He’s not wrong about this, but there’s something else too: the game itself is the second-most perfect encapsulation of the seamless meeting of “high” and “low” art that I can think of (the most perfect being the time that Salman Rushdie became addicted to Super Nintendo). Just as there’s no one way of playing Minecraft, there’s no one way to experience the day.

The live event is meant to reflect the ethos of the game, I’m told by the COO of Mojang, Vu Boi, who has travelled with Bergensten to the event. It gives him an air that’s less “mogul at the helm of a multi-billion dollar empire” and more “viking who has become lost at the shops”. There’s a calm awkwardness about Bergensten. The first time I see him he’s at the business end of a massive line of devotees, dutifully signing posters, posing for photos and answering questions. The lead developer and designer is now Jens Bergensten, a tall, rake-thin and bearded Swede who, throughout the day at the Opera House, will wander into the foyer to greet fans. At the time of writing, around 55 million players log into the game each month in 2016 the game sold around 55,000 copies per day and in 2014 it was sold to Microsoft for $1.5b, allowing Persson to retire and pursue another of his passions full-time: being insanely cross on the internet. Like the game itself, the sheer scale of Minecraft’s success can be difficult to comprehend. Jens Bergensten, lead developer and designer of Minecraft, speaks at the Sydney Opera House. The host can’t fault this and asks for a high five. There is little to no mining or crafting in this iteration of the game, and at the end of each round, the winning children are interviewed by the host, who quizzes them on their strategies, their faces projected on to a gigantic screen at the back of the stage.Īccording to an astonishingly fashionable kid in a leather jacket and asymmetrical haircut, the trick is to “get a weapon and run”. The version of the game used for competition is rapid and combat-based and so this experience is less about the unchained power of the imagination and more about shoving one another into big pools of lava. At the start of each round, four dozen children are marshalled on to stage, organised through a system of coloured wristbands that, throughout the hours I am at the event, I will never understand. With three sessions over the course of the festival, and each session comprising seven rounds with 48 children per round, over a thousand kids will compete over the two days. In the past, players have used the game’s universe to build painstaking reconstructions of Taj Mahal, the International Space Station and – of course – the Sydney Opera House.Īustralia’s first Minecraft tournament is playing out in the main concert hall. To a degree this is true, although it does suggest that the collective imagination of the hive mind is overwhelmingly preoccupied with creating enormous effigies of Super Mario. These blocks can be mined and placed in any configuration the player desires, and for this reason the game is often described as an environment where you can build “anything you can imagine”. In Minecraft you are born without ceremony or context into a world made up of blocks. Their confusion is understandable: on the surface, Minecraft as a popular game, let alone an international phenomenon, is hard to explain.Ĭreated by Markus “Notch” Persson in 2009, Minecraft is what’s known as a “sandbox” game – a genre typically defined by an absence of clear goals or win conditions, and an emphasis on creation and free-play.

Parents watch ‘with an air of contented bafflement’ as their kids play Minecraft.

Minecraft opera