Jayden Kim, Instructor Sheng Kao | ENGL 131 Major Project 2 | 23 Nov. 2025, Rev. 9 Dec. 2025.
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As I reminisce upon my childhood, a period of my life that is now departing from me, I remember one game that I spent much of my life surrounded with. On the 17th of June, 2020, I got my first video game — Minecraft. This followed years of me watching videos and livestreams of people playing Minecraft, whether it be on adventure maps, survival worlds, or on servers with other people. One of Minecraft’s alluring aspects is its nature as a sandbox game. Essentially, there are no confining limits to what one can do in Minecraft; the only limiting factor on the player is the game mechanics and the power of their computer. In Game Design Fundamentals, a collection of student work from a game design course at Stanford University, Lucy Zhu writes the following: “the lack of defined boundaries that leads to Minecraft’s limitless exploration potential and makes it a very fun game to me” (Zhu). Minecraft’s seemingly limitless potential questions the true motives of the game. There are no clear intentions — the game does not come with an instruction manual. This ambiguity alludes to existentialism being used as an extended metaphor throughout the game, taking lines of code with no real-world meaning and creating a meaningful conclusion for the player.
The basis of sandbox games is found in its name, derived from the freedom of sandboxes. I never had a sandbox, but I remember always playing with the kinetic sand in my friend’s sandbox whenever I went over to his house. We used to build castles, roads, and anything else we could imagine. While real sandcastles are limited by physics and the amount of sand, sandbox games are limited by the game’s mechanics and the resources available in that game. Inherently, there is no objective to a sandbox game — the players are meant to make their own meaning. Similarly to sandbox games, there is no clear objective to life from an existentialist perspective; the common sentiment for the meaning of life is to participate in one’s own “becoming” (Oppong). Philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, a well-known existentialist, describes that “[m]an is condemned to be free; because once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does. It is up to [him] to give [life] a meaning,” (Sartre qtd. in Oppong). Sarte’s perspective requires people to make their own meaning to life and forge their own path.
Minecraft’s free nature allows players to explore their respective interests and build their own path: whether it be building, mining, or fighting. For instance, players build iron farms involving the exploitation of a mechanic where entities called iron golems spawn in a village when villagers are threatened by a hostile creature. The Minecraft community has bridged that mechanic to iron farms by constantly terrorizing villagers, who are typically caged inside a small glass dome on a floor made of beds, with zombies to spawn these iron golems — the iron golems that are subsequently funneled into a chamber where they are soon killed with lava. This process is quite similar to real-life industrial farms, where animals are funneled into tight cages and are fed just to be eaten. The mechanics of these villagers, mimicking a society within the game, question the meaning of life, how we react to threats, and most importantly, questions whether we can fight back against external entities. A mechanic seemingly so innocent makes observant players question the complex questions of life. The implications of this, I argue, require further consideration, especially when overlayed against the “completion” of the game.
Following the description of being a sandbox game, Minecraft has no clear end —however there is an “end.” More specifically, there is a dimension called the End. The End is essentially a string of islands arranged in a circular manner, separated by a void of nothingness. The nothingness is meant to define the boundaries of the world, but the open access to it alludes to the idea that the world is infinite yet inaccessible; the player begins taking damage when they pass a certain threshold. In the End, there is an entity called the Ender Dragon. There seems to be no purpose to the Ender Dragon except to be defeated by the player and grant them access back to the Overworld, or the main dimension. Many other games have entities that are solely meant to be defeated by the player; however, the Ender Dragon can be respawned and subjected to continuous killing. With little boundary to make deeper meaning from the dragon, we must contemplate the claims its existence makes canonically.
After defeating the Ender Dragon, the player is granted access to a portal that allows them to return to the Overworld. As they go through the portal, however, there is a conversation that plays. Written by Julian Gough, the End Poem is the supposed conclusion to Minecraft. Two entities, supposedly the universe, are speaking. One of the first things the poem does is break the fourth wall, describing the player as reading the universe’s thoughts as words on a screen. Gough began his conversation by asking whether the viewing could be coded so that the player’s name is in the poem itself; an element quite simple to code in creates an environment where the player engages in meaningful reflection. In doing so, it shifts the focus back to the player and requires them to contemplate their existence in the poem — an existential element. The text reads, “there are times [the player] is sad, in the long dream. It creates worlds that have no summer, and it shivers under a black sun, and it takes its sad creation for reality” (Gough). It describes a meaningless life, one where the player is “sad” — echoing existential themes once more. Gough includes a voice of reason, however: “[t]o cure it of sorrow would destroy it” (Gough). He takes the existential viewpoint of the player and, through the voice of the universe, declares there is meaning to sorrow — to ameliorate the effects of happiness and make it better. He concludes the game’s exploration of the meaning of life.
Throughout Minecraft’s game mechanics and elements, there are claims about life and its meaning, both for the player and the being they are beyond the screen. Although Gough is not the writer of Minecraft’s voice and overall story, his poem fittingly contributes to the game’s exploration of such a deep topic. Although the entities are effectively only lines of code, their presence might have been meant for another purpose. The villagers in the game cannot make their own meaning; whether the villagers have a meaning at all is contentious. Regardless, their existence as entities coded into the game is juxtaposed with the freedom of the player, requiring ethical questions that provoke the core of our decision-making manners. Minecraft generally does not require moral actions, nor does it enforce any unethical behavior on singleplayer worlds. There is no responsibility that the player holds, as Sartre describes, but they only hold the responsibility they put on themselves. It is on this basis that the End Poem resides. Although Gough does not mention having played Minecraft prior to writing the poem, Minecraft creator Markus Persson “didn’t want to change a word” (Gough). In Minecraft, players craft their own meaning. They explore the depths of the possible and they explore the limits of what they call moral. They lose themselves in the fictional world to distract themselves from the realities they face; it is much easier to comprehend a game with known mechanics than to face the unknown of life.
There is a nostalgia to playing this game. Phillip Ham describes this nostalgia as timeless, where worlds become liminal spaces as the player logs off (Ham). Nostalgia provides stability, a familiar place to go. Relying on a video game for stability is questionable, yet the game is timeless; the save files essentially exist for as long as the player stores it. Despite the existentialism of Minecraft, we are constantly reminded to explore and make our own meaning and extend this mindset from the game into reality.
The End Poem is written as a conversation from the universe, where the universe says that “the game was over and the player woke up from the dream … And the player was the universe. And the player was love” (Gough). Minecraft encourages players to live their life through the suffering and the pain because of love, concluding the journey that the player takes.
It is thus our responsibility to leave this game and live our lives, honoring the universe by dreaming through our love and continuing to dream, because we are the players — we must wake up.
Works Cited
Gough, Julian. “I wrote a story for a friend.” THE EGG AND THE ROCK, 7 Dec. 2022, theeggandtherock.com/p/i-wrote-a-story-for-a-friend.
Ham, Philip. “Revisiting Minecraft.” The Michigan Daily, 3 Apr. 2024, michigandaily.com/statement/revisiting-minecraft.
Oppong, Thomas. “An Existentialist Approach to a Meaningful Life,” Personal Growth, 12 Jul. 2022, medium.com/personal-growth/an-existentialist-approach-to-a-meaningful-life-d1bacc63181a
Zhu, Lucy. “The World of Minecraft.” Game Design Fundamentals, 20 Apr. 2020, medium.com/game-design-fundamentals/the-world-of-minecraft-376f4b8a4b83.
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