As an avid gamer with nearly 30 years of gaming as a pastime, I feel pretty qualified to answer this question. Also, I hate Minecraft.

I was introduced to it long ago, feels like 10 years but I can’t remember exactly when because it made very little impact on me at the time. I played for about 6 hours straight, digging deep into the Earth while my friends were busy building an enormous castle. I explored, and eventually found some weird spawn point that kept shooting zombies out into the middle of an underground chamber. Cool! My friends were amazed by this. I dug a channel from the mysterious spawn point that funneled the zombies into a pool of lava and then stood above the pool, thus leading the zombies into the lava. Woo!

Then it hit me: This is pointless. There was no story, no progression other than making better weapons so that you could dig and build more quickly. People made impressive structures, but so what? What’s the point of making something that serves no purpose? Surviving night raids by zombies? You can do that by digging a ditch or building a tiny little hut.

So I left the game to my friends and uninstalled it. I thought nothing more of it for years until it suddenly seemed to be the only thing people were talking about. “OMG! Have you played Minecraft!?” *I had forgotten that I had played it.* When I “checked it out”, I realized that they were talking about that pointless and ugly game I’d given six hours to and decided I’d plumbed the depths of all it had to offer and found it lacking.

And that’s when I began to hate it. It spawned clone after clone, copies with slightly more polish but no more depth. It seemed there was a “retro” graphics explosion where it was suddenly “cool” to make games that look like they were made for the original Nintendo console. Maybe Minecraft wasn’t to blame for the pixel-graphic explosion, but I think it was.

Every now and then something *trendy* comes along and sets progress back instead of pushing the boundaries of what is possible, which has always been what made video games so incredible. I think Minecraft did that. It’s impressive that it was created by one guy, and I’ve got much respect for Notch, but Minecraft is still affecting the modern generation of Indie developers and I, for one, am sick of looking at pixel graphics and voxel-based knockoffs of Minecraft.

My students talk about it all the time, and I have to explain that, in terms of capability, Minecraft belongs in the early 90s, not in the modern world. I’ve got no problem with people playing it, but I don’t accept it as an amazing accomplishment in gaming, and I don’t like that it’s hyped so much beyond its depth and polish.