Everybody knows that feeling where the urge is so strong that you cannot resist doing it, and when you do it, it feels just right. When I was on a vacation in Thailand, we were chilling on the beach like all the other tourists. We were doing the classic activities that you do on the beach, such as swimming, running, sunbathing, and playing with the sand.
As an architect, of course, I had to go ahead and build some buildings with sand, as all other architects would do on a beach. While staring at the sand, I had an idea to build castle walls and make a river around it with a bridge connecting the interiors with the outside world—and then it hit me. This was the exact feeling I get when building something in Minecraft.
Minecraft literally manipulates that same instinctive feeling you get when you build sandcastles near the beach or carve something in the soil. So there you have it, everyone. We’ve cracked the code of why it feels so good to play Minecraft—and possibly why it became extremely popular (so popular that even grandmas and grandpas could know about it due to their grandchildren screaming “chicken jockey!” and throwing their popcorn all around the house).