Minecraft
What is Minecraft?
Who developed Minecraft and when was it released?
What are the main modes in Minecraft?
What is the Uncensored Library in Minecraft?
What educational uses does Minecraft have?
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Minecraft, open-world electronic game in which players manipulate an environment composed of virtual 3D blocks. With its simple graphics and relatively modest system requirements, Minecraft was designed to appeal to a wide audience. By 2023 Minecraft was the second highest-selling title in video game history, behind Tetris.
Development and release
Swedish software programmer Markus (“Notch”) Persson began working on Minecraft in 2009, and he founded Mojang Specifications (later Mojang Studios) to handle the game’s development and release. A playable alpha build of the game was released in June 2010, and a more polished beta version was unveiled in December of that year. Minecraft was officially released in November 2011 at MineCon, an annual fan event that was created to celebrate the game, later rebranded to Minecraft Live. Minecraft debuted on the PC, but it has since been adapted for mobile devices, Xbox, Nintendo Switch, and PlayStation.
Gameplay
Minecraft is a creative game that primarily focuses on building. Everything is made from blocks and has cartoonlike visuals. The blocks are made of various materials—such as stone, wood, clay, or ore—that the players may mine with a pickax or collect after detonating explosives. Players can enjoy the game by themselves or join others in building a communal world.
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Game modes
Minecraft has four main modes:
- Creative mode: Players have unlimited resources to use. Their characters can fly and cannot be injured.
- Survival mode: Players have no resources to begin with. They need to collect resources, gather food, and make tools. Characters can be weakened or killed by events such as starvation, accidents, or attacks. Death in survival mode is temporary, however. After dying, characters awaken in their beds or respawn at a designated point on the map. Players in survival mode can also adjust the difficulty level to match their abilities.
- Hardcore mode: This mode is structurally similar to survival mode, except that the player’s character has only a single life. If the character’s health reaches zero, the game ends.
- Adventure mode: This is a modified version of survival mode that restricts players’ ability to destroy or manipulate blocks. Games created in this mode may involve solving puzzles, fighting monsters, or engaging with elements of fan-created lore within the Minecraft universe.
Characters and hostile creatures
Although Minecraft players create their own world, they may come into contact with roaming, game-generated characters known as “mobs” (mobile entities). These include “passive” mobs (which will not attack players) such as villagers or farm animals (e.g., pigs and cows). “Neutral” mobs, such as bees or polar bears, will generally ignore characters unless provoked. “Hostile” mobs—including zombies, skeletons, and creepers (distinctive green creatures that explode when they approach a player’s character)—will attack the player’s character on sight. Players can fight and kill these and many other monsters; however, the game does not contain graphic violence. All conflicts can be avoided by adjusting the game settings to “peaceful.”
Acquisition and varied uses
In 2014 Microsoft acquired Mojang for $2.5 billion, and Persson left the company as soon as the deal was completed. Two years later Microsoft released a version of Minecraft specifically designed for classroom use. Minecraft: Education Edition was designed to enhance school curriculum as a supplement to class lessons. It includes lesson plans for teachers in multiple subjects, including coding, history, geography, and math. Examples of tasks include building an Egyptian pyramid, solving math puzzles, and devising a plan to colonize Mars. These activities were intended to encourage creativity, problem-solving skills, and teamwork. Multiple schools around the world—including in the United States, Australia, France, Germany, and the United Kingdom—have incorporated these lessons into their curriculum.
In 2020 Mojang released Minecraft: Dungeons, an action role-playing game set in the Minecraft universe. The game, which was a challenging, if lighthearted, take on a genre dominated by clones of the Diablo fantasy horror franchise, was met with generally positive reviews.
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In 2025 the feature film A Minecraft Movie, starring Jack Black and Jason Momoa, was released. That same year the U.S. Library of Congress added the soundtrack Minecraft: Volume Alpha (2011) to the National Recording Registry, a list of audio recordings deemed “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”
A library within Minecraft
In 2020 Minecraft became the host of the Uncensored Library, a virtual library designed to provide public access to journalistic articles (housed as virtual books) that have been censored across print, broadcast, and digital formats. The project uses Minecraft’s open, block-based environment to present banned texts in the form of in-game books that players can read. The Uncensored Library was created by Reporters Without Borders, a nonprofit organization that works to defend freedom of information worldwide. It was built inside Minecraft by the design studio BlockWorks.
The library was opened on March 12, 2020, the World Day Against Cyber Censorship. It can be accessed through a dedicated multiplayer server or downloaded locally for offline exploration. It consists of about 300 books arranged across 12 wings, most of which correspond to countries where access to independent journalism is limited.
Among the works represented in the library are Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi’s articles. He was a critic of Mohammed bin Salman, Saudi Arabia’s crown prince and de facto ruler since 2017. After moving to the United States, Khashoggi wrote columns for The Washington Post before he was killed in 2018 at the Saudi consulate in Istanbul. Although his journalism is banned from circulation in Saudi Arabia, selected works are made accessible through the Uncensored Library, allowing readers in his native country and elsewhere to access texts that their own governments have sought to suppress.
Minecraft’s distributed servers and downloadable game maps are harder for automated filters and firewalls to block than ordinary websites. The game’s widespread popularity also means that it often attracts less scrutiny in countries with strict controls on online information.
Countries represented in the library were selected using the World Press Freedom Index, a project of Reporters Without Borders. The library is curated and regularly updated and continues to expand, with new rooms added to include texts on countries such as Brazil, Belarus, Eritrea, and Iran.