[AndrewPGameDev]

The first time I played Minecraft Classic was really significant to me.

I was around 12 years old at the time, and I was in middle school. I remember feeling extremely frustrated at the school system because I was ready for much more in terms of academics, but my teachers mostly taught to the lowest common denominator. I read books by John Taylor Gatto, and later Alfie Kohn. I was extremely interested in "Unschooling", an idea that if the school system were removed, kids would actually learn more by their natural curiosity. That idea isn't very appealing to me anymore but Montessori schools and more self-directed learning in general would probably be a good thing for the educational system.

I had found a website that allowed you to click a button and would redirect you to a random "interesting page". There was a website called "Everybody Edits" which was a 2D platformer made out of a grid of squares, and players could add or remove squares. Servers had challenges with read-only levels, and there were buttons and doors and little boost pads. I thought the game was pretty fun but I left after a couple hours playing different challenges.

I clicked the button again, and it led me to minecraft.com . That game almost immediately blew my mind. I built a little brick house with flowers out in front and I got my mom to come over and look at it.

What made it so special for me was this very tangible feeling of freedom. This was a game that allowed me to build anything, where I wasn't restricted at all by my parents, or my teachers, or any authority figure whatsoever.

After playing with the singleplayer mode, I saw there was some multiplayer servers. I don't remember much about the first (several?) servers I joined, I think they were all build-protected so nobody could grief them, and they had some pretty builds.

Then I joined a server that didn't have any build-protections at all. It kind of reminded me of a jungle? Whatever terrain was randomly generated there was completely destroyed. Minecraft classic had an extremely short height limit, I think 64 blocks. Many many people had joined the server, built a pillar directly to the top of the world and constructed a "canopy" built out of random blocks. I swam over to the only structure that existed, a brick house that was decaying. I started to fix it, but then another random player started destroying it, being kept in a constant moving state of existence.

To this day, I'm still obsessed with web games and games that allow an extremely high level of freedom. Much later in life I got a software engineering degree, I went to work for a big company with a big paycheck, I bought an RTX 3090 to play Minecraft RTX, and now I'm fulltime trying to build a pathtraced game on the web using WebGPU. The main reason why I want pathtracing isn't for photorealistic visuals, but to enable the same level of freedom that Minecraft has.