Minecraft is creating the Next Generation of Architects

So when I think of Minecraft I don’t think of survival I mean most of you might I mean if you’re following the channel you probably don’t because my channel is mainly creative but I want to talk about the creative side of the game today and how it can bring you from a

Kid that just likes Minecraft you think it’s pretty cool all the way into a potential career because that’s what I’m doing right now in April of 2023 I graduated with a degree in architectural engineering not architecture architectural engineering it’s different but it all stemmed from when I bought an

IPod when I was 12 years old and the only reason I wanted this iPod Touch is so I could download Minecraft Pocket Edition and then eventually I’m like it’d be pretty cool to make a city so I did that and I built one city I built

Two cities I built three cities I built airports they were complete garbage but I was a kid I was having fun I was getting my Creative Energy out somehow because paper and Pen not really my thing I did enjoy creating and drawing on paper sometimes but I felt that 2D

Wasn’t enough for my brain and just being able to have that 3D aspect of your creativity just brought it to an entirely new level now I used my iPod Touch pretty much every day for about two two and a half maybe three years and once I got into high school I think I

Was in grade nine so I bought my first desktop I think it was four hundred and fifty dollars and it came with a keyboard so it was the absolute cheapest computer that money could buy but I bought it because I mean I watched Minecraft YouTube videos I watched

Corrales I watched all these YouTubers that were building these really cool things and they were all on the computer they were all on Java Edition and I was in Pocket Edition and I’m like well if I get onto Java then I can have all these extra tools the worlds are infinite and

You can go on multiplayer and then work with all these other people and since you had that Community you could collaborate with people and then the projects became more and more complex now this is about when I’m 14 15 years old and something that I noticed is that

You’re building a better world so at the time I was still of course living with my parents I grew up in the suburbs of New Brunswick which for those of you that don’t know that is a province on the east coast of Canada but living in

The suburbs of New Brunswick it was not very walkable but compared to a big city where you can go out you can walk to a grocery store you can go to a cafe and then walk back home within I don’t know a 15 minute walk that wasn’t a thing but as I continued

To build I sort of noticed that I was creating an Ideal World of course I was replicating a lot of things that I saw around me and places that I did visit but at the time to me ideal meant more of a walkable study even though I didn’t

Really realize it at the time and as I continued to build I used references like Google Maps and all these pictures and all these videos on YouTube you know all those walking tours things like that or just whatever you can find of places that you can’t afford to or don’t have

Time to visit but you want to experience it so using those real life references I started to take bits and pieces and put them together and mesh them into what I was building to create this Ideal World if you will and it sort of helps you realize what your built environment

Could be and what you’re missing now as I got older about 16 17 years old I’m still in high school grade 11 grade 12. I’m starting to realize that it’s architecture that I like of course you can kind of tell when you’re 14 15 chain

But once you get to 16 17 you’re like okay I gotta go to college I gotta go to university I’m gonna have to have a career make money so I don’t be homeless so you start thinking okay well what do I like so for me it was architecture and

Urban planning but the university that I was planning to go to they didn’t have anything like that and the only place in the maritimes that had anything related to architecture or urban planning was Dalhousie University in Halifax but to get into that program you need to complete two years of any degree and

Then you switch in for your third and fourth year so it doesn’t really matter what you do but I wanted to do something related to buildings and I knew I wanted to stay where I was so I chose to go into civil engineering makes sense it’s related to buildings so

That’s what I did in my first year I went into civil engineering but about halfway through after looking through all the courses that I would be completing to get this degree I realized it’s not exactly what I want to do so I started thinking I’m like okay do I do

Two years of civil engineering and then transfer to this program in Halifax or do I transfer universities so I started looking online to see if I could transfer into an architecture program at a different University and I ended up applying to the architecture design architecture urban planning and architectural engineering which is not

Architecture now I’m about 18 19 at this point and I really really wanted to get into architecture design because that’s architecture architecture you designed the buildings but unfortunately I didn’t get in now to get into architecture programs you need a portfolio which typically consists of drawings your

Sketches and I knew I was really really creative and I know that I’m really good at designing buildings at least for my age but the only medium I had that I was really good at was Minecraft and I really struggled with the question of do I use Minecraft

In my portfolio for my application to this professional University program and ultimately I didn’t I made a portfolio that was really subpar with all my drawings and my application got denied and the reason I didn’t use Minecraft to apply in my portfolio because I felt like it was an insult to the profession

It’s a video game it’s a kids video game or so I thought and looking back I regret not using Minecraft because I think now I would have gotten it but I didn’t do it because it’s seen as a kids game so instead of getting into the architecture design program I got

Into architectural engineering which is basically the same thing as building engineering but there’s more of the Heritage conservation side of it and there’s a lot of structural elements involved as well so I packed up my things I moved to Ottawa to go to Carlton University in this architectural

Engineering degree and I moved into a room where I shared this room with one person to start and then they moved out and then another person came in but I didn’t play Minecraft at all for about eight months I maybe opened it a couple times but I never built consistently I

Was sharing a room and I mean they can like see my screen and everything and I was afraid of being judged which is really stupid now that I think about it because that’s the thing that I loved the most that was my creative Outlet so

Why would I let any sort of fear of judgment block me from that now after those eight months I ended up moving into another apartment where I had my own room which was great and I started getting back into Minecraft because I knew nobody was watching and I continued

To build I continue need to create cities I continued to create all these really intricate designs and as I progressed through my degree I was learning all these things about buildings that I didn’t know before of course if I did why would I be at University but I took all these things

And I applied them into my Minecraft Builds which made them more realistic more complex but I was still having this element of creativity where I had these really wild designs but I made them grounded and that’s really when my Minecraft Builds took off and started to

