A Minecraft player has shared their useful method of dealing with panic attacks with the game’s online community. Mojang’s sandbox experience has been around since 2011 and is popular not only for the exploration provided by its procedurally generated world, but also the creativity it inspires. Players can build shelters to help with survivability in Minecraft, but can also make machines, towering structures, and pretty much anything else their mind can dream up.
Many people view video games as solely a means to pass the time or immerse themselves temporarily in another world. However, titles like Minecraft that allow players to use their imaginations to build, craft, or otherwise customize their experience can serve another, more meditative purpose. Likewise, the soothing benefits of losing oneself in creating art — be it woodworking, painting, crocheting, or playing a video game with building mechanics — are well documented.
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User momotive has shared the therapeutic effects they find while playing Minecraft with the game’s subreddit community. Whenever they have a panic attack, says the player, they work on a a giant 256 x 256 rendition of their pet cat. The accompanying screenshot shows an impressively detailed work-in-progress of their black cat. Only the head and some of the chest have been completed so far, but the feline’s expression and even the tilt of its ears already capture the furry critter’s mood.
Minecraft Can Be Useful for More Than Entertainment
Momotive clearly has great patience to painstakingly recreate such a detailed image within the game. Members of the Reddit community have commended the player for having found a useful and productive coping tool in the video game, while others hope that they will never feel a need to finish, considering that they work on it to calm down during a panic attack.
Other players in the thread have shared how momotive is making the giant cat portrait, so that others can do it too. Websites like MapartCraft let users upload any image, which are then converted into a schematic. The specific Minecraft blocks needed to build the image in-game are mapped out, allowing any determined player to painstakingly recreate it.
But players do more than reconstruct pretty pictures in Mojang’s sandbox game. Minecraft has been the home to some incredibly massive and magnificent bases, as well as recreations of beloved locations like Hobbiton, New York City, and the Kalimari Desert track from Mario Kart 64. One dedicated fan even spent three years rebuilding the whole map of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild in Minecraft, an incredible feat.
Minecraft
Minecraft is a sandbox video game that puts players in procedurally generated worlds and offers them no guidance whatsoever in where to go or what to do, creating a sense of freedom that was unparalleled in 2011.
Minecraft has gone on to become the highest-selling video game of all time.