With over 300 million copies, Minecraft – sandbox video game developed by Markus Persson – is the best-selling video game in history and part of its success is undoubtedly linked to the very particular game world, composed entirely of cubes and modifiable in every aspect. These digital universes seem infinite, but they are not: in Minecraft every world measure 59,999,968 million blocks per sidewhich for simplicity we can round to 60 million blocks. If we consider that every block would be equivalent in reality to a cube of 1 meter per sidethen each map measures 60 thousand km x 60 thousand km. In terms of surface area we are talking about an incredibly large value equal to 3.6 thousand billions of km2.
To make a comparison with our planet, we can estimate the surface area of the emerged lands equal to 149 million km2 and, therefore, the world of Minecraft “walkable” is about 24 times larger than ours. If we also include the oceans of our planet in the count, the earth’s surface reaches a value of 510 million km2and therefore the relationship between the two surfaces goes from 24 to 7… of course, a less impressive value, but still incredible if we think that it is a video game!
What if we wanted to compare the world of Minecraft to Italy instead? The calculation is easy to do: the surface area of Italy is approx 302 thousand km2and therefore every world is more than 11 thousand and 900 times larger of the Bel Paese.
This explains why it is so simple to have theimpression that it is an infinite world: the game universe is so extensive that, in fact, for the average player it is as if it were unlimited.
