If you are in the age range of 25 or younger Minecraft is most likely more than a game to you. It is something that you discovered as a child and completely took over your world for a certain amount of time. You could have been a teenager when you discovered Minecraft of 5 years old, and the same childlike wonder would overtake your body. If you are around my age or in my generation most of you will remember having these feelings the first time you discovered Minecraft. There was a sense of wonder and mystery as there was entire worlds created and destroyed that could be explored, improved, or griefed. I can remember the terror that set in on the first nighttime with monsters spawning everywhere, you probably dug into a hole or a wall and sat there in darkness for ten minutes straight waiting for the Sun to come back up. This sense of exploration and childlike wonder that Minecraft offered us as kids will probably never be able to be replicated. For one, we are all older now and that childhood sense of wonder is gone from us. We expect certain levels of quality from the video games we play, we watch trailers and gameplay long before deciding what we are going to buy and play. There is too much information in the world to ever go back to that time as children where you could discover something and entirely figure it out by yourself. But just because we have changed as human being does not mean that Minecraft has not also changed with us. The simple, blocky Minecraft that we knew as kids is not the same Minecraft that children and adults play today.  All along while we have been growing up Minecraft has also grown with us, adding in all types of new mobs, biomes, and features for gamers to keep people coming back. However, many of us have already put potentially hundreds of hours into Minecraft already at this point in our lives. I know I personally at least 2-3 times a year start up a completely new world from scratch and play through the first 10-15 hours of a new world. So, for many of us we have seen the entirety of what base Minecraft has to offer. We have beaten the Ender Dragon, the wither, the Pillagers, all of these and more. Some of us have spent countless hours building vast worlds in creative mode that bring forth some of the best of human creativity to life. We build towns and villages, create forts and castles, and create farms bug enough to completely lag out the game.
For those of us who do feel like they have done all these things and seen all that Minecraft has to offer, a Melancholic feeling towards Minecraft can grow. It is easy to feel apathy for a game that you feel you have entirely milked for all its worth. And for 99.9% of games this feeling of melancholy and apathy that comes with completely experiencing and milking a game of all its got is completely normal. But Minecraft is not like any other normal game. There is a reason Minecraft has completely taken over the world and Internet at points in its existence, it is because the game is infinitely replayable. A lot of games claim to be infinitely replayable but this concept by definition can only apply to a few types of games. Those type of games really turn out to be more like a meta-verse than a game(ignore Zuckerberg and his metaverse cringe). These are games where the actual player base are the ones infinitely generating new fun game modes to play. Think of a game like Roblox for example as another game in this infinitely replayble metaverse. The unlimited creativity offered by Minecraft, and a game like Roblox are what have given these games such long shelf lives. The actual developers of the games don’t need to spend countless hours creating content to keep the games fresh if the players themselves are the ones creating the content. Another game of this type was Garry’s Mod offered up by Steam to infinitely generate content. Simply put due to the nature of the sandbox in Minecraft players can continually come up with new ways to play the game that keep it fresh. Think things like SkyBlock, Bedwars, 2b2t, and other SMP servers. These are just of the few examples of different type of game modes within Minecraft that players can go and explore if they are getting bored.
The potentially most interesting out of these mentioned would be the SMP(survival multiplayer server). This essentially is a big server hosted by a company or some of the players that people can come in and live as part of a community. This shifts Minecraft from a single player experience to a multiplayer social experience where people could meet new people. Players can banter or roleplay or really do whatever they want to do except instead of it being an isolating experience it becomes a socially liberating experience. And in some of these severs there may be modded versions where to join the server the player must download a specific mod list and then can play a modded version of Minecraft with other people. Speaking of Mods, we have not even spoken about the other infinite form of generated content that comes with Minecraft. If you are bored with the actual developers at Mojang coming out with content, lucky for you, there hundreds of thousands of user created mods that anyone can download to spice up their Minecraft world. Users must download a Mod launcher like CurseForge and then search up whatever your heart desires. There is genuinely infinite amount of content to be added on to the already infinite world of Minecraft. With all the actual content added by Mojang, special game modes created by users, and Infinite number of Mods available this game could never go stale.
