Teens Are Playing Minecraft Again

And it’s awesome.

The summer of 2019 in teen culture was marked by the rise of the VSCO Girl, the release of Stranger Things 3 (Max and Eleven friendship goals!), and a surge of interest in a hip new video game called *checks notes*… Minecraft? Wait a minute.

First released in 2009, Minecraft is a surprisingly simple and flexible game, focused on building, collecting resources, and (depending on your game mode) surviving a zombie apocalypse. Its cheerful, block-centered characters and structures can be found on everything from t-shirts to keychains to throw blankets. A recent Engadget article notes that Minecraft now has 112 million monthly players. And I can confirm that my kids are two of them.

Personally, I was surprised to find my 14-year-old daughter playing the same game she had recently mocked her little brother for being obsessed with. Once upon a time, they had played the game together, but as my daughter hit middle school, she had abandoned Minecraft and came to see it as both babyish and somehow embarrassingly nerdy. So, what changed?

Of the teens I talked to, many of them mentioned initially getting back into Minecraft as an exercise in nostalgia. FaceTiming their friends late at night, they reminisced about the computer games of their youth. “Remember Animal Jam? Club Penguin?” They dug…