Minecraft is self-indulgent. And that’s okay.
In a world where everything feels mapped — everything charted and explored — we crave a new beginning. We crave a land that feels untouched, a space that invites us to indulge in our ideas, stories, and fantasies. Minecraft is self-indulgent in that it is a medium that allows us to play god. And, in playing god, we get to both expand and reflect upon our creative intuitions.
When I began playing, I was delighted by the world before me. In a place like Stanford, everything is pristine. Beautiful, yes, but also pristine. The bushes are carefully leveled, the flowers planted in a straight line, the rats fully exterminated. Side-note: throwback to spring 2025 when campus was full of rats. That fall, though, when we returned from summer break, somehow they were all magically gone.
I digress.
Minecraft, at the start, feels like a world of one’s own — natural and inviting, not only as a place to escape our current world, but also to create our own. It asks us to tap into our imagination and explore what we envision if we were, essentially, god.
In the real world, creation is rarely so simple. It often requires money, materials, strenuous labor, permits, and time. Minecraft removes almost all of these barriers. Like most powerful mediums, Minecraft “eliminate[s] time and space factors in human association exactly as do radio, telegraph, telephone, and TV, creating involvement in depth,” (https://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/mcluhan.mediummessage.pdf). In doing so, it invites players to indulge in their own fantasies — live out their own stories.
Being a god, as it turns out, does come with a few — and just a few — rules. One must still mine for their materials, and, by nightfall, it’s helpful to have some sort of house or structure — or else the monsters will surely kill you. I guess god isn’t fully invincible.
That said, while playing, even this small restriction became frustrating for me. Busy with mining, creating, and exploring, I repeatedly died and respawned, either failing to build a protective house or doing so and then getting lost after wandering too far.
However, my frustration actually revealed precisely why the game is so appealing. Minecraft has very few restrictions — this was virtually the only one — and even this felt intrusive. For me, the appeal of Minecraft was in its frictionless design: the freedom to indulge in curiosity without interruption. God doesn’t like being interrupted.
In our present culture, the word “indulgence” carries a negative connotation, especially self-indulgence. However, in many ways, we often actively try to recreate this kind of environment. We give students marshmallows and toothpicks to create their own structures. We encourage self-designed research projects to follow one’s own curiosity. We literally have sandboxes in playgrounds. We recognize that creativity is a skill, and like any skill, it can be exercised, expanded, and strengthened. Over time, our sense of what is possible grows. The ideas become more complex, the stories more nuanced, the imagination more flexible. As Marshall McCluhan states in “The Medium Is the Message,” new mediums “[alter] not only habits of life, but patterns of thought and valuation.” In this sense, Minecraft isn’t about building any specific structure. It is about fostering the capacity to imagine at all.
In real life, we struggle to create the frictionless. Why not encourage ourselves to indulge in being god? Who knows what we’ll create?
Some may argue that such indulgence is dangerous. That, “who knows what we’ll create?” is a rather scary question. As Dan Olsen mentions in his video, “Minecraft, Sandboxes, and Colonialism,” one’s interests, imagination, and values, are not created in a vacuum but are rather shaped by inherited cultural structures. And, given our history of oppression, control, and violence, that’s not exactly an exciting prospect.
Furthermore, however hidden, it’s not like Minecraft’s structure is without its influence. Even in subtle design choices, Minecraft shapes how players interact with the seemingly “open” world. For starters, the land is not truly “empty” — there are villagers, animals, and other entities that already exist within it. And yet, these figures are often reduced to simplified roles: villagers as passive and manipulable, animals as resources, monsters as inherently hostile. In fact, the only way to combat these aggressive monsters is to fight back, or, as the game wants, build. It does, admittedly, feel very colonial-y — noteworthy as “any medium has the power of imposing its own assumption on the unwary,” (https://web.mit.edu/allanmc/www/mcluhan.mediummessage.pdf).
With that said, I feel that — even in these settings — indulgence is worthwhile, as it forces us to confront what we are drawn to when given freedom in such scenarios. In games about complicity, we often praise them for holding up a mirror — revealing uncomfortable truths about our actions. Sandbox games like Minecraft can do the same.
Overall, Minecraft acts as a powerful medium for self-indulgence. While such freedom is not without its risks, too much restriction of such freedom would limit something equally important. It is through this openness that creativity is exercised, expanded, and tested.
