how
their platform is used.”
Collectives like James’s might not mind that much.
In addition to Microsoft gigs, they have artistic projects and historical collaborations.
“So this was commissioned by the Museum of London, it ties in with and exhibition
they’ve got commemorating the Great Fire of London in 1666.”
But the change in rules shows the risks of building your business in another person’s
world.
Promotional map crackdowns, and even limits on private servers, have kept the Minecraft
economy kind of uncertain.
When you’re playing another person’s game, night could come at any time.
And then, it’s always survival mode.
We put links to all the maps we used in this video in the description, so there’s a lot
to explore and have fun with.
Now I’m gonna put this gold block on the ground.
OK.

Minecraft isn't just a game. It's an art form.

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