Minecraft: Real Architecture in Video Games

Minecraft: Real Architecture in Video Games

Minecraft is the world’s most popular video game, releasing in 2009- so much so that Microsoft purchased the game and its parent company, Mojang, for a whopping $2.5 billion in 2014.

These days, the world-building platform has also garnered the attention of designers and architects. Could a video game really alter how architecture is taught and practised?

For those people who aren’t knowledgeable about the game, Minecraft is a game of infinite possibilities, one of those possibilities is to allow users to create homes, cities, underground bunkers, and entire digital worlds using 3D textured cubes that represent various materials.

The primitive, cubist platform produces a pixelated landscape which looks like a rustic version of a LEGO collection. Along with their own free-form dream worlds, Minecraft users have replicated virtually every famous building in life, such as the Taj Mahal, the White House, and the Burj Khalifa.

Designers have taken note of this happening of Minecraft architecture.

Minecraft is really a computer-aided design instrument. It’s easy for anybody to start building inside this game (counting kindergartners). It helps that Minecraft designers function from a first person perspective. This allows them a grasp of scale as they move through and occupy a space.

The emphasis on and capacity for real-time collaboration are also critical components. Online sharing is a part of the millennial generation and reminiscent of modern architectural tools like Building Information Modeling (BIM), which makes it possible for designers, customers, and end-users to swap performance information to a much finer degree than previously.

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