What is Minecraft,
really?

The full narration of the video.

A box of building bricks comes with instructions: follow them and you get a car. Minecraft is bricks too, but it comes with no instructions. It's a computer game made of blocks. Its English name, Minecraft, means to mine and to craft: dig and build. Everything in the game is a block. One block counts as one cubic metre. Dirt, stone, trees, water: all blocks.

You can dig blocks out and put them in your pocket. Then stack them, one by one, into whatever you like. How big is the world? From the centre, you can walk 30 million blocks in every direction. A world that big isn't drawn in advance. Wherever you walk, the computer builds it right there, on the spot.

What it looks like is decided by a string of numbers called a seed. Same seed, exactly the same world. There are two main ways to play. In survival mode you find your own food and build shelter. At night, monsters come out. In creative mode, blocks are unlimited and you can fly. Many people build whole cities and palaces.

Even cleverer is a block called redstone, which carries signals. Someone used it to build a working computer inside the game. It was made in 2009 by a Swedish programmer, Markus Persson. In 2014, Microsoft bought it for 2.5 billion dollars. By 2025 it had sold more than 350 million copies. That makes it the best-selling video game of all time.

In China, NetEase has run a Chinese edition since 2017. Why do so many people love it? Because it never tells you what to do. Whatever you want to build, you can. Next time a kid says they're playing Minecraft, try asking: what did you build today?