Go to another level and at this point I was an administrator staff member whatever you want to call me on the current creative server that I play on cubes and I like to think I’m sort of a leader in that Community although I can’t really be the judge of that but

You guys can and I noticed that I was able to answer more and more technical questions or even just general design questions with certainty so covet hit I was doing my Co-op internship I was working for the government doing project management and I wasn’t used to having

So much free time because I wasn’t taking any classes I was just working full-time so I thought okay what do I do with my free time and I had a lot of people asking me very similar questions about Minecraft about how to build and design cities so I

Thought okay well instead of typing out multiple paragraphs each time to answer these questions why don’t I just start making videos so that’s what I did I made a couple videos less so answering questions but more making guides on how my creative process works and where I pull information from

To make cities but I’m linking Minecraft and real life because real life is my inspiration but back in the day when I was using pocket edition other people building in Minecraft was my only inspiration you get older 14 15 you start to introduce real life oh okay

Well they’re starting to come together a little bit now and now I’m at the point where I feel like it’s my responsibility to take things that I’ve learned and my Inspirations put them into these videos for you so that maybe you can get inspired Now by looking at my YouTube analytics I

Know that a lot of you aren’t in the typical Minecraft demographic it’s marketed towards kids it’s marketed towards the younger audience but a lot of yourselves are my age roughly and you might not have any Minecraft content on YouTube that you enjoy watching because it’s all kind of

Big and in your face I’m not a big fan of it I do enjoy some content but most of it I really don’t but that’s just me and I’m assuming if I think that way a lot of you might also think that way so that’s why I try and make my content

Different that’s why I try and gear it towards the more realism side but I also see the trend of marketing Minecraft towards kids in Minecraft education Edition it makes sense it’s very easy to run on say Chromebooks or any sort of lower end device that kids could have

Access to because it’s cheaper and I see all these courses and guides or whatnot that’s Mojang or Microsoft are creating on on mostly Bedrock Edition I think like there’s Marketplace I’m not super familiar with it but after being through this journey with Minecraft I think there’s so much more that could be done

With Minecraft education Edition with bedrock Edition but not just taking the simple concepts of this is a building this is a city you should have trees in your city yeah we know I’m talking about the more in-depth structural systems you have your Shear walls you have your

Beams you have your columns you have Green Building Design Systems you have green roofs you have skylights Windows the orientation of the building matters the site location matters your water runoff everything I really think Minecraft could be applied at a much higher level than it currently is so

Maybe that’s something I’ll do maybe I’ll reach out to Microsoft I do have contacts there I haven’t thought too hard about this yet the idea just popped into my head actually a couple minutes ago but even related to the higher level of education and Minecraft last year I actually used Minecraft to

Get a preliminary design for our fourth year design project I’m talking preliminary layouts Styles orientation and anything related to Green Building design all your high performance building aspects and this was about two years into making YouTube videos so I felt pretty confident that I wouldn’t be met with oh that’s childish because I

Was participating in entrepreneurship events I was part of different accelerators just to learn you know the business behind YouTube and my group members they loved it they thought it was really cool so since applying to the architecture program going into my second year of University where I

Thought it was childish to do that I’ve changed my mind and I really think that people in the profession think it’s really cool now that I’ve talked to a lot of them Minecraft is a very accessible tool it’s 3D so it’s not just 2D it’s an entire other dimension there

Is an infinite amount of space there’s a lot more blocks now you have multiplayers so you can collaborate and you have all these social media platforms that you can share your Creations on and get feedback so I don’t think Minecraft’s going anywhere anytime soon and I think the creative side of

The game is going to grow a lot over the next few years and I’m going to make sure that happens because people love it they think it’s really cool and anybody who doesn’t Well they suck and building in Minecraft can bring you way further than you ever think is possible I was 12

Years old I had my iPod Touch I was building anything under the sun as I grew up I continued to build cities different buildings I use Google Maps and Google Street View to create these really intricate buildings based on buildings I found in downtown Vancouver and it inspired me to go into my

Architectural engineering degree even though I wanted to do architecture but I still enjoyed my degree so win-win I guess and now that I’ve recently graduated I just moved to Vancouver and I live in downtown Vancouver and I like to go for walks quite frequently and I’ll turn a corner and I’ll see a

Skyscraper and I won’t clue in for a minute or two then I’ll think I built that 10 years ago I was standing right there on Google Street View looking at my computer monitor looking up at this building some place that I’ve never been before and I made this building this sort of

Rendition taking the Styles but making it my own and now because of that I get to experience it every day now if you’ve been following the channel for a while you’re probably thinking okay why did I choose this video to put my face in because I’ve never really done that

Before I think it’s important that as I try to continue to grow the creative side of the game and to show people what’s possible by just starting by playing Minecraft it’s nice to have a face behind it so that you know I’m serious about it I’m taking a risk

Because I’m putting my face on the internet which I don’t really want to do but I think it’s important that I do anyway because I truly believe that Minecraft is going to create the next generation of Architects and Engineers who are going to shape this world and if

I can help to be a part of that whether it’s just providing some inspiration or showing you what you can do in a career I think it would be really beneficial to this world I’m working on a video series that shows my experiences throughout my degree in architectural

Engineering and the idea is to show you the parts of it that I liked that I didn’t like and what you can expect from a degree similar to mine and there’s definitely an overlap between a pure architecture program and architectural engineering the technical side for the most part but this video series will

Talk about my experiences in this degree and hopefully what you’ll get out of it is maybe a decision on whether or not you’ll like the degree as well it’s not out yet I’m still producing it it’s going to take a very long time to make but if you would like to be notified

When it does come out sign up for my email list in the description my name is Matt I have a degree in architectural engineering and you’re watching Alpine