Imagine Lego.

Now imagine you have all the pieces.

Now imagine that you can play with people all over the world.

Now imagine that some of those people have created intricate block worlds and set up different kinds of games to play on them.

The games themselves are as varied as Lego players:

Some are world shaping where you play cooperatively, some are wealth building where you mine the local resources and “craft” them into other blocks, with the end goal of unlocking a new area of the game with new blocks where you can eventually get powerful enough to defeat a dragon.

A popular variant is player-vs-player capture the flag, where you re-spawn at your bed when you die… unless someone destroys your bed. Last team standing wins.

Another popular game is Minecraft parkour, where it’s a race through an obstacle course to a finish line.

The types of objectives to any scenario are only limited by the world builder’s imagination.

Some people have built functional computers within Minecraft that do a great job of visually explaining how computers work.

Others have used Minecraft to demonstrate city planning methods and their results.