If you were in elementary school sometime circa 2016, you might remember sprinting home after school, tossing your backpack on your bedroom floor and opening your battered iPad mini, its screen smudged with fingerprints and all, to watch Aphmau’s “MyStreet” season finale. There you were, squealing in a decibel that would have had an adult-you cringing, as you watched Aaron finally ask Aphmau to be his girlfriend. And for those who have no idea what I’m talking about, MyStreet is not a TV show, or a movie, or even a cartoon. It’s a Minecraft roleplay series.
Fast forward to January 6, 2021. While the rest of the country was glued to the news for one very obvious reason, hundreds of thousands of teens were glued to Twitch and YouTube for another: Minecraft YouTubers, Technoblade and Dream, had just carpet-bombed L’Manberg with TNT on the DreamSMP (another Minecraft roleplay Series). Twitch streamer TommyInnit broke over half a million live viewers for the event. Twitter was trending with the names of fictional Minecraft nations as many fans, trying to ignore that they were maybe “too old” to watch blocky avatars yell at each other, were insisting (and still are) that it was one of the most compelling online stories of the decade.
Fast forward (one more time, I promise) to June 2025. It’s 3 a.m., you definitely should be asleep, but instead you're in the peak of your yearly “Minecraft Phase,” and you’re watching the finale of Minecraft PvP Civilization. You bear witness as Evbo becomes immortal in a metaphor that may or may not hold together — it’s somehow the best and worst piece of media you’ve consumed all year, but you’re far from alone (the video has over a million views). The genre of Minecraft roleplay refuses to die. To outsiders, “Minecraft roleplay” are two words that simply do not go together, but since Minecraft’s early years, online creators have worked to transform it from not just a game, but into a storytelling medium so distinct that it barely resembles anything else in digital culture.
Broadly speaking, Minecraft roleplay appears in two forms. The first is scripted roleplay, essentially TV shows created within Minecraft, complete with writers, directors and voice actors collaborating to build serialized romances or action stories. Minecraft YouTuber Aphmau’s four-year MyStreet series falls into this category, and its production values rival traditional animation while its merchandising (yes, you can buy character posters on Amazon) and 28 billion views over 6 seasons show how firmly series like MyStreet have entered mainstream culture. The second form is improvised roleplay, where creators outline only major plot beats and quite literally just go with the flow from there. The roleplay series Dream SMP—which thrived on chaos, where alliances crumbled and wars erupted spontaneously because creators accidentally clicked the wrong button — easily falls into this category. This second form of Minecraft roleplay is unpredictable and alive.
Many, myself included, predicted Minecraft roleplay’s end after MyStreet’s peak in 2016, and again after the Dream SMP’s decline in the post-pandemic era, but then Minecraft YouTuber Evbo’s Parkour Civilization (and then later its sister series PVP Civilization) exploded on YouTube, gaining more than 46 million views. Some, actually many, of you might be wondering how on earth Minecraft Roleplay keeps making a comeback. It comes down to this. Minecraft is abstract and visually limited; it’s quite literally a pseudo-fantasy block game, and so creators must communicate emotion through unconventional tools — movement, architecture, music cues, chat messages, modded animations. Viewers become hyper-attuned not only to the narrative but to how the creators are working within the constraints of the game, and thus the telling becomes part of the story. For example, take MyStreet, the plot is a familiar romance of “new-girl-in-town-meets-cute-boy-next-door,” but instead of calling out unoriginality, fans instead marvel at the meticulously built suburban neighborhoods and character skins within the game. Creators have to adapt the game’s limited quirks into narrative opportunities, producing something that exists somewhere between theatre, gaming, web series and improv, and because expectations are low (remember “It’s just Minecraft”), the payoff feels unexpectedly huge. And as a result, the medium continually surprises viewers by transcending its own blocky limitations.
Admittedly, nostalgia also plays a huge role in Minecraft Roleplay’s continued popularity. Minecraft’s golden era, which I will label as the mid-2010s, coincided with Gen Z’s childhood. Many of us grew up watching Minecraft Creators like StampyLonghead, DanTDM, iHasCupquake, SamGladiator and dozens of others spin elaborate stories inside a world made of cubes, so when Minecraft roleplay resurfaced in 2020 (and every time it resurfaces), it essentially became a comforting reminder of our childhood. The genre’s success can also be partially attributed to its accessibility: the stories are free, online and unbounded by streaming subscriptions or box office tickets. Anyone can watch Minecraft roleplay. And anybody can make it; you don’t need a film degree or expensive equipment, just the game and an idea. It democratizes storytelling, pulling viewers into the creative process and often inspiring them to become creators themselves.
Minecraft roleplay is weird, I will admit that, it is not something I usually tell people I watch. But as ridiculous as it is also earnest. It is low-budget and ambitious. It is awkward and (weirdly) deeply compelling. It’s not quite film and not quite gaming — but that's why it keeps coming back, why I keep coming back to it and why you should watch it (don’t knock it until you’ve tried it).
Leslie Monter-Casio is a sophomore in the Jeb E. Brooks School of Public Policy. They can be reached at lm953@cornell.edu.
