10(ish) games for the 2010s pt 11

#0 Minecraft

	Let’s be real, if this wasn’t at the top of the list, you could just throw out my opinions on everything.  Minecraft has been THE defining game of the decade and it hasn’t been close.  And ok, technically Minecraft released in 2009, but it left Beta in 2011, and it’s released consistent patches and updates throughout the decade, so it gets in.  My interactions with Minecraft began in 2011, when my siblings both started playing.  I, the cooler older brother (lmao yeah right) refused to play this kid game… for like a month and then I was in.  And while I’ve paused and backed off from the game, I’ve never been out.

	Minecraft has been a juggernaut among games, rolling over the landscape and dominating everything that attempts to stand against it.  While other games that get popular might spawn copies or attempts to duplicate the experience which themselves get popular, almost no Minecraft clones even come to mind for me.  It’s an experience that’s deceptively simple, with the comparisons to Lego being incredibly apt for reasons beyond the actions taken.  There exist other block-based building toys, but none of them are Lego.  Similarly, there’s other block-based building games, but only Minecraft stands tall.

	For essentially every other game on this list, the lessons learned can be applied to things we learned from Minecraft.  Minecraft made youtubers millionaires and drove kids to streams to watch their favorite personalities playing the latest hit mods and alterations to the game.  Minecraft Hunger Games were one of the original Battle Royales, demonstrating the lengths people will go to win.  Minecraft memes are ubiquitous and universal.  Controversies? Of course, with the buying of the game my Microsoft and everything the creator Notch Hatsune Miku has done being on the top of the list.  Microtransactions? The game had to ban server owners from charging for in-game features, which led server owners to just add to “donation tiers” to dodge legal action; likely because Microsoft added its own in “bedrock edition”.  Open world size?  Minecraft is functionally infinite.  Perhaps the only thing that Minecraft can’t offer is a compelling story, mostly because the point of Minecraft is the freedom to do anything without constraints from a story getting in your way.

	The game’s fanbase is second to none.  Over 100 million people play the game each month, which is an absurd number.  Accessibility?  Please, every kid wants to play Minecraft.  Once they play Minecraft, they might start playing Fortnite, but the amount of DNA shared between those games makes them basically cousins.  I’ve been sitting on the train, playing Skyrim, and a little kid I’ve never met came up to me and asked to play Minecraft.  Which we of course did.

	I once had a conversation with someone on the topic of this list, with them arguing that Skyrim deserved the top spot.  Their argument was that people whose first game was Skyrim went on to other games, while Minecraft players only played Minecraft.  In fairness to them, that point has some validity.  But while Skyrim might draw people off to play other games, I argue that this is primarily a fault of Skyrim being such a mess.  In Skyrim, you mod the game to get it into a playable state, better than the base game in effectively all scenarios.  But with Minecraft, mods are just another experience.  Some mods change the game so much it becomes like another game.  Why bother with other games when you can get so much from the Minecraft experience?

	I’ve played Minecraft for an absurd number of hours, potentially more than League of Legends, definitely more than Skyrim.  I’ve never really branched out into mods, because the base game is just so deep.  I’ve built towers of gold in creative, torn down other players’ towers as a griefer, built redstone devices complex enough to make my brain hurt troubleshooting them, run servers, gotten banned from servers, been the resident madman on servers, and completely crashed multiple games using TNT to great effect.  Just today I joined the literal Christian Minecraft Server where cursing is indeed banned.  Where will Minecraft go?  I have no clue.  Definitely not away, the game is too big to fail at this point, and unless someone does it better I don’t see it vanishing anytime soon.  Even if you don’t like the current version, go play on servers running ancient history, many still exist.  Or make your own, the game can be run on basically anything and servers can be set up even on moderately decent machines.  Minecraft has proven itself to be the king of this decade, and to be frank, I wouldn’t be surprised if it continued as monarch of this next one.