Minecraft is not only a standalone video game that creates a digital sandbox for players to play, create, design, and publish thinking, but it also can be used for a different purpose entirely–to create other video games.
How is this possible? A few facts to clarify:
1. Minecraft is a video game.
2. It allows players to use digital blocks to create almost anything they can imagine.
3. With this capacity, it can then be used to create or re-create other video games, or “circumstances” that have goals, rules, and user interaction. So, by definition, a game.
4. This can be done to create original games from a player’s imagination, or to re-imagine existing games for novice designers.
The video below also includes four other examples of what can be done with Minecraft, including a television (that seems to work), Connect 4, and an interesting experiment in scale.
3 Steps To Creating A Game With Minecraft
Creating a video game with it, then, is as simple as creating the rules to any other “game”:
1. Establish a world
2. Communicate rules to players directly or indirectly
3. Create some system of player interaction, from simple to complex
The possibilities for using minecraft in learning are staggering really, perhaps only stunted by the perception of it as “just a game.”