Minecraft is a very famous video game that we all know and have probably played at least once. Minecraft is a 2011 sandbox game developed by Swedish video game developer Mojang Studios. In November, 2014 Mojang Studios was bought by Microsoft. Minecraft is the best-selling game of all time, with over 300 million copies sold and 172,130,556 active players.
A main aspect of Minecraft is building using the signature Minecraft blocks. To be honest, a lot of players don’t know how to build very well. However, building well in Minecraft is a skill one can achieve easily with time, practice, and by learning from others’ work. Some people, including myself, do believe that Minecraft can be a legitimate art form.
There are 3 main types of Minecraft building that are used by players: Structures (houses, buildings, etc), Organics (trees, plants, statues, animals, etc), and Terrain (mountains, bodies of water, cliffs, etc). Most Minecraft builders make structures their main focus. Builders have created amazing structures using the blocks available to them in the game.
Some builders are even thought of as artists. These artists of Minecraft usually view certain blocks as colors rather than what the blocks are named: dirt is used as a brown color, stone is used as a gray color, and bricks used as red. There are many, many more options for other colors as well.
A certain set of Minecraft players are considered the best at what they do (building). They’re called the Bakery community. They are all mostly creative mode builders, who sometimes use game commands (or an item called a debug stick) to change the state of some blocks (for example: making a fence turn into a connected state when there isn’t another block next to it).
One of these builders, named “Snarple” on Instagram and YouTube, is considered by many Minecraft players to be the best builder of our time. Snarple is talented in all three forms of building (structures, organics, and terrain) and is great at using blocks as colors rather than what they are named. He has a video on YouTube teaching players how to do something called “texturing” which is basically just using blocks to color. He teaches shading and tinting; which are both real life art practices. He often does collaborations with his friends on his Instagram blending build styles with whoever he works with. Through Snarple, and the builder community of Minecraft, this game can be seen as a legitimate form of art, because beautiful pieces can be created.
