Minecraft

What are the uses and gratifications of Minecraft? Give specific examples of how the game entertains, help audiences identify with others and educates and what are the advantages and disadvantages of Minecraft being owned by Microsoft?

Minecraft is what's known as a sandbox game, this pretty much means when a player can do what ever they want within the world of the game, they have freedom to explore, build and destroy the world. Although the game is still played today but thousands of people and they do updates and mods the graphics have pretty much stayed the same, the whole world is made from blocks, however there are loads of different blocks and resources to collect within the world, it in ways link to reality/ real life as you have to craft items for example you have to get wood from a tree and wool from a sheep to create a bed, this will give the players some real life knowledge on what resources are used to make real life things. 

Minecraft was released on the 17th of May 2009, it was created by a Swedish game developer Markus Persson and later developed by Mojang. The game has changed significantly since it was first released as the objective at the start was pretty much to survive and build within the world as you can turn on 'mobs' which as zombies, skeletons, creepers, spiders and some others, you can also have personal goals like to find diamonds within the game while underground mining or maybe its to build a huge house and defend it against the 'mobs', but since the game has developed there are now servers you can join which are online platforms where you can talk to other players and play different modes with them, but you can also play the game normally and build big buildings with other players or make swords and kill each other in game, however there are also games you can play for example one of the most popular Minecraft is known for is 'hunger games' this is like the movie where you can either go in on your own or with your friends to try and survive and kill other teams by getting weapons from chests. 

Minecraft was originally played on computer but since so many people started playing and they expanded the market and made an Xbox version as well as a PlayStation version, in present day however you can play it on a huge range of devices like a Nintendo Switch, Wii U and even your phone (ios). Minecrafts age rating is 7-13, however due to YouTube young adults around 18-25 play it and make money from playing due to the amount of people watching them, this means people can make there jobs playing games for kids to watch which is why so many older people play it, its also played by older people because when they add more things to the game it makes it more complicated and allows players to do more and set more goals for themselves